Book excerpt: First published in 1988, this book explores the grammatical loss of gender in English. It demonstrates that from the end of the Old English period, there was a considerable time period, of about three hundred years, during which there existed "echoes" of the gender classification of nouns. The study records the best known conclusions concerning the behaviour of anaphoric pronouns under grammatical gender "stress" in the late Old English and Middle English periods. It focuses on a discussion of attributive word morphology in the noun phrase.