She, He or It?Is it a Matter of Gender or Something Else?A Look into Children and Teens’ Literature

n the last couple of decades, there have been numerous studies on gender renewal, all of them stressing the relevance of conceptual categories, such as animacy and individuation, in the transition towards (more) semantic systems. These studies mainly focus on the emergence of new gender system and on pronominal agreement strategies. The phenomenon of gender variation con-cerns the change of gender assignment and also co-exists within fully-gram-maticalised and/or standardised gender systems. This paper deals with gender assignment variation in English children’s literature, where the factors ruling gender assignment apparently diverge from those claimed in traditional gram-mar. Examining a more marginal phenomenon, i.e. multi-gender nouns in the history of English, I propose to show how gender is not too different from other nominal categories, and its assignment is a matter of semantic-pragmatic agreement. Accordingly, individuation still plays a major role in the gender systems of English varieties and informal register.