The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns 9781032394749, 9781032394770, 9781003349891

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 The little words that mean a lot
Part I History and change
Chapter 2 Variation in pronoun typologies
Chapter 3 A history of personal pronouns in Standard English
Chapter 4 On the alleged stability of pronouns: The influence of language contact and social intervention
Chapter 5 Grammaticalization as a process for pronoun change
Chapter 6 The future of pronouns in the online/offline nexus
Part II Processing and categorisation
Chapter 7 Pronouns in the brain
Chapter 8 Pronouns and aphasia
Chapter 9 Pronoun comprehension
Chapter 10 Personal pronouns and noun phrases as shifters in Southeast Asian languages
Chapter 11 Alternative pronominal items: Noncanonical pronouns in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Afrikaans
Part III Acquisition and language learning
Chapter 12 How children acquire pronouns
Chapter 13 Bilingual acquisition: More object pronouns at once
Chapter 14 Deixis in the manual modality: Insights from diverse signing communication systems
Chapter 15 Acquisition of pronouns in Creole languages
Chapter 16 Use of anaphoric reference by second language writers: From empirical data to pedagogy in the classroom
Part IV Making pronouns personal
Chapter 17 T/V in the 21st century: A case study of French
Chapter 18 Pronouns as shibboleths: Prescriptive attitudes to case forms
Chapter 19 Identifying who uses first-person singular pronouns and the psychological impacts this language may have
Chapter 20 Strategic uses of pronoun drop in economic decision-making
Chapter 21 What does it mean when a computer says I?
Part V Power and politics
Chapter 22 The role of pronouns in the race debate: George Floyd and BLM protests
Chapter 23 ‘They really eat anything don’t they?’: Pronoun use in COVID-19-related Anti-Asian racism
Chapter 24 Pronoun use in cross-cultural therapy sessions
Chapter 25 Politicians’ pronouns: Who is ‘we’? Negotiating national collectivities in Taiwan’s authoritarian period
Chapter 26 Strategic use of pronouns among lingua franca English users in a university project-based learning programme
Chapter 27 Pronoun activism and the power of animacy
Part VI Gendered pronouns and beyond
Chapter 28 Epicene pronouns new and old
Chapter 29 Gender-neutrality and clitics
Chapter 30 Gender binaries in constructed languages
Chapter 31 Non-binary singular they
Chapter 32 Individuals’ pronoun choice: A case study of transgender speakers in Berlin, Germany
Chapter 33 Misgendering in the media
Index

Citation preview



In this thought-provoking book, the authors explore the profound role of pronouns in how we enact our identities and relationships through language. With remarkable insights, they illuminate in detail the often-overlooked functions that pronouns serve in construing the multifaceted aspects of the human experience. Michele Zappavigna, Associate Professor of Digital Communication, University of New South Wales, Australia No stone is left unturned in The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns, with inspiring contributions by world-leading scholars, offering innovative analyses from all angles. Highly recommended for linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, students, teachers and a general readership. Lucía Loureiro-Porto, Associate Professor in English, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain A welcome wealth of resources for the study of pronouns, the small giants in language processing. A must-read for seasoned scholars as well as for aspiring ones. Luis H. González, Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Wake Forest University, USA

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PRONOUNS

This original volume provides the first state-of-the-art overview of research on pronouns in the 21st century. With its dedicated sections on grammar, history, and change, language learning/ acquisition, cognition and comprehension, power, politics, and identity, The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns shows that contemporary interest in pronouns and gender represents just the tip of the iceberg. Led by Laura Paterson, a transdisciplinary collection of experts discuss the global history of different pronoun systems, synthesize the literature, and contextualize the salient issues and current debates shaping research on pronouns across different spheres and via different theoreticalmethodological traditions. The Handbook is designed to encourage readers to engage with a range of perspectives from within and beyond their immediate areas of interest, with the ultimate aim of shaping the future trajectory of interdisciplinary, multilingual research on pronouns. Using data from multiple languages and engaging deeply with the social, cultural, political, technological, and psychological factors that can influence pronoun use, this innovative book will be an indispensable resource to scholars and advanced students of theoretical and applied linguistics, education, and the social and behavioral sciences. Laura L. Paterson is Senior Lecturer at The Open University, UK, and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Language and Discrimination.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS

Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics provide overviews of a whole subject area or sub-discipline in linguistics, and survey the state of the discipline including emerging and cutting edge areas.  Edited by leading scholars, these volumes include contributions from key academics from around the world and are essential reading for both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS Edited by Xu Wen and John R. Taylor THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL SIGN LANGUAGE RESEARCH Edited by Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, and Annika Herrmann THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANGUAGE AND PERSUASION Edited by Jeanne Fahnestock and Randy Allen Harris THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SEMIOSIS AND THE BRAIN Edited by Adolfo M. García and Agustín Ibáñez THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM Edited by Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL LINGUISTICS Edited by Sandrine Zufferey and Pascal Gygax THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOPHONETICS Edited by Christopher Strelluf THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PRONOUNS Edited by Laura L. Paterson Further titles in this series can be found online at www​.routledge​.com​/series​/RHIL

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PRONOUNS

Edited by Laura L. Paterson

Designed cover image: Getty First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Laura L. Paterson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Laura L. Paterson to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-39474-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39477-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34989-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003349891 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments

ix xi xiv xxii

1 The little words that mean a lot Laura L. Paterson

1

PART 1

History and change

5

2 Variation in pronoun typologies Heather Bliss, Richard Compton, and Dennis Ryan Storoshenko 3 A history of personal pronouns in Standard English Mikko Laitinen 4 On the alleged stability of pronouns: The influence of language contact and social intervention Peter Siemund



7 29

44

5 Grammaticalization as a process for pronoun change Gunther De Vogelaer

58

6 The future of pronouns in the online/offline nexus Brian W. King and Archie Crowley

74

v

Contents PART 2

Processing and categorisation

87

7 Pronouns in the brain Joanna Porkert, Hanneke Loerts, Anja Schüppert, and Merel Keijzer

89

8 Pronouns and aphasia Eleni Peristeri

104

9 Pronoun comprehension Jennifer E. Arnold

120

10 Personal pronouns and noun phrases as shifters in Southeast Asian languages Dwi Noverini Djenar 11 Alternative pronominal items: Noncanonical pronouns in Chinese,Vietnamese, and Afrikaans Chenchen Song, Li Nguyen, and Theresa Biberauer PART 3

135

148

Acquisition and language learning

165

12 How children acquire pronouns Petra Hendriks

167

13 Bilingual acquisition: More object pronouns at once Katrin Schmitz

182

14 Deixis in the manual modality: Insights from diverse signing communication systems 199 Jenny C. Lu and Diane Lillo-Martin 15 Acquisition of pronouns in Creole languages Dany Adone and Tamirand De Lisser 16 Use of anaphoric reference by second language writers: From empirical data to pedagogy in the classroom Masumi Narita and Mark R. Freiermuth PART 4

210

226

Making pronouns personal

241

17 T/V in the 21st century: A case study of French Kimberley Pager-McClymont, Sarah Eichhorn, and Amélie Doche

243

vi

Contents

18 Pronouns as shibboleths: Prescriptive attitudes to case forms Linda Pillière 19 Identifying who uses first-person singular pronouns and the psychological impacts this language may have Nicholas S. Holtzman and Logan C. Delgado

258

274

20 Strategic uses of pronoun drop in economic decision-making Tai-Sen He

289

21 What does it mean when a computer says I? Andrew Gargett

302

PART 5

Power and politics

315

22 The role of pronouns in the race debate: George Floyd and BLM protests Zeynep Cihan Koca-Helvacı

317

23 ‘They really eat anything don’t they?’: Pronoun use in COVID-19-related anti-Asian racism Ursula Kania 24 Pronoun use in cross-cultural therapy sessions Nahed Arafat

333 350

25 Politicians’ pronouns: Who is ‘we’? Negotiating national collectivities in Taiwan’s authoritarian period Jennifer M.Wei

365

26 Strategic use of pronouns among lingua franca English users in a university project-based learning programme Satomi Ura and Hiromasa Tanaka

378

27 Pronoun activism and the power of animacy Laure Gardelle PART 6

394

Gendered pronouns and beyond

409

28 Epicene pronouns new and old Charlotte Stormbom

411

vii

Contents

29 Gender-neutrality and clitics Ashley Reilly-Thornton

421

30 Gender binaries in constructed languages Angela Zottola

437

31 Non-binary singular they Lex Konnelly, Kirby Conrod, and Evan D. Bradley

450

32 Individuals’ pronoun choice: A case study of transgender speakers in Berlin, Germany 465 Olga Steriopolo and Harley Aussoleil 33 Misgendering in the media Kat Gupta

480

Index

497

viii

FIGURES

  6.1 Four Twitter bios with pronouns represented in various ways   6.2 Elizabeth Warren’s Twitter bio with pronouns ‘she/her/hers’ listed   7.1 Left: A subject performing an ERP task; right: continuous raw EEG data measured during reading task   7.2 Summary of ERP technique: Markers of the critical words in the continuous EEG data, and subsequent averaging of the signal per condition as visualization of the components   8.1 Sums of null subject and clitic pronouns in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group (PWA vs Controls) 11.1 API diagnostic (for imposters and NCPs) 11.2 Diachronic development of NCPs 14.1 From left to right, the images depict (a) reference to self, (b) addressee, (c) physically present third person or inanimate objects/locations 14.2 Reference to non-present referents through a Referential Locus 14.3 An example of a directional verb, ASK, that shows verb agreement through spatial modulation; the movement represents the directionality of the action, going from the subject to the patient 15.1 Jamaican-speaking children performance on Pronouns and Reflexives in Experiment 1 15.2 Jamaican-speaking children’s performance on pronouns and reflexives in Experiment 2 15.3 Jamaican-speaking children’s performance on pronouns and reflexives in Experiment 3 15.4 Cumulative results experiments 1, 2, and 3 16.1 Normalized frequency of the sentence-initial this in each writer group 16.2 Types of the nouns following this as a determiner in each writer group 16.3 Structural characteristics of the antecedents to the sentence-initial this in each writer group



