In English, Italian, French, and Spanish (to name only a few languages), people’s names tend to suggest the referent’s gender. Thus “Paul,” “Paolo,” “Pierre,” and “Jesús” strongly suggest that their referent is male, while “Ortensia,” “Mary,” “Paola,” “Pauline,” and “Lizbeth” suggest that the referent is a female. To borrow the terminology introduced by Putnam, we can characterize the additional information conveyed by a name as stereotypical information. It doesn’t affect someone’s linguistic and semantic competence: one is not linguistically incompetent if one doesn’t know that “Sue” is used to refer to females. The argument here is that the stereotypical information conveyed by a name can be characterized along the lines of Grice’s treatment of generalized conversational implicatures and that anaphoric resolution exploits it.
