Pronouns and Gender in Language

By Kirby Conrod. 2020

22 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pronouns are a grammatical element that take the place of full noun phrases, and in many of the world’s languages, pronouns also convey social information such as the gender of a referent. This chapter surveys the literature on the linguistics of pronouns from a broad array of disciplinary perspectives, focusing on the way social categories of gender interact with linguistic factors. The first section reviews gendered pronouns through the lens of performativity and speech act theory, discussing how pronouns and misgendering can be used for impoliteness and politeness. The second section surveys some semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses of pronouns, including debates on the semantic and syntactic category of pronouns in the grammar. While the bulk of this chapter focuses on gendered pronouns in English, the third section provides a cross-linguistic perspective of gendered pronouns and inflectional morphology, and more interactional data is discussed.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory, Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Eric Michael Smith
2. Adina Williams

In Language and Linguistics

1. Marco Turchi
2. Matteo Negri
3. Eric Michael Smith
4. Adina Williams

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Eric Michael Smith
2. Adina Williams

In Linguistics

1. Eric Michael Smith
2. Adina Williams

Citations in the corpus

• 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 Bias in Machine Translation (2021, background): “Also, they exhibit to what extent speakers of each group are led to think and communicate via binary distinctions,6 as well as underline the relative complexity in carving out a space for lexical innovations that encode nonbinary gender (Hord, 2016; Conrod, 2020).”