ix

81 81 90 91 112 152 162 200 200 202 220 220 221 221 233 235 235

Figures

19.1 Falsifiable prediction: Treatment efficacy as a function of time since the precipitating negative event as well as type of self-talk intervention 20.1 A sample round of the lottery-choice task 20.2 A sample decision item of the SVO task 31.1 Effect of age on acceptability rating of singular they by antecedent type 31.2 Effect of age on acceptability rating of singular they by participant gender 32.1 A schema depicting the three proposed tiers of gender, overlaid 33.1 Timeline of events 33.2 Concordance 1: occurrences of he was 33.3 Concordance 2: occurrences of he will 33.4 Concordance 3: occurrences of he has announced 33.5 Concordance 4: he is to become a woman 33.6 Concordance 4: Occurrences of a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’ 33.7 Concordance 4: Occurrences of as ‘she’ and no longer ‘he’

x

284 295 297 456 457 466 485 487 487 492 492 493 493

TABLES

2.1 Mandarin personal pronouns 2.2 French nominative personal pronouns 2.3 Commonly proposed phi-features for person and number 2.4 Inuinnaqtun absolutive personal pronouns 2.5 Independent pronouns in Sanapaná 2.6 Independent pronouns in Winnebago 2.7 Central Alaskan Yup’ik personal pronouns 2.8 Singular pronouns in Tok Pisin 2.9 Khoekhoe personal pronouns 2.10 Boumaa Fijian cardinal pronouns 2.11 Larike free pronouns 2.12 Independent pronouns in Waris 2.13 Pite Saami nominative pronouns 2.14 Scots Gaelic personal pronouns 2.15 Kanienʼkéha independent pronouns 2.16 Makaa object pronouns 2.17 Three pronoun types 2.18 Reinhart and Reuland typology 2.19 Mandarin compound reflexives 3.1 OE personal pronouns 3.2 ME personal pronouns in Chaucerian English (mid/late-fourteenth century) 3.3 Extract from “The Reeve’s Tale” 3.4 Personal pronoun in the mid-fifteenth century Early Modern English 3.5 The percentages of generic he and its forms 5.1 Subject pronouns in Germanic languages 5.2 Cliticization in Dutch, first person plural 7.1 Overview of task specifics of reviewed ERP studies for this chapter 8.1 Demographic and clinical information for each PWA in the study



xi

8 8 9 9 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 13 14 14 14 15 18 21 22 31 32 33 34 38 66 69 96 109

Tables

8.2 Percentages (%) of referentially appropriate (i.e., unambiguous null subject and clitic pronouns) and inappropriate expressions (i.e., referentially ambiguous null subject and clitic pronouns) in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group 8.3 Summary of logit mixed effects model: Referentially appropriate vs inappropriate forms 8.4 Summary of logit mixed effects models: Types of referentially appropriate and inappropriate forms 8.5 Percentages (%) of grammatical (i.e., pronominal clitics) and ungrammatical (i.e., substitution errors on clitics, null object pronouns) used in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group 8.6 Summary of logit mixed effects model: Grammatical vs ungrammatical forms 8.7 Summary of logit mixed effects models: Types of ungrammatical forms 8.8 Mean accuracy (%) rates and RT in the 2-back task per experimental group 11.1 Ancient royal terms revived in Modern Chinese 11.2 Dialectal-origin noncanonical pronouns in Chinese 13.1 Strong object pronouns 13.2 Clitic pronouns first and second person 13.3 Clitic pronouns third person 15.1 Production of pronouns in Jamaican 15.2 Distribution of pronouns 15.3 Jamaican children performance on reflexives and pronouns 16.1 Summary of the research topics for four major studies (in chronological order) 16.2 Composition of the essays for analysis in the present study 16.3 Taxonomy of structural characteristics of antecedents of the demonstrative this 16.4 Frequency of anaphoric reference by the sentence-initial this 16.5 Frequency of verb types following the sentence-initial this as a pronoun 16.6 Syntactic patterns of copular verbs following the sentence-initial this as a pronoun 16.7 Instances of sentences beginning with this as a pronoun 17.1 French-speaking countries and regions survey participants have lived in 17.2 Survey participants’ level of education. 17.3 Survey participants’ answers to stimuli in matrix table with a 4-point Likert Scale 17.4 Survey participants’ response to scenario 2 18.1 Traditional paradigm of pronouns in standard English 18.2 General acceptability rating of pronoun usage in Mittins et al.’s 1970 study 22.1 The Alt-Right corpus 22.2 Top 10 semantic categories in the Alt-Right corpus 22.3 The frequency of ingroup and outgroup pronouns 22.4 Concordances of ‘we need to’ 22.5 Concordances of ‘our own country’ 22.6 Concordances of ‘they want’ 22.7 Concordances of ‘their hatred’ 23.1 Example of a POS-tagged comment xii

113 113 113 114 114 114 115 154 155 185 185 186 217 218 219 228 231 232 232 233 234 234 248 248 250 251 261 268 320 323 324 324 325 327 328 337

Tables

23.2 Absolute frequencies of personal/indefinite/possessive prenominal pronouns 23.3 Singular/plural/indefinite determiners/pronouns 23.4 Collocates of I (+R3, MI+Log-ratio p my; 33

Mikko Laitinen Table 3.4 Personal pronoun in the mid-fifteenth century Early Modern English

1st singular 2nd singular 3rd singular masculine 3rd singular neuter 3rd singular feminine 1st plural 2nd plural 3rd plural

Nominative

Genitive

Accusative

I thou he (h)it she we ye / you they

my / mine thy / thine his his her(s) our(s) your(s) their(s)

me thee him (h)it / him her us you them

thyne/thine>thy). It has been suggested that the process was phonologically determined, so that the longer forms were predominantly used with words with initial vowels (Schendl 1997). The change from hit to it was heavily conditioned by the language-internal factor of morphophonetics, and the starts to be omitted as early as the twelfth century. Hit, however, continues to be used until the sixteenth century. According to Lass (1999: 148), the emergence of its is a simple analogy, and the addition of ‘is just the non-feminine pronominal genitive’. This first appeared at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in informal texts and oral genres. By the midseventeenth century, it had become the most frequent form of various genres, including personal correspondence, as in (1) (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1994: 176). (1) my ague dos yet contingu and begines to renew its strength (Corpus of Early English correspondence, CEEC (1998), Jane Hook, 1631; barrington, 174) A range of variationist sociolinguistic studies have shown that by the early seventeenth century, its had a number of competing variant forms, including the archaic it (as in 2 below), thereof, and of it (see Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1994). Of these forms, its and of it gradually became the dominant variants (Palander-Collin 2018). (2) It lifted up it head and did address Itself to motion like as it would speak (Shakespeare Hamlet, I.ii.216) The process involves both language-external conditions and language-internal processes. In seventeenth-century use, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1994) observe that its found favorable conditions in reflexive uses and with certain semantic roles, while the postnominal variables (thereof and of it) were favored in non-reflexive uses and when the semantic roles is that of an object, as in (3): (3) He had a letter to thee from me. I pray be mindfull of the contents of it assoone as you can (Corpus of Early English correspondence, CEEC (1998), Thomas Knyvett 1644; knyvett, 144) In terms of social stratification, its first appeared in the writings of high-ranking and professional men, which may also explain that it emerged in the South of England, in the area around London and Oxford. As the change progresses, women are shown to use the new form more frequently than men do (Raumolin-Brunberg 1998, Palander-Collin 2018). The replacement of the subject form of the second person with you is a more complex process. According to Lass (1999), singular you first emerged in the thirteenth century, possibly as a result of language contact from French, which had already witnessed the distinction between tu and vous. You was gradually adopted as the unmarked form in the upper echelons of society, while thou devel34

A history of personal pronouns in Standard English

oped the senses of intimacy and reciprocity or contempt. The process was conditioned by languageinternal forces in that thou was favored as subject with auxiliary verbs and you with full lexical verbs (Lass 1999: 149). The process became clear during the following centuries when you developed into a neutral second person pronoun, while thou was increasingly reserved for intimacy. One particularly informative example is a letter from Sir Thomas More to his daughter Margaret Roper, written in 1534 from the Tower of London. (4) And where you write these wordes of your selfe, ‘But good father, I wretch am farre, farre, farthest of all other from such poynt of perfection, our Lorde send me the grace to amende my lyfe, and continually to haue an eie to mine ende, without grudge of death, which to them that dye in God, is the gate of a welthy lyfe to which God of his infinite mercie bringe vs all. amen. Good Father strenght my frayltie with your deuoute prayers.’ The father of heauen mote strenght thy frailtie, my good daughter and the frayltie of thy fraile father too. (Corpus of Early English correspondence, CEEC (1998), Thomas More, 1534, more 545) As shown in the following paragraphs, extensive historical sociolinguistic evidence from personal correspondence shows that the replacement of subject ye by you occurred in the sixteenth century. According to Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 61–61), this process was a very rapid replacement, spreading through society in roughly 80 years. Detailed corpus studies show that the process was initiated by language internal processes, since the seed for the reorganization can be found in impersonal structures and in sentences where the subject follows the verb. Using correspondence data, the sociolinguistic processes related to this change have been described in Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003: 118–119), who show that the change was clearly led by women, and it was from below in terms of public linguistic awareness since you first surfaced in family correspondence (2003: 194–195). At least in correspondence data, ye continued to be used by ‘some men at Court who occasionally continue to resort to’ it after you had diffused through most of the society (2003: 195). Nevertheless, the change was driven by the capital region as a whole (2003: 171–172). An interesting sidetrack in the path for thou/thy was its use in religious contexts in the Quaker movement in the seventeenth century, a process in which the use of the plural you in a reference to a singular entity was seen as an act against the plain and pure speech of the Bible (Burnley 2003, Nevala 2004: 93, Walker 2007). By the late modern period, understood to cover the period from the eighteenth century onward, thou had disappeared from the standard variety. Discussing personal pronouns in general, Denison (1998: 106–107) points out that, as far as this period is concerned, the changes in forms are few. According to Denison, thou is rarely preserved, and its uses were restricted to anger or patronizing use. The loss of thou was most likely brought about by a mixture of languageinternal and also sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic factors. As far as the latter is concerned, it has been suggested that you gradually developed into an unmarked form, with a broader scope in functions. Thus, if a speaker wanted to avoid emotive connotations in speech, then you was a better choice. Moreover, when it was a case of indexing social status differences, you was more flexible than thou, so it could be used either for imitating the speech of upper ranks or in situations where expressing social differences was not ideal or preferred. You simply had a pragmatic range that was far greater than that of thou (see Barber 1976, Wales 1983, Nevala 2018). Additionally, not only was you more flexible, but speaker evaluation of both ye and thou also contributed to its demise. To illustrate, Nevala’s (2018) extensive survey of EModE grammars shows 35

