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Personality, prescriptivism, and pronouns

Factors influencing grammaticality judgments of gender-neutral language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2019

Evan D. Bradley ,
Maxwell Schmid  and
Hannah Lombardo
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Extract

Because standard English lacks a true a gender-neutral singular pronoun, there has long been debate over how to refer to generic persons whose genders are unknown, or those who reject binary male or female identities. Singular (or epicene) ‘they’ has a long history as a pronoun to refer to individuals of unknown gender (Balhorn, 2004), and has also been adopted as a personal pronoun by those who identify as neither male nor female. Borthen (2010) argues based on a corpus study of Norwegian that, crosslinguistically, plural pronouns allow for vague reference, and that their lexical features (e.g., number, person) need not match their interpretation in context, which makes these pronouns prime candidates to be used in gender-neutral contexts. Chen and Wu (2011) contend that this is true for both singular and plural pronouns, but Borthen (2011) disputes this, arguing that the data show that for definite plural pronouns, but not singular, the antecedent need not be activated in the speaker's or addressee's mind, and thus can be inferred.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 41 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

When this article was first published it erroneously omitted the names of two other authors, Maxwell Schmid and Hannah Lombardo. This error has been corrected and a corrigendum published with further information, including the authors' biographical details. This can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078419000397.

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