Well, it certainly is a much stronger disambiguater than those other signals. Dividing a population in half is a pretty powerful technique. Though now that I t

Well, it certainly is a much stronger disambiguater than those other signals. Dividing a population in half is a pretty powerful technique. Though now that I think about it age is also potent - you get the same rough division w.r.t relative age (younger vs older than the speaker), and you can divide the population roughly into quarters with ease and accuracy. Do miss and ma'am count as pronouns here? They code for age as well as gender Hair color and height dont really have the same sort of dividing power broadly speaking. Still, your line of thought there about what a pronoun should capture is intriguing.