This book explains how and why grammatical gender disappeared from English through a detailed
analysis of unhistorical gender assignment within the noun phrase in Layamon's Brut one of the
most important Early Middle English texts. Such deviations do occur capriciously but not
randomly suggesting a development of innovative functions of the attributive forms concerned.
These innovations are mainly of two types: gender-insensitive uses as a case marker and a shift
from a bipartite to tripartite system of defining words the that and this. The author
discusses these innovations focusing on their implications for the subsequent development and
eventual loss of grammatical gender.
