Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English
By Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. 2017
Singular they enjoys a curious notoriety in popular discussions of English grammar. Despite this, and though its use with quantificational, non-specific, and genuinely epicene antecedents dates back at least to the 1400s (Balhorn 2004), it has been little discussed in formal linguistics. This squib suggests an analysis of this longstanding use of they, while also describing a more recent change in they’s distribution, whereby many speakers now accept it with singular, definite, and specific antecedents of known binary gender. I argue that the distribution of they, in both conservative and innovative varieties, has implications for our understanding of the syntactic representation of gender in English, the structure of bound variable pronouns, and the regulation of coreference.
Subfields: Natural Language Processing
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In Natural Language Processing
- Adina Williams
- Eric Michael Smith
- Kai-Wei Chang
- Hal Daumé Iii
- Yang Trista Cao
- Mohit Bansal
- Yejin Choi
- Jason Aaron Edward Weston
Citations in the corpus
- Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution (2019, background): “Some languages have no grammatical gender at all; English is generally seen as one (Nissen, 2002; Baron, 1971) (though this is contested (Bjorkman, 2017)).”
- Hi, my name is Martha: Using names to measure and mitigate bias in generative dialogue models (2021, background): “Here, we focus only on binary gender, which is clearly an incomplete picture of the range of human self-reference (Butler, 1990; Conrod, 2017; Bjorkman, 2017; Ackerman, 2019; Conrod, 2020).”
- Gender and Representation Bias in GPT-3 Generated Stories (2021, background): “Still, humans and NLP models associate many names with gender and consequently, with gender stereotypes (Bjorkman, 2017; Caliskan et al., 2017; Nosek et al., 2002; Moss-Racusin et al., 2012).”
- “I’m fully who I am”: Towards Centering Transgender and Non-Binary Voices to Measure Biases in Open Language Generation (2023, background): “Common distal forms include naming someone by occupation [7].”