Singular ‘they’ and novel pronouns: gender-neutral, nonbinary, or both?

By E. Bradley, Julia Salkind, Ally Moore, Sofi Teitsort. 2019

40 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pronouns have recently become a highly visible aspect of the LGBTQ+ movement among the general public and in linguistics. We investigated whether singular, specific ‘they’ and the novel singular gender-neutral pronoun ‘ze’ are interpreted as gender-neutral (slient on gender and the gender binary) or or referring specifically to referents of non-binary gender. Participants read descriptions of scholarship applicants, and guessed which photo matched the applicant they read about from an array of male, female, and non-binary subjects. Results suggest that ‘they’ is interpreted as gender-neutral, including non-binary/gender-nonconforming referents. ‘Ze’ does not appear to be recognized by enough English speakers to determine a definitive interpretation.

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

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution (2019, background): “, ZE/HIR, XEY/XEM), which have been in usage since at least the 1970s (Bustillos, 2011; Merriam-Webster, 2016; Bradley et al., 2019; Hord, 2016; Spivak, 1997). 2Following GLAAD (2007), transgender individuals are those whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.”
Gender Bias in Machine Translation (2021, background): “In this sense, while English is bringing the singular they in common use and developing neo-pronouns (Bradley et al., 2019), for grammatical gender languages like Spanish neu-”
Neural Machine Translation Doesn’t Translate Gender Coreference Right Unless You Make It (2020, background): “Their study focuses heavily on English, which has minimal gender inflection and where gender-neutral language such as singular they is in increasingly common use (Bradley et al., 2019); the authors acknowledge that ‘some extensions .”
Detecting Independent Pronoun Bias with Partially-Synthetic Data Generation (2020, background): “Our linguistic understanding of (neo)pronouns and inclusive NLP development are areas of ongoing research (Ackerman, 2019; Bradley et al., 2019; Cao and Daum´e III, 2020; Conrod, 2020; Denton et al., 2020; Mitchell et al., 2020).”
Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution: An Analysis of Gender and Bias Throughout the Machine Learning Lifecycle* (2021, background): “, ZE/HIR, XEY/XEM), which have been in usage since at least the 1970s (Spivak 1997; Bustillos 2011; Merriam-Webster 2016; Bradley et al. 2019; Hord 2016).”