Mikko Laitinen

that by the end of the seventeenth century thou was a socially marked form, and she continues that ‘most eighteenth-century grammars condemned its use as “vulgar”, :ungenteel”, and “rude”’ (2018: 81). Robert Lowth wrote in his grammar (1762: 22) that: (5) Some writers have used ye as the objective case plural of the pronoun of the second person; very improperly and ungrammatically. … It may perhaps, be allowed in the comic and burlesque style, which often imitates a vulgar and incorrect pronunciation, as ‘by the Lord, I knew ye, as well as he that made ye.’ Shakespear, I Hen. IV. But in the serious and solemn style no authority is sufficient to justify so manifest a solecism. The Singular and Plural form seem to be confounded in the following sentence: ‘Pass ye away, thou inhabitants of Saphir’. Micah, i. II. What is more, the decline in the use of thou may have been a counteraction against its adoption in the Quaker movement, and its use was further stigmatized. Arguments for language-internal factors are fewer, but it has been suggested that a tendency to simplify verbal inflections also had an impact on the marginalization of thou. The result is, however, clear, and by the eighteenth century, thou was marginalized and is increasingly restricted to archaic, poetic, and socially marked uses (Lass 1999: 11). To illustrate, Nevala (2018) investigates the uses of thou in personal letters and observes that in the eighteenth century it developed specific textual meanings that aimed at being literary or elevated in style, so that its use imitates great authors of the time. In addition to this specific stylistic register, thou continues to be used in adjusting the emotive register in correspondence. According to Nevala (2018: 94), it continues to be a useful linguistic tool ‘for expressing changes in the tone or mood of the letter’ and to show affection and intimacy. One such case can be illustrated by a letter sent by music historian Charles Burney (b. 1724) to his adult daughter Susanna Phillips, who was in her thirties at the time. (6) How much pleasanter an employmt would it be, if I had time for it, my ever dear and darling Susey, to scrible nonsense to Thee, than either to write History or read lectures on its alphabet, from door to door, as I now begin to do! (Corpus of Early English correspondence, CEEC (1998), Charles Burney, 1783?; Burney, 402) Since the late modern period, the usage of thou reflects its complex history, and the connotations in its use continue to be slightly paradoxical. On the one hand, it remains archaic and poetic, and its use is also restricted to biblical language, possibly because it is, for instance, the dominant form in the King James Bible and because it has been associated with the Quakers in the past. On the other hand, it also appears in highly non-standard, dialectal speech, and it continues to be used in intimate speech. One additional consequence of the emergence of you, replacing ye and the loss of thou displays a paradigm gap in the second person plural. Various regional forms (y’all, you all, etc.) have emerged. Wales (2004) writes that ‘speakers across regions clearly do feel the need to fill the “gap”, so to speak, that has been left in the history of “standard” English with the loss of a singular/plural distinction’.

4.  History of the generic pronoun they Tables 3.1, 3.2, and 3.4 present an idealized and neat system in which the pronoun forms divided by number are deceptively simple. However, when personal pronoun use is investigated, nuances and differences start to emerge. Indeed, Jespersen (1924: 188) points out that number ‘might appear to be one of the simplest natural categories, as simple as “two and two are four.” Yet on closer inspection it presents a great many difficulties, both logical and linguistic’. One such issue, which intersects pronoun form with function, deals with human third person references in the generic sense, meaning

36

A history of personal pronouns in Standard English

those instances in which the reference is unknown or there is no need to disclose specific information about the referent (Jespersen 1914: 137–141). Such cases typically occur in anaphoric usage when a reference is made to indefinite pronouns (somebody, anyone, etc.) and singular occupational/descriptive nouns that do not distinguish gender, but which can occur both as indefinite and as definite noun phrases (a student, the writer, a doctor, a lawyer, etc.). These antecedents are grammatically singular, and since English, like many other Indo-European languages, makes a distinction between masculine and feminine with animate singular third person references, it leads to the generic pronoun question of which one of the singular pronouns to use when referring to a human antecedent whose gender is not known or is irrelevant (as in a prototypical example, such as ‘A good doctor knows what [he|she|they is|are] doing’.). This discursive need for a generic pronoun has a long history and circles around a number of solutions for language users, which are discussed in descriptive grammars (Quirk et al. 1985: 770, Biber et al. 1999: 316–318, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 491–495). The solutions have both advantages and disadvantages. First, language users can decide whether to use either of the two singular animate pronouns (either he or she) and therefore add a gender label to the otherwise genderless nominal element (such as a doctor), but the advantage is that subject-verb concord is consistent, i.e., a singular subject is used with a verb in the singular. Second, they have the option of using the plural pronoun they and its forms and run the risk of breaking verb concord if the generic antecedent is in a subject position with a finite verb. Alternatively, speakers can use coordinated forms, such as he or she, s/he, him or her, etc. In normative grammars, however, these are often described as clumsy. Baron (1986) offers a thorough overview of the debates suggesting alternatives for singular generic third person pronouns. A number of studies have approached the generic pronoun questions in present-day English (see overviews in Bodine 1975, Wales 1996, Newman 1997, Pauwels 1998, Laitinen 2002), and the topic seems to be a household subject in various student theses. It goes without saying that present-day grammars should be approached with caution when interpreting diachronic developments of generic pronouns, and in what follows I will provide a brief overview of the generic pronoun question in the history of English. Curzan (2003: 70–79) offers a linguistic account of the early history of generic pronouns, both he and they in particular. She writes: One of the most important implications of these examples from earlier periods of English is that some form of generic they has been in use in the written language since Old English, as a natural solution to the generic pronoun problem. It also clearly has not been the only option and given some of the extended grammatical solutions … it would seem that writers have been struggling with this construction for centuries (Curzan 2003: 72). Although generic they was in use from the earliest English texts onward, he was the most common choice in the human indefinite sense in Old and Early Middle English (Curzan 2003: 70). This is not surprising, for two reasons. The first is the pronominal man, which gradually disappeared in Middle English. This pronominal man was polysemous with ‘male human being’ and was used as a pronoun in Old English to denote humans in general. It logically followed that the overtly masculine singular pronoun was also used in a generic sense, as in (7) and (8). (7) Cleued be mi tunge to mine cheken gif ich forgete þe ierusalem. þanne man forgiet þat he seien sholde. þanne beð his tunge alse hit cleued were. (The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC): Trinity Homilies [TRIN] 73) (8) ‘Let my tongue be stuck to my cheeks if I forget thee Jerusalem. When a person / one forgets what he should say, his tongue is as if it were stuck’.

37

Mikko Laitinen

Nis na god þæt man nime his bearna hlaf. and wurpe hundum; (HC: Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies [AELFR2/8] 69-70) (9) ‘It is not good that one takes his children’s bread and throws it to dogs’. Second, the topics in most of the surviving Old English texts deal with male activities (Curzan 2003: 66), which meant that writers naturally followed the notional gender assignment and used the masculine singular he as a generic pronoun. He and they in human indefinite reference are widely discussed in descriptions of Early and Late Modern English (Poutsma 1914: 310–314, Jespersen 1949: 137–141). Corpus evidence shows that he appears consistently and continuously through to later stages in the history of English (Curzan 2003: 70). Laitinen (2007), using historical sociolinguistic methods, has focused on Early Modern English personal correspondence, and corpus evidence shows that both generic alternatives, he and they, are used in Early Modern English, but the proportions of they increase steadily and statistically significantly through 1500–1800. Variationist studies also offer a new perspective on the role of various factors in variation between the two alternatives. Laitinen’s (2007) data highlight the ongoing variation process, and the results illustrate that women almost invariably use the generic they at least in personal correspondence data, while men show highly stratified uses of both he and they in Early Modern English. Overall, the social factor of gender contributes to variation more than textual register variation. Register plays no role in women’s pronoun use, but it does in men’s, strongly suggesting a change in progress, with women leading the trend. The use of generic they emerged as a topic in normative grammars from the eighteenth century onward, as evinced in Lindley Murray’s grammar (1795: 95–96) (see also Bodine 1975, Baron 1986, Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006, Paterson 2014). One of the most influential usage guides of the twentieth century, H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), strongly condemns both the use of generic they and ‘cumbersome he or she, his or her, &c’ (1926: 648). Using dictionary data from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Balhorn (2004) observes a general trend in which the share of generic singular they increases in texts from the late Middle Ages through to the present day. Another, more comprehensive, study is Dekeyser’s (1975), in which he uses literary British English texts from the modern period. His observations (Table 3.5) show a decrease in the frequencies of generic he from the seventeenth century through to the nineteenth century. A closely related issue is the use of coordinated pronouns (he and she, s/he, her or him, etc.). Paterson (2020) uses the Brown family of corpora to study their use from the 1930s onward. Her analysis of written British and American English shows that these generic pronouns are rare in the 1930s corpora. The frequencies are slightly higher in British English (c. 9 occurrences per one million words) than in American English (c. 5 per one million words). Their frequency, however, increases substantially during the twentieth century, only to decrease in the present day. This decline could be explained by language-external factors. Antecedents are typically definite noun phrases, and the prototypical order is such that the masculine pronoun precedes the feminine (also Jochnowitz 1982, Gerner 2000).

Table 3.5 The percentages of generic he and its forms

% of masculine generic

17th century

18th century

19th century

86

81

73

From Dekeyser 1975: 78

38

A history of personal pronouns in Standard English

5.  Special uses of personal pronouns in the history of English As seen in the discussion above, pronoun categories have undergone substantial changes (i.e., the originally plural accusative/dative you extended to the singular, or plural they has been used in the singular). These are not unique, in the sense that another closely similar change that occurred in the modern period concerns case selection in which the older subjective form was replaced with the objective. Denison (1998: 107–108) notes that in this period this change not only concerned frequency shifts but also was ‘a real change’. It was not fully completed in the early modern period, meaning that the variant forms coexisted. This change affected three environments, viz., bare responses in (10)–(11); after prepositions or conjunctions, such as as and than (12)–(13); and subject predicatives, as in (14)–(15) (the illustrations are from Denison 1998: 107–108). (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

‘Not they’, cried the Princess joyously ‘Not me!’ was Gerald’s unhesitating rejoinder But Martha was stronger than he. Just because he’s bigger than me ‘Oh, if it’s only I, he said ‘It’s us that beg yours’, said Cyril politely

In sociolinguistic terms, the process was introduced from below, meaning that it had roots in spokenlike genres such as personal correspondence and fiction. According to Denison (1998), the linguistic environment from which the change was initiated was in the first person and only later in the third. A closely related process in the history of English pronouns concerns the use of coordinated pronouns (such as she and I or me and her) and affected two environments. First, objective pronoun forms are frequently used in subject position, and they are considered non-standard and are stigmatized (e.g., me and him went to see the movie yesterday). Second, subject forms are also used in object positions (as in between you and I) (Denison 1998: 109–110). Overall, it has been suggested that in their contexts these two structures are related in the sense that the first (objective forms in subject position) has attracted prescriptivist comments throughout the past few centuries. In a sociolinguistic sense, it has occurred above the level of linguistic awareness (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994), while the second one (subject forms in object position) is what could be called a hypercorrection, meaning that language users have overgeneralized the rule that the me and him type is grammatically incorrect and therefore proscribed, and in the misanalysis subject forms in object positions also started to be overused (the between you and I type). Another line of diachronic research makes use of personal pronoun frequencies in historical register analysis and in historical sociolinguistics. These studies link the study of pronoun frequencies in large databases and connect frequency analyses to cultural trends, such as the democratization of societies or colloquialization of genres (i.e., written genres, for instance, becoming more spokenlike). As an illustration of the study of pronoun frequencies in historical register analysis, Biber’s multidimensional analysis of register variation has shown that personal pronoun frequencies distinguish informational and involved/interaction production (Dimension 1), and hence a key feature that is indicative of the involved style is the use of first- and second-person pronouns (Biber and Finegan 1997, Biber and Burges 2000). Tyrkkö (2016) has investigated pronouns in political language. He uses the Small Corpus of Political Speeches as his primary data and examines the use of personal pronouns in a diachronic study spanning 1800–2000. Pronoun frequencies are used as a means to manage audience perceptions of in-groups and out-groups, such as us and them. The results reveal a considerable increase in the first person plural pronouns, labeled as inclusive-referential pronouns, occurring around the 1920s, and the author accounts for this as a consequence of the emergence of broadcast media in that period. 39

Mikko Laitinen

In historical sociolinguistics Vartiainen et al. (2013) use personal letters in the Corpora of Early English Correspondence covering 1600–1800. They analyze the extent to which first- and secondperson pronoun frequencies ‘are affected by the relationship between the sender and the recipient of the letter, comparing the effect to that of gender’ (see also Säily et al. 2011). The data suggest clearly gendered styles, in which female authors use substantially more personal pronouns than do males. The authors attribute this finding to the more involved style of women’s writing across the centuries. Using a culturomic approach, Twenge et al. (2012) make use of the Google Books database to investigate the ratio of male to female pronouns in a diachronic study covering 1900–2008. Their analysis shows substantial fluctuations that correlate with the status of women in the United States. Their main finding is that the proportional share of masculine pronouns increased substantially in the early twentieth century, only to retreat in the second half of the century.

6. Conclusions This chapter has aimed at providing a diachronic overview of personal pronoun forms and frequencies in the history of the English language. It has necessarily been selective in order to include a broad overview of how personal pronouns have been studied. However, the main lines of development concerning central personal pronouns are clear. Throughout the centuries, personal pronouns have undergone substantial changes in form as a result of sociolinguistic contacts and language internal reorganizations. The most important of these forces have been contacts with speakers of other languages, such as Old Norse and Norman French, and the considerable changes in the noun phrase structure, including loss of grammatical gender in nouns. Personal pronouns have also been subject to a wealth of qualitative and quantitative research. This research tradition most likely stems from the fact that pronouns are a high-frequency part of speech, and they can therefore be effectively studied both in small and even tiny corpora as well as in big and messy ones. There is simply no shortage of material to be studied. Moreover, it also seems that as a category that is seemingly very simple, there are a number of contexts where usage and prescriptive ideas clash, which results in a number of interesting research settings (singular uses of they, for instance, or the use of objective forms of coordinated pronouns in subject position). A number of major diachronic trends may also be observed, and all of these are closely related to the key properties of personal pronouns. The first is the prominence of the objective case, which is clearly seen in the changes in the second person (you ousting the singular thou and plural nominative ye) and also in the use of coordinated forms in either subject or object positions. Second, in terms of gender, the origins and uses of singular they continue to excite and attract interest as a sociolinguistic index that symbolizes the non-binary view of gender as a social category. Third, in terms of number, i.e., the inconsistency of the second person paradigm when compared with the first- and the thirdperson, speakers and writers have, throughout the decades, opted for producing a singular–plural distinction with a range of creative solutions.

Note 1 I wish to thank Professor Emerita Terttu Nevalainen (University of Helsinki) for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

References Alcorn, R. (2012). An Introduction to Old English (second edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barber, C. (1976). Early Modern English. London: André Deutsch. Baron, D. (1986). Grammar and Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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A history of personal pronouns in Standard English Bergs, A. (2005). Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421–1503). (Topics in English Linguistics 51). Berlin: de Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110923223. Biber, D. and Burges, J. (2000). Historical change in the language use of women and men: Gender differences in dramatic dialogue. Journal of English Linguistics 28(1): 21–37. Biber, D. and Finegan, E. (1997). Diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English. In T. Nevalainen and L. Kahlas-Tarkka (eds) To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, pp. 253–275. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Konrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Bodine, A. (1975). Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: Singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’. Language in Society 4: 129–146. Burnley, D. (2003). The T/V pronouns in later Middle English literature. In I. Taavitsainen and A.H. Jucker (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 27–45. doi: 10.1075/ pbns.107.03bur. Burrow, J.A. and Turville-Petre, T. (1996). A Book of Middle English (second edition). Oxford: Blackwell. Busse, U. (2017). Pronouns. In A. Bergs and L.J. Brinton (eds) The History of English. Volume 4. Early Modern English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 209–223. doi: 10.1515/9783110525069. Bybee, J. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/ CBO9780511750526. CEEC = Corpus of Early English Correspondence. (1998). Compiled by T. Nevalainen, H. Raumolin-Brunberg, J. Keränen, M. Nevala, A. Nurmi and M. Palander-Collin at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Curzan, A. (2017). Periodization in the history of the English language. In L. Brinton and A. Bergs (eds) The History of English: Historical Outlines from Sound to Text. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 8–35. doi: 10.1515/9783110525281-002. Curzan, A. (2003). Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dekeyser, X. (1975). Number and Case Relations in 19th Century British English: A Comparative Study of Grammar and Usage. Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Nederlandsche Boekhandel. Denison, D. (1998). Syntax. In S. Romaine (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 4 (1776– 1997). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 92–329. Fennell, B. (2001). A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Fowler, H.W. (1926). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gerner, J. (2000). Singular and plural anaphors of indefinite personal pronouns in spoken British English. In J.M. Kirk (ed.) Corpora Galore. Analyses and Techniques in Describing English. Papers from the Nineteenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerised Corpora (ICAME 1998). Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 93–114. Hogg, R.M. (1992). Phonology and morphology. In R.M. Hogg (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 1 (The beginnings to 1066). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67–167. Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irvine, S. (2012). Beginnings and transitions: Old English. In L. Mugglestone (ed.) The Oxford History of English (updated edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39–74. Jespersen, O. (1914). A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part II: Syntax. 1st vol. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. Jespersen, O. (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen and Unwin. Jespersen, O. (1949). A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part II. Syntax (First volume). London: George Allen and Unwin; Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard. Jochnowitz, G. (1982). Everybody likes pizza, doesn’t he or she? American Speech 57(3): 198–203. Kolve, V.A. and Olson, G. (eds) (1989). The Canterbury Tales. New York: Norton. Laitinen, M. (2002). Singular HE and plural THEY in indefinite anaphora in written present-day English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7(2): 137–164. Laitinen, M. (2007). Agreement Patterns in English. Diachronic Corpus Studies on Common-Number Pronouns. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki LXXI). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Lass, R. (1999a). Introduction. In R. Lass (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3 (1476– 1776). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–12. Lass, R. (1999b). Phonetics and morphology. In R. Lass (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3 (1476–1776). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 56–186.

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Mikko Laitinen Lass, R. (1992). Phonetics and morphology. In N. Blake (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2 (1066–1476). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–155. Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C. and Smith, N. (2009). Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J. (2002). An Introduction to Old English Syntax. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mitchell, B. (1985). Old English Syntax, Vol I. (Concord, the Parts of Speech, and the Sentence). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, B.R. and Robinson, F.C. (2007). A Guide to Old English (seventh edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moessner, L. (2017). Standardization. In A. Bergs and L. Brinton (eds) Early Modern English, Volume 4, pp. 167–187. doi: 10.1515/9783110525069-010. Murray, L. (1795). English grammar. In G. Nelson (ed.) Landmarks in English Grammar. The Eighteenth Century (CD-ROM). London: University College London. Mustanoja, T. (1960). Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevala, M. (2004). Address in English Correspondence. Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki LXIV). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, T. (2006). An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nevalainen, T. and Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (2003). Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Nevalainen, T. and Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1994). Its beauty and the beauty of it: The standardization of the third person neuter possessive in Early Modern English. In D. Stein and I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds) Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 171–216. Nevalainen, T. and Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2006). Standardisation. In R. Hogg and D. Denison (eds) A History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–311. Newman, M. (1997). Epicene Pronouns: The Linguistics of a Prescriptive Problem. New York, London: Garland. Palander-Collin, M. (2018). Ongoing change. The diffusion of the third-person neuter possessive its. In T. Nevalainen, M. Palander-Collin and T. Säily (eds) Patterns of Change in 18th-century English. A Sociolinguistic Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 159–177. doi: 10.1075/ahs.8.10pal. Paterson, L.L. (2014). British Pronoun Use, Prescription, and Processing. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Paterson, L.L. (2020). Non-sexist language policy and the rise (and fall?) of combined pronouns in British and American Written English. Journal of English Linguistics 48(3): 258–281. Pauwels, A. (1998). Women Changing Language. London: Longman. Poutsma, H. (1914). A Grammar of Late Modern English. Part II: The Parts of Speech. Groningen: P. Noordhoff. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (1998). Social factors and pronominal change in the seventeenth century: The Civil War effect? In J. Fisiak and M. Krygier (eds) Advances in English Historical Linguistics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 361–388. Säily, T., Nevalainen, T. and Siirtola, H. (2011). Variation in noun and pronoun frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(2): 167–188. Schendl, H. (1997). Morphological variation and change in Early Modern English: My/mine, thy/thine. In R. Hickey and S. Puppel (eds) Language History and Linguistic Modelling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday. Vol. 1. Language History. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 179–191. Smith, J. (2017). Middle English: Overview. In L. Brinton and A. Bergs (eds) Middle English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 8–28. doi: 10.1515/9783110525328-002. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2006). English at the onset of the normative tradition. In L. Mugglestone (ed.) The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 240–273. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (1994). Standard and non-standard pronominal usage in English, with special reference to the eighteenth century. In D. Stein and I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds) Towards a Standard English 1600–1800. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. doi: 10.1515/9783110864281.217. Twenge, J., Campbell, K. and Gentile, B. (2012). Male and female pronoun use in U.S. books reflects women’s status, 1900–2008. Sex Roles 67: 488–493. Tyrkkö, J. (2016). Looking for rhetorical thresholds: Pronoun frequencies in political speeches. In M. Nevala, U. Lutzky, G. Mazzon and C. Suhr (eds) The Pragmatics and Stylistics of Identity Construction and Characterisation. VARIENG e-series, https://varieng​.helsinki​.fi​/series​/volumes​/17​/tyrkko/. Vartiainen, T., Säily, T. and Hakala, M. (2013). Variation in pronoun frequencies in early English letters: Genderbased or relationship-based? In J. Tyrkkö, O. Timofeeva and M. Salenius (eds) Ex Philologia Lux: Essays in Honour of Leena Kahlas-Tarkka. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XC). Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, pp. 233–255.

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A history of personal pronouns in Standard English Visser, F.Th. (1963–73). An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Wales, K. (2004). Second person pronouns in contemporary English: The end of a story or just the beginning. Franco-British Studies 33(4): 172–185. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wales, K. (1983). Thou and you in Early Modern English: Brown and Gilman re-appraised. Studia Linguistica 37(2): 107–125. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1983.tb00316.x. Walker, T. (2007). Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions, and Drama Comedy. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 158. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Further reading Alcorn, R. (2012). An Introduction to Old English (second edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fennell, B. (2001). A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Nevalainen, T. (2006). An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, J. and Horobin, S. (2002). An Introduction to Middle English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2009). An Introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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4 ON THE ALLEGED STABILITY OF PRONOUNS: THE INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT AND SOCIAL INTERVENTION Peter Siemund 1. Introduction1 It is of course a truism to say that pronouns do not change very often or particularly quickly. Being morphologically light, highly frequent closed class items in the typical case, they possess important properties that guarantee long-term stability. For example, a comparison of the Old English paradigms of personal and other pronouns with those of Modern English reveals important commonalities, although there are certainly also differences. The Indo-European m-, t-, s- paradigm of the first, second, and third singular has survived in many modern members of this phylum. It is certainly no coincidence to find me, te, and se in Spanish; mich, dich, and sich in German; and меня (menya), тебя (tebya), and себя (sebya) in Russian. Pronouns are stable to an extent that – with some goodwill on the part of the analyst – one may follow certain forms back until as early as the last Ice Age (see Section 3.3). Earlier than that, however, traces definitely disappear in time. Nevertheless, Thomason and Everett (2001) warn us that pronominal systems can become the target of contact-induced language change, especially borrowing. They argue further that it is not enough to consider pronouns to establish genealogical relationships of languages. Pronominal stability is a deceptive issue, apparently manifest in some language phyla though not necessarily in others. I here wish to argue that when pronouns and their respective paradigms change, this happens primarily as a consequence of language-external rather than language-internal factors. This concerns categorial changes, in particular. Pronouns usually resist change for the above-mentioned properties and persist without major alterations throughout the centuries, even millennia. The most important trigger inducing modifications in pronominal paradigms and their usage appears to be language contact, but one can also identify cultural and social factors as driving forces. The present study begins with an outline of the major pronominal categories and their functions using mainly English for illustration. This leads over to a synopsis of crucial changes that English went through in the pronominal domain. These sections will be flanked by cross-linguistic data and generalizations that help to gauge the position of English – both historical and modern – in the universe of languages. Following that, I discuss several case studies manifesting rather abrupt changes of pronominal paradigms and their use, ordered by language contact and sociocultural factors as explanantia. Regarding language contact, I first consider the plural pronouns they, them, and their as borrowings from Scandinavian resulting from intense contact between Old English

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-5

On the alleged stability of pronouns

and Old Norse. Second, I reconstruct the history of English complex reflexive pronouns and selfintensifiers as a consequence of contact with Celtic. And third, I discuss the pronominal form one with special reference to Colloquial Singapore English where certain specific uses can be reconstructed as influence from Sinitic languages. In relation to sociocultural factors, the present discussion includes the loss of the second person singular forms in Early Modern English, the emergence of epicene they, and the use of the gendered pronouns he and she for inanimate referents in relation to the expression of identity and solidarity. In the sociocultural domain, one can see issues of politeness, cultural demands for gender neutrality, as well as personal emotions and the expression of affection at play. Such external influences on language, originating both in language contact and sociocultural demands, interfere with the structuralist dictum of language as a closed system ‘un système où tout se tient’ (attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure; Koerner 1997), roughly translatable as ‘a coherent system of interrelated elements’.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics This section introduces the known pronominal categories and traces their development through the recent history considering English as a case study. Furthermore, the section offers a cross-linguistic comparison that complements the perspective on English.

2.1  The system of pronouns In their most typical use, pronouns are deictic elements for direct reference to humans, animals, and entities of the inanimate world – mediated through mental concepts, of course. They are reference shifters and, as such, lack a specific referential meaning. This deictic use is best illustrated by the use of first and second person singular I and YOU in face-to-face conversation where they identify speaker and hearer, respectively. Each turn produces a shift in reference. Furthermore, pronouns have anaphoric (cataphoric) uses in which they refer back (forward) to nouns and nouns phrases in the preceding (subsequent) discourse (the lioness … she; When he arrived, Paul …). Although pronouns require context for their interpretation and are referentially underspecified, they vastly increase the functionality and economy of language. Without pronouns, all reference tracking would need to proceed on the basis of full noun phrases aka names – a rather cumbersome strategy. While personal pronouns furnish the most obvious illustration of the category, there are many other types of pronouns. I will briefly discuss demonstrative, possessive, reflexive, reciprocal, indefinite, relative, and interrogative pronouns. Demonstrative pronouns can be described as locative and, by metaphorical extension, temporal pointers to real-world entities. In English, the category comprises the elements this and that as well as these and those. They occur as nominal premodifiers (this book, this year), but also as independent pronominal forms (I did not think about that). The demonstrative that also occurs as subordinator (The fact that…), which is related to the demonstrative historically (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 185–189). The possessive pronouns, similarly, have pre-modifying uses (my car, your pencil), but also independent nominal uses for which the forms mine, yours, etc. are employed (This book is mine, that is yours). Reflexive pronouns, in their most typical use, co-index subject and object position of transitive predicates in the minimal clausal domain (Mary admires herself) in contrast to simple personal pronouns that enforce a referentially disjoint interpretation (Mary admires her, i.e., someone else). Morphologically, these are complex expressions consisting of a pronominal form to which self/selves is appended. English self-forms can further be used as post-nominal intensifiers (the professor himself), adverbial intensifiers (I did it myself), and there are also several lexicalized reflexive verbs (pride, absent, avail, demean, ingratiate, perjure) or quasireflexive verbs (behave, feel, adjust, prepare; Quirk et al. 1985: 357–358; Siemund 2014). Reciprocal pronouns (each other, one another) express reflexive cross-reference (Paul and Mary hugged one another, i.e., ‘Paul hugged Mary and Mary hugged Paul’) or consecutive reference (The children 45

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infected one another, i.e., ‘one after the other’). The indefinite forms in English comprise various compound expressions (everyone, someone, anyone, no one) that differ in their semantic specification (universal, assertive, nonassertive, negative; Quirk et al. 1985: 377). Relative and interrogative pronouns overlap in their forms in English (Who ate the cookie?, The girl who ate the cookie…). Strictly speaking, these categories contain several non-pronominal members that need to be analyzed as adverbs of time, place, and manner (how, when, where, why; Siemund 2018). Besides substituting full nominal expressions, pronouns typically encode various additional grammatical distinctions, perhaps for ease of reference tracking. As for English, we find formal differentiations according to person (I/you/he-she-it, etc.), number (I/we, he-she-it/they, etc.), gender (he/she/it), and case (I/me, who/whom, etc.). The paradigms are highly defective there being many cases of syncretism, as, for example, the form you in the second person singular and plural, the pronoun it being used in all structural case positions, and the form her encoding possession as well as object case. Gender distinctions exist only in the third person singular, as illustrated above. English pronouns do not encode other cross-linguistically attested distinctions, such as politeness or respect (German, Japanese; Helmbrecht 2013), duals, trials, or paucals as more specific instantiations of the category of number (dual pronouns in Tahitian), or the distinction between inclusive and exclusive first person plural forms that either include or exclude the addressee (Chinese; Cysouw 2013).

2.2  Changes in the history of English Although pronouns count among the slowly changing items, the reconstructed phonological form of pronouns in Old English typically differs from today’s pronunciation. For example, the Old English first person singular pronoun ic, pronounced as /itʃ/, changed to /ai/ in Modern English, graphically represented by capital . Similarly, the Old English third person singular masculine pronoun hē, originally articulated as /he:/, came to be pronounced as /hi:/ in Modern English (orthographically realized as ). These changes can plausibly be reconstructed in terms of regular sound change within the Great Vowel Shift (lengthening, raising, diphthongization). The Old English first person plural dative pronoun ūs/us (long/short) changed according to a different pattern, and is now realized as /ʌs/ or /əs/. In this case, apparently, the unstressed and short-vocalic uses made their way into Modern English. Such cases are outside the Great Vowel Shift, although diphthongized dialectal variants are indeed attested (ous, OED 2021, entry on us).2 I will not follow up these phonological developments in detail here, but rather focus on the categorial changes. In other words, the question will be where and to what extent the pronominal paradigms have changed. Despite considerable stability, a comparison of the pronominal paradigms of Old with those of Modern English indicates important losses. Most conspicuous is the disappearance of the dual forms that, however, had become marginalized already during Old English times. There used to be speaker and hearer based dual forms, namely wit ‘we two’ and git ‘you two’ with different case forms for nominative, genitive, as well as syncretic forms for dative and accusative (Campbell 1983: ch. XV, Baugh and Cable 2002: 59). Syncretism of dative and accusative forms was extant in the Old English pronominal paradigms. The two cases were only distinguished in the third person, though in all genders (him/hine, hiere/hīe, him/hit; Campbell 1983: 289). The dative forms survived in the masculine and feminine gender, while it was the accusative form in the neuter gender. In addition, the formal differentiation between the feminine pronoun in the genitive (possessive) and accusative (object case) is lost, i.e., hiere and hīe come to be replaced by Modern English her. Unlike in Modern English, the second person singular was distinct from the plural (ðū/gē, ðīn/ēower, ðē/ēow) in Old and Middle English. Here, only the plural exponent has survived (you). We will examine the loss of the singular forms in detail in Section 3.2. Today’s paradigm of demonstrative pronouns (this/that, these/those), encoding number (sg., pl.) and distance (proximal, distal), was forged out of the paradigm of the definite articles in Old English (also used as demonstratives, or vice versa) and the 46

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series of demonstratives: þes (nom. masc. sg.), þēos (nom. fem. sg.), þis (nom. neut. sg.), þās (nom. pl.) (Campbell 1983: 290–291). Besides the above losses or simplifications, there are also various cases of restructuring. For instance, the Old English third person singular feminine pronoun hēo is remarkably different from the modern equivalent she. This difference is difficult to reconstruct in terms of sound change. The modern form she more likely originates in the feminine demonstrative or definite article sēo that apparently replaced hēo. As a speaker of German, I find the latter reconstruction intuitively plausible, since the gender-distinct article forms der (masc.), die (fem.), and das (neut.) of Modern German also serve as demonstratives, as definite articles, and as independent pronouns. The Old English neuter possessive form his has been replaced by its in Modern English, i.e., the original nominative or accusative form to which a possessive -s was appended (avoidance of neuter his; Baugh and Cable 2002: 243–244). Most remarkably, the Old English third person plural pronouns hīe, hiera, him, and hīe came to be replaced by the Scandinavian forms they, their, and them during the later period of Old English. This will be reconstructed as contact-induced change in Section 3.1. In view of the Modern Icelandic forms þeir, þeirra, and þeim, such a reconstruction is entirely plausible. The Modern English complex reflexives did not exist in Old English. Pronominal forms followed by self/selves coalesced and stabilized only in Middle English. The primary strategy in Old English times to express reflexive relations consisted in the use of simple personal pronouns (ða behydde Adam hine, ond his wif eac swa dyde ‘… Adam hid himself …’; Ælfric Gen. 3.8, Crawford 1922). Another remarkable change is the use of interrogative pronouns as relative pronouns, emerging in Middle English (Baugh and Cable 2002: 244–245). Earlier, relative clauses used to be attached to their respective head noun by the relative particle ðe or the demonstrative pronoun ðæt. The latter use has been continued in Modern English that. The pronominal form one in its impersonal use is first attested in the late Middle Ages (e.g., Whenne on hath done a synne, Loke he lye not longe there-ynne [1450]; OED 2021, entry on one 17.a). It is evidently based on the numeral for singular units that also gave rise to the indefinite article.

2.3  Cross-linguistic patterns and regularities What has been said about English in the preceding sections represents a specific selection of the cross-linguistically attested inventory of strategies and categorial distinctions in the pronominal domain. This section provides a brief assessment of the situation in English against the known crosslinguistic facts. To begin with, the occurrence of fused person-number forms involving different stems, as in English, represents the majority pattern in the world’s languages (Daniel 2013). Less widely attested strategies include the use of person-number affixes or different person-number stems in combination with plural affixes. English you can be analyzed as a number-indifferent stem, as the same form is used in singular and plural. The Konstanz Universals Archive (typo​.uni​-konstanz​​.de) considers this situation highly exceptional (rarissimum 70; typo.​​uni​-k​​onsta​​nz​.de​​/rara​​/rari​​taete​​nkabi​​ne​tt/​​10070​/), especially since English second person pronouns do not inflect for case either. Moreover, the formal relatedness of third person pronouns and demonstratives is common crosslinguistically (Bhat 2013). We have seen above that especially the OE third person pronouns could be used as pronouns, demonstratives, and definite articles. Approximately half of the languages in Bhat’s (2013) sample manifest such a relationship, albeit of different types. Similarly, if pronouns encode gender distinctions, this typically happens in the third person singular and the relevant distinctions are mostly based on (presumed) sex. As early as 1963, Joseph Greenberg formulated two tentative universals that were later corroborated by bigger language samples. These are Universal 44 ‘If a language has gender distinctions in the first person, it always has gender distinctions in the second or third person, or in both’ and Universal 45 ‘If there are any 47

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gender distinctions in the plural of the pronoun, there are some gender distinctions in the singular also’ (Greenberg 1963: 76, Siewierska 2013). Gender distinctions in English pronouns follow the majority pattern in this respect, but it also needs to be noted that about two-thirds of the languages in Siewierska’s (2013) sample do not encode gender in independent third person pronouns. The encoding of pronominal gender as such does not follow the mainstream. Due to the syncretic forms in the second person that are used in both singular and plural (you), English lacks the distinction between intimate and polite otherwise common among European languages. For example, the French second person pronouns tu (sg.) and vous (pl.) encode such a politeness distinction in addition to being used for singular and plural reference. The polite form vous is thus number-indifferent. In German, the third person plural pronoun Sie is used for polite forms of address to both individuals and groups of people. The second person singular pronoun du, in contrast, expresses an intimate relationship between speaker and addressee. Having said that, Modern English – contrasting with earlier forms of English – belongs to the majority of languages that does not encode politeness distinctions in independent pronouns (Helmbrecht 2013). English, furthermore, is among the 120 languages in Cysouw’s (2013) sample that does not distinguish between inclusive (‘we, I, and you’) and exclusive pronouns (‘I and some others, but not you’). This is clearly the majority. A total of 63 languages in this sample of 200 languages encode this contrast, there being no European language amongst them. Cross-linguistically, indefinite pronouns show a tendency to be based on interrogative pronouns (or vice versa), especially in Asian languages (Haspelmath 2013). English possesses distinct indefinite pronouns (everyone, someone, anyone, no one), except perhaps for the compound forms whoever, whatever, and the like. On this parameter, English does not align with the cross-linguistic majority pattern. The English complex self-forms, as argued above, are a relatively recent outcome of the development of English. Their two main uses as reflexives and intensifiers are formally distinguished in many other languages (e.g., German reflexive sich and intensive selbst). Most European languages follow the German pattern, rendering English a marginal member of Standard Average European in this respect (Haspelmath 2001). The world’s languages represent the two strategies (i.e., identical marking versus differentiation) in roughly equal proportions, but there are certain areal patterns with many Asian languages opting for identical encoding (König and Siemund 2013).3 Nichols and Peterson (2013a, 2013b) identify enticing regularities regarding the phonological forms of first and second person pronouns. For example, the Latin m-/t-pattern, also found in other Indo-European languages including Old English, is attested all across Eurasia, suggesting some ancient common origin of the different language families. First person singular pronouns beginning in m- are even more widely attested, including Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Similarly, there is a cross-linguistically salient n-/m-pattern common in North and South America, indicating genealogical relatedness across otherwise distinct language families. Evidently, the stability of pronominal systems offers an important window back in time.4

3.  Current contributions and research Although pronouns as closed class items can be expected to resist language change, the above discussion of English nevertheless revealed important differences between the pronominal systems of Old and Modern English. Things have changed. While most of these can be reconstructed as languageinternal changes, the more profound and partially abrupt changes can be linked to language contact and sociocultural factors.

3.1  Language contact It would be a fallacy to use the relative stability and social diffusion of today’s heavily standardized written languages as a yardstick in the interpretation of earlier language stages. The period of Old 48

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English was one of primarily oral language use with extensive dialectal differences across England. Although West Saxon was recognized as a written standard, its social impact in the wider population can be expected to have been low. After all, the majority of people were illiterate. Accordingly, the scholarly discussion of Old English relates to a rather small segment of society, i.e., basically the literate elite. Otherwise, the profound changes to English during the Middle English period, when French was the official and written language, become difficult to explain (see Vennemann 2002). During this period, English was primarily used as an oral language.

3.1.1  Pronoun borrowing in Old English Language and dialect contact can be taken as a defining characteristic of Old English. The early contact with Celtic by the newly arriving Germanic invaders apparently produced little influence from Celtic apart from place names (London, Thames, etc.; Baugh and Cable 2002: 75–77). However, this contact situation may have been responsible for far-reaching, more covert structural influence (see Section 3.1.2). The Scandinavian invasion in the eighth and ninth centuries left more obvious marks on the English language. Besides numerous lexical borrowings (sky, skin, skill, etc.; Baugh and Cable 2002: 97), this contact situation can be held responsible for the Old Norse forms in the English paradigm of personal pronouns (they, them, their). According to Thomason (2001: 66), intense social contact is necessary to effect such structural borrowing, which, in addition, must have stabilized extremely quickly. This appears plausible once one assumes that the initial brutal raids by Scandinavian warriors, primarily targeting the affluent monasteries on the East coast (e.g., Lindisfarne), were followed by periods of more peaceful occupation, settlement, and assimilation. Language contact was additionally facilitated by the similarity of the languages involved. In those days, Old Norse will not have been too different from Old English, perhaps as different as Dutch, Danish, and German today. Accordingly, mutual intelligibility will have been high accompanied by extensive bilingualism and code-switching. Moreover, given the common Germanic ancestry, the social and cultural barriers in these contact communities will have been low, i.e., there will have been close interaction between the indigenous and settler groups. As is well known, Scandinavian-English language contact started in the Northeast of England from where the relevant changes percolated to the southern dialects. Even though it remains impossible to explain why exactly the third person plural pronouns were borrowed into Old English, language contact can be considered a plausible explanans for this change in the pronominal paradigm. The contact-induced change just sketched is an outcome of pronoun borrowing. Comparable cases of pronoun borrowing are difficult to find in Indo-European languages, which has helped to cement the idea that pronominal systems are stable and resist change. Outside this phylum, and especially in relation to certain Asian languages, the situation appears different. Thomason and Everett (2001) discuss several cases of apparent pronoun borrowing, arguing that it is especially languages that possess more open pronominal systems where such cases of borrowing have been confirmed (Southeast Asian languages; Thomason and Everett 2001: 307; see also Thomason 2001: 83–84).

3.1.2 Convergence The case of complex reflexives and self-intensifiers, as introduced in Section 2.2, is considerably more difficult to account for in terms of language contact. The situation in Old English was such that reflexive relations were expressed by simple personal pronouns (hine he bewerað mid wæpnum ‘he defended himself with weapons’; Ælfric, Gr. 96.11–12, Zupitza 1966) and that the intensifier self could be added as an apposition to a noun phrase (se cyning sylfa ‘the king himself’; Siemund 2000: 27). Old English lacked a dedicated reflexive marker and even the intimate contact with Old Norse did not reestablish such a grammatical marker. However, already in Old English, the self-intensifier could be optionally appended to referentially ambiguous object pronouns in a reflexive interpreta49

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tion (Hannibal ... hine selfne mid atre acwealde ‘Hannibal killed himself with poison’; King Alfred’s Orosius 4 11.110.2, Bately 1980). Personal pronouns and appended self-intensifiers were still separable at this stage (König and Siemund 2001). During the Middle English period, the juxtapositions of pronoun and right-adjacent self-form fused in both reflexive and intensifying uses (him + self → himself).5 A new paradigm of reflexive pronouns and self-intensifiers emerged. Although it is possible to discard these developments as cases of language-internal grammaticalization, the scholarly literature contains several attempts at identifying a Celtic template of these newly emerging self-forms. On that account, English complex selfforms come to be analyzed as loan translations of a similar Celtic expression, carried into English by substratal Celtic speakers, and fully grammaticalizing in Middle English. Such a view is adopted by Vezzosi (2005), Lange (2010), as well as Filppula and Klemola (2014). The structural similarities are indeed compelling. For example, the paradigm of reflexives and intensifiers of Modern Irish basically looks identical to that of Modern English. The relevant compound expressions consist of a pronoun appended by féin ‘self’: mé féin ‘myself’, tú féin ‘yourself’, é/í féin ‘him-/herself’, etc. (Irslinger 2014: 161). Moreover, similar paradigms can be found in Modern Welsh and other Insular Celtic languages. Much as in English, diachronic evidence allows one to pursue the history of these expressions as far back as the eighth and ninth centuries (Old Irish, Old Welsh). However, closer scrutiny of these early documents reveals that the patterns found in Old Irish and Old Welsh were not so different from those attested for Old English. The evidence available makes it difficult to paint a clear picture of Celtic substrate influence on English. Rather, the languages then present on the British Isles appear to have been influencing one another and moving in the same direction concurrently. As Irslinger (2014: 48) summarizes ‘[t]he diachronic developments have thus led to the emergence of two distinct convergence areas, which both contain Insular Celtic and West Germanic languages. All languages on the Isles use complex intensifiers as reflexives, while the languages on the Continent possess the intensifier-reflexive differentiation’. On that parameter, English along with the Celtic languages differs from Standard Average European (Haspelmath 2001: 1501, Lange 2010: 261).

3.1.3  Semantic extension As a third example illustrating contact-induced changes in pronominal paradigms, I would now like to extend the discussion to Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). This is a non-standard variety of English characterized by strong interference from the locally present Sinitic languages, especially Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew, but also the indigenous Malay language and the long-time local lingua franca Bazar Malay (Siemund 2023). English was transplanted to Singapore when the island became part of the British Empire in 1819. The Sinitic languages arrived there through migrants from primarily Southern China. Besides numerous bona fide structural influences on English from the above contact languages (e.g., already as an aspectual marker), anaphoric one stands out as one of the lesser studied phenomena. While anaphoric one is perfectly grammatical in the standard varieties following an adjective or a determiner (Which one? – The blue one), Colloquial Singapore English attests one in several additional uses that would be considered ungrammatical from a normative perspective. These include the use of one as (i) a nominalizer or relative marker (The boy pinch my sister one very naughty ‘The boy who pinches my sister is very naughty’; Alsagoff and Lick 1998: 129), and (ii) as an emphatic marker (You always late one! ‘You are always late’; Wee and Ansaldo 2004: 70). A comparison with the Chinese vernaculars in the area reveals that such instances of English one are modelled on similar uses of the Chinese particle de 的. Bao (2009: 344), in a quantitative comparison of two corpora of British and Singapore English, finds the above uses restricted to Colloquial Singapore English. Here, apparently, complete syntactic frames were copied from Chinese into English with anaphoric one being syntactically and semantically extended to these new contexts. 50

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3.1.4  Summary Taken together, the three case studies indicate that pronominal systems can change due to language contact, at times rather abruptly. The above observations underline Thomason and Everett’s (2001) warning that pronouns on their own, in spite of their alleged stability, are not sufficient proof of genealogical relatedness. As they put it: ‘there are no shortcuts to the establishment of genetic relationship’ (Thomason and Everett 2001: 313).

3.2  Sociocultural factors The discussion so far essentially adopted a structuralist perspective on language with pronominal paradigms regarded as systems offering alternative choices. However, this systemic view is by no means the only or necessarily the best approach to the analysis of language, including language change. Following Bourdieu (1991), we can alternatively view language as symbolic capital that speakers use and adapt to negotiate and enhance their position in the social marketplace. Such a perspective is useful to understand the influence of sociocultural forces on pronominal systems. Language users become intentionally acting agents who more or less deliberately effectuate language change. The systemic view, in contrast, considers language users as more involuntary agents of language change in which issues of economy, frequency, and naturalness serve as explanantia. Evidently, deliberate change presupposes conscious recognition of the items to be changed. Pronouns, as I will argue here, possess sufficient salience to allow such conscious recognition. Steering clear of the controversial question of whether deliberate language change is desirable or justifiable, I will here only be concerned with the driving forces behind any such changes. Their social value and assessment represent different issues that are tied to fundamental philosophical and also ideological debates. For example, someone may believe in the (rather deterministic) influence of language on thinking and social structure (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), while others may deny any such direct relationship and regard especially social structure as independent of language, or vice versa. Similarly, someone may strongly believe in the symbolic power of language and wish to exploit it for issues of social justice, whereas others may consider language a natural system that had better be left alone and deserves to be preserved. This touches upon the thorny area of politics, beliefs, dogmas, and norms, which are outside the present discussion. Be that as it may, it appears evident that language can be used to mask or unmask biological and social differences.

3.2.1  Power and solidarity As pointed out in Section 2.2, English lost the morphological distinction between second person singular and plural pronouns. Today’s number and case neutral form you replaced the earlier pronouns ðū/gē, ðīn/ēower, and ðē/ēow. Although especially North American colloquial speech is in the process of renovating the second person plural by univerbating you all (y’all) and the use of you guys indiscriminately of the sex of the addressees, these forms have not yet found their way into standard language. Baugh and Cable (2002: 242) reconstruct the loss of the second person singular pronouns as the result of excessive courtesy. Since the second person plural pronouns were also used as polite forms of address especially to superiors, ‘the usage spread as a general concession to courtesy until ye, your, and you became the usual pronoun of direct address irrespective of rank or intimacy’. One can interpret this as an instance of quasi-deliberate language change, as language users apparently felt a desire to communicate hitherto unknown levels of politeness. The question, of course, remains where that sudden desire for courtesy and politeness originates (see Silverstein 1979: 230–231). Brown and Gilman (1960: 259) inform us that in Medieval Europe, the T/V-distinction, i.e., the morphological opposition between second person singular and plural (French tu/vous), first and foremost signaled social class membership. The V-forms were used in the nobility, while the 51

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T-forms were common amongst ordinary people. Encounters between people from the two classes proscribed the use of the V-forms in the upward direction and that of the T-forms in the downward direction. In the course of the centuries, this primarily power-based system changed into one resting on solidarity as the principal semantic distinction determining pronoun usage. People on equal terms, irrespective of their social class membership, use the T-forms, whereas the V-forms came to be used to signal non-solidary relationships. For example, when I go the gym T-forms are used indiscriminately throughout even though I would address the very same people with V-forms in the university context. To understand the loss of English second person singular forms, one needs to know that Medieval England was a diglossic and partially bilingual society (Fishman 1967). After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the nobility spoke and wrote in French, while ordinary people continued to use English albeit only as a spoken language. There were strong political ties between England and France. At the administrative level, at least, they practically formed one country. After these political ties collapsed, especially following the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), the French-speaking nobility in England started to disconnect from France and shift to English as their main and subsequently first language (see Baugh and Cable 2002: 141–142). English developed into a marker of national independence of the newly developing country and became a written language again after several centuries of oral use. In the course of these processes, apparently, what happened was that the French nobility continued the use of the second person plural forms of address, but the French forms were relexified (i.e., replaced) by the corresponding English pronouns. Later on, ordinary people and, in particular, the newly arising middle class must have copied this new pronominal usage from their superiors with whom they increasingly began to identify and subsequently disseminated it through society. The main driving force behind this dissemination can be assumed to have been prestige and perhaps also national identity formation. In addition, one needs to factor in that the social elite shifting from French to English was in control of the written language and that after Caxton’s introduction of mechanical printing in 1476, written documents began to be produced and circulated at an unprecedented pace. It is likely that the newly arising standard language was based on the spoken register of the formerly French-speaking social elite. On that account, the loss of the English second person singular forms essentially comes to be interpreted as a learner error, an instance of fossilization as it were, that came to be adopted by the wider speech community.

3.2.2  Grammatical gender Another area where the influence of sociocultural factors on pronouns becomes visible is gender, here primarily understood as the grammatical, but partially also the sociocultural construct. In English, the pronouns of the third person are the only grammatical exponents encoding gender differences, with masculine he being used for male (human/animate) referents, feminine she for female (human/ animate) referents, and neuter it for all other entities (Siemund 2008). Accordingly, sociocultural concern regarding gender equality has focused on pronoun usage, besides various lexical issues such as the use of chairperson instead of chairman. Moreover, pronouns possess enough communicative salience to attract sociocultural scrutiny and attention. Languages like German, which have preserved more fully the older Indo-European tripartite gender system and display gender exponents on a greater range of word classes (determiners and adjectives, besides pronouns), in principle offer more targets for sociocultural intervention. However, while it is possible to proscribe the use of the feminine pronoun sie ‘she’ for neuter nouns describing female human referents, as, e.g., das/ein schönes Mädchen ‘the/a beautiful girl’), the article and concomitant adjectival inflection cannot simply be exchanged for the corresponding feminine gender exponents. German nominal derivational suffixes are heads and determine the gender of the noun. Accordingly, any such changes would induce massive imbalances in the grammatical system, perceived as ungrammaticality. There arises friction 52

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between current sociocultural demands and historically grown grammatical structure, much as in urban planning where modern needs put stress on historically grown structures. As for English, an issue of some sociocultural concern has been generic he, i.e., the use of the masculine pronoun for groups of referents comprising both males and females: Every student is required to submit his term paper by the end of September. The pronoun his in the preceding sentence used to refer to both male and female students, but sociocultural intervention has practically restricted its reference to males. Older and younger speakers will have very diverging intuitions on this. This represents a case of semantic narrowing. The Oxford English Dictionary documents examples of generic he dating back to Early Modern English (e.g., If a person had never seen but one thing…he could not be sensible or conscious he did see it [1694]; OED 2021, entry on he 2.b), but generic he was in competition with singular they in such contexts (see below). Prescriptive grammarians proscribed generic he in the eighteenth century (Curzan 2014: 117–120), which is the main bone of contention in current sociocultural discussions. In Old English, much as in Modern German, some common generic nouns (e.g., láreów ‘teacher’; Modern German Lehrer) were of masculine gender and, hence, triggered the masculine pronoun for anaphoric reference. It is, of course, another issue to what extent there were female representatives in the groups of people described by such nouns. A by now widely accepted proscribed alternative is epicene they, meaning the use of the (Old Norse) plural pronoun with singular reference: Every student is required to submit their term paper by the end of September. This works well in contexts of distributed reference, but many speakers (still) find epicene they unacceptable with identifiable referents whose gender or sex is apparent: Lara is a famous singer. They identify as diverse. However, sociocultural intervention is likely to succeed in this case of semantic extension. Interestingly enough, idioms appear to resist change. The wellknown idiom he who laughs last laughs longest returns exactly one hit with epicene they on Google Search (they who laugh last laughs longest; accessed 31 January 2022). Sociocultural demands can also induce bona fide pronoun borrowings, as when the Finnish gender-neutral pronoun hän is borrowed into Swedish as hen, thus complementing masculine han and feminine hon. There remain two noteworthy points. On the one hand, we need to understand that the above pieces of sociocultural intervention continue active proscriptive processes of standardization initiated at least as early as Early Modern English, perhaps earlier. The underlying principles, such as appeal to norms, harmony, consistency, regularity, and equality, have not changed in spite of shifting ideologies. On the other hand, sociocultural intervention frequently draws on, refunctionalizes, and generalizes existing linguistic options. For example, the use of third person plural pronouns with singular referents has a long history, dating back at least to Early Modern English (e.g., Euery one visered himselfe, so that they were vnknowen [1548]; OED 2021, entry on they 2.a). Also, after some time of using it as possessive pronoun (The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had it head bit off by it young; King Lear 1.4.215), possessive ‘s was appended to it thus generalizing the use of the possessive marker (Baugh and Cable 2002: 243–244). The history of possessive its appears especially interesting, as the dynamics of natural language change and the forces of standardization are difficult to disentangle.

3.2.3  Identity and affection Although the use of gendered pronouns in standard English apparently follows transparent rules, it is possible to transgress them for certain effects. For example, it is well known that the feminine pronoun may be used for ships and perhaps other vehicles. Babies can be referred to by he, she, and it. The same holds for pets and domestic animals, and partially for other animals. Such transgressions can mean that speakers do not know the sex of a referent or wish to remain silent about it. They can also be used to express identity and affection. In view of the current pressure from the standard varie53

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ties, such stylistic options are not very likely to induce language change. Nevertheless, they produce options that could lead to a change in pronominal usage given appropriate circumstances. Relatively little is known about the emotive use of gendered pronouns for inanimate entities and animals. The reasons appear largely methodological. The relevant specimens of language are relatively rare and difficult to identify. Moreover, speakers may be aware of their pronoun usage and avoid such non-standard uses when interviewed. For example, Siemund (2008: 60–61) reports a mere handful of examples from the spoken dialectal material of the British National Corpus: Where’s the pen? […] Oh there he is, in my pocket, it’s in my pocket. The study by Mathiot (1979) contains 160 specimens of gendered pronouns used for inanimates and animals, collected in spontaneous American English. It documents such uses for animals of unknown sex, trees and plants, various human artifacts (tools and instruments, house and garden, vehicles), environmental objects and weather events, as well as items of food and drink (see Siemund 2008: 101–116 for discussion). Svartengren (1927) collected numerous examples from fictional texts where they are usually considered personifications. MacKay and Konichi (1980) examined a large body of children’s literature for specimens of he and she with reference to non-human referents. Besides personification, they identify the specificity of the referents as well as their centrality in the discourse as parameters influencing pronoun use (see Siemund 2008: 164–170 for discussion). Siemund (2008: 139–144) generally argues for the importance of individuation determining gendered pronoun use in English, but also several other Germanic languages. In the course from Old to Modern English, grammatical gender has changed from a lexico-semantic category to a referential one governed by the properties of the referents. We probably find more variation in the use of gendered pronouns today than during Old English times, as the properties of referents are, at least to a certain extent, subject to the evaluations of the speakers. Grammatical gender rules are more fixed. However, even in Old English there was already variation in the use of pronouns, especially when the properties of the referent are in conflict with the lexical gender of the corresponding noun: Ða ða þæt mæden gehirde þæt hire wæs alyfed fram hire fæder þæt heo ær hyre silf gedon wolde, ða cwæð heo to Apollonio ‘When the girl heard that her father allowed her to do as she pleased, she said to Apollonius’ (Apollonius of Tyre XVI, Goolden 1958). In this example, the noun mæden ‘girl’ is of neuter gender, as indicated by the preceding determiner þæt. However, all ensuing anaphoric pronominal references select forms of the third person feminine pronoun (hire ‘her’, hyre silf ‘herself’, heo ‘she’). The transition period from Old to Modern English was one of great instability in the use of gender exponents. The historical documents contain many instances of inconsistent uses where gender exponents on determiners and adjectives do not reflect any longer the lexical gender of the corresponding controller noun. There can be little doubt that changes begin to become visible on the pronominal gender exponents first before they spread to other targets (Siemund and Dolberg 2011). Some regions developed their own specific rules of gender assignment, as the notorious mass/count system found in the traditional dialects of the English West Country. The exodus into the New World transplanted such historical dialectal gender systems to North America and Australia (Siemund 2008). For example, the use of the feminine pronoun for inanimates is not at all uncommon in colloquial Australian English or Newfoundland English.

3.2.4  Summary The dividing line between intentional and unintentional language change remains difficult to draw. Language-internal change keeps producing linguistic variants, some of which develop into objects of sociocultural inspection and modification. Pronouns represent an obvious target. The alleged beauty, harmony, and consistency of the classical languages used to be the gold standard for standardization and proscriptive efforts in the pre-modern era. In the contemporary world, especially cognitive 54

On the alleged stability of pronouns

linguistics argues for the influence of symbolic structures on the way we think and behave. It thus offers a more scientific basis for all matters of proscription. Symbolic systematicity produces social justice. It remains to be seen whether this proposition withstands the test of time.

4.  Future directions The present contribution departed from the widely accepted stability of pronominal paradigms arguing that these may be more vulnerable to change than usually assumed. Besides language-internal change, I identified language contact and sociocultural intervention as important driving forces. As so often, the discussion primarily drew on English data as this language remains perhaps the best described language in the world for which relatively extensive historical and synchronic documentation is available. Moreover, the English language has engaged in a large number of language contact situations and has been subject to extensive sociocultural scrutiny. Evidently, the claims made here need to be tested against a wider array of languages, but doing so necessitates a traditional philological approach that is both labor and time intensive. There are no large corpora or big data that could be consulted. Instead, one needs to peruse grammatical descriptions of as many languages as possible and consult the relevant experts. Outcomes of language contact and social intervention are not likely to be marked as such in general grammatical descriptions. The interested researcher needs good intuitions to identify plausible specimens that could then be scrutinized with experts of the relevant languages. Thomason and Everett (2001) point to a number of important examples of pronominal change resulting from language contact, but any further claims need to be based on more systematic language samples.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Manfred Krug, Lijun Li, Anna Mauranan, Laura Paterson, Sarah Thomason, Theo Vennemann, Letizia Vezzosi, and Beáta Wagner-Nagy for their support while I was working on the present article. I would further like to acknowledge the valuable feedback of an anonymous reviewer. 2 Krug (2003, 2017) offers a very informative summary and recalibration of the Great Vowel Shift. There, the systematic changes in the English vowel system from Middle to Early Modern English are linked to the sonority hierarchy and frequency effects. 3 There is a cross-linguistic tendency to grammaticalize reflexive pronouns from body part nouns (body, heart, soul, etc.). However, an etymological relationship of self with a body-part noun is controversial (Siemund 2000: 22–24). 4 For a precise definition of the consonantal values, the interested reader is referred to Nichols and Peterson (2013a, 2013b). 5 It is probably no coincidence that the object forms of the pronouns came to be fused in the newly emerging self-forms, as these served as stressed forms that could practically be used in all syntactic positions (Hudson 1995; Wales 1996: 19).

References Ælfric, Gen. Samuel J. Crawford (1922). The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Aelfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and His Preface to Genesis. London: Milford. Ælfric, Gr. Julius Zupitza (1966). Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Hildesheim: Weidmann. Alsagoff, L. and Lick, H.C. (1998). The relative clause in Colloquial Singapore English. World Englishes 17(2): 127–138. Apollonius of Tyre. Peter Goolden (1958). The Old English Apollonius of Tyre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bao, Z. (2009). One in Singapore English. Studies in Language 33(2): 338–365. Baugh, A. and Cable, Th. (2002). A History of the English Language. London: Routledge. Bhat, D.N.S. (2013). Third person pronouns and demonstratives. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/43 (accessed 19 August 2021).

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Peter Siemund Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