4.3. Distributive Marking Reflected in Personal PronounsMarking in terms of address belongs to formal marking, in this part we will explore distributive marking by analyzing personal pronouns. Personal pronouns include “he”, “him”, “himself”, “she”, “her”, “herself” etc. In English, “he” can be used for both male and female. For instance, in the sentence “one should do the best he can”, he refers to both men and women. However, “she” can only be used to refer to female, so masculine pronouns are distributed much more widely than feminine pronouns. Liu (2002) selected 1284 sentences with the third person pronouns in his survey and found that more than 75% of the sentences adopted the generic use of “he”, “his” and “him”. To find out the distribution of personal pronouns in news context and positive changes taking place during the past 100 years, the authors collect data about “he”, “she” and “he or she” in The NewYork Times, and tabulate information as in Table 5.