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Singular <i>they</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English

Paper · 2017 · Bronwyn M. Bjorkman

Summary

This squib asks why English speakers treat singular they so unevenly. With quantified, indefinite, or gender-unknown antecedents, they has been usual since at least the 1400s (Balhorn 2004). Bjorkman also documents a newer pattern that earlier work missed. Some speakers now use they for a definite, specific person of known binary gender ("my cousin"), yet still reject it after a given name or a gendered noun ("Janet", "my sister"). The evidence is judgement contrasts, read against historical and sociolinguistic studies (Bodine, Newman, Matossian). The analysis has three parts:

  • Bound variables: these may carry fewer features than referential pronouns. This fits the pronoun typology of Déchaine & Wiltschko and is incompatible with Heim's Feature Transmission.
  • Innovative speakers: for them, gender on pronouns is no longer contrastive but an optional semantic feature. Names and gender-specific nouns still carry it lexically.
  • Discourse condition: a coreferring pronoun must carry at least the features already attached to its referent.

The result explains why adopting they for nonbinary people runs into a grammatical obstacle, not only a cultural one.

Key points

  • Singular they with epicene or quantified antecedents is attested since the 1400s, while prescriptive bans date only from the 1700s (Bodine 1975).
  • Newman (1992) studied speech from nine TV shows and Matossian (1997) studied interviews in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. Both found that they favours "nonsolid" antecedents, meaning ones low in referentiality, specificity, and definiteness.
  • Haegeman (1981) is cited as the only earlier generative treatment. Its ban on sex-specific antecedents is refuted by bound-variable examples from Shakespeare and Austen.
  • Feature Transmission (Heim 2008) cannot derive the attested pattern. The Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002) split between pronoun types can.
  • Lexical gender is placed low, on the n head or the root (Kramer 2015; Steriopolo & Wiltschko 2010), while pronoun gender sits higher as discourse gender.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A referential pronoun may enrich what discourse has recorded about a referent but may never be less specific than that record, which is a monotone, dynamic agreement check.
  • I2. Bound-variable pronouns and referential pronouns obey different feature rules, so they should be handled by separate mechanisms rather than one agreement routine.
  • I3. Gender can come from two distinct sources: lexically fixed on certain nouns and names, or optional and tied to the discourse referent.
  • I4. Antecedent "solidity" bundles referentiality, specificity, and definiteness into one graded property that predicts pronoun choice.
  • I5. The core evidence is minimal pairs that differ only in antecedent type ("my cousin" vs "Janet"), which isolates a single factor.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): coreference could keep a feature set per entity and reject pronoun links whose features are a strict subset, with the rejection logged as the explanation.
  • I2 (frames): pronouns under quantifiers like "everyone" or "each" could be routed to variable binding with relaxed number and gender checks, separate from discourse coreference.
  • I3 (world): entity records could tag each gender value with where it came from (a name, a noun like "actress", or a later pronoun), so contradictions and overrides stay traceable.
  • I4 (world): entities could carry specific/generic/quantified flags, letting the world model tell "the ideal candidate" apart from a concrete person.
  • I5 (learn): such pairs make good negative controls for the coreference resolver, checking that it does not link they across the board.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Queen's UniversityKingston · Canada8 works · 1,610 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksSocial Sciences · 744 worksGender Studies · 30 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksCoreference resolution · 550 works

Cite

Cite as Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. 2017. Singular <i>they</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.374

@article{bjorkman2017singular,
  title = {{Singular <i>they</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English}},
  author = {Bronwyn M. Bjorkman},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.374},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374}
}

References

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  22. How to cite this article: Bjorkman, Bronwyn M. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 80. 1–13, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374 ↗
  23. Published: 06 September 2017 find
  24. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. ↗

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