“To each reader his, their or her pronoun”. Prescribed, proscribed and disregarded uses of generic pronouns in English

Abstract

After a brief review of the existing literature, this paper investigates the use of generic pronouns in the academic written sections of several corpora of English, namely, (a) the so-called ‘Brown Family’ of the ICAME collection, (b) six components of the International Corpus of English, (c) the British National Corpus and (d) the current extent of the American National Corpus. The analysis shows that the 1970s and 80s debate about sexism in language has apparently influenced academic writing, to the extent that the frequency of generic he is lower in the post-debate texts, while other alternatives have been introduced, some of which, such as ‘he or she’ are now widely used in academic writing. Furthermore, in a genre which is most concerned with ‘correctness’, some so far proscribed pronouns, like singular they, show a slight increase, while the usually disregarded generic she attests a quite significant use. The data testify to variations in use between BrE and AmE and, less conclusively, between other geographical varieties of English. In addition, the analysis makes some observations on the contexts of use, both in terms of domains and of type of antecedents, of s/he, singular they and of the rare, yet attested, generic she, generally disregarded by the literature on the subject.

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