Review: Gender shifts in the history of English. Anne Curzan.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.pp. 223 + xii.

Herbert Schendl (2001:9) defines ‘the study of ongoing changes in a language’
as one of the fundamental goals of historical linguistics. Curzan’s book, which
examines the historical development of the English gender system, is a work
noteworthy not only for historical linguists, but also for experts of gender
and language precisely because it attains the aforementioned objective. The
book not only gives a well-argued description of the development of English
linguistic gender – a fact that makes it a pivotal addition to earlier theories of
the field (e.g. Corbett 1991) – but it also utilises its findings to contribute to the
research on contemporary gendered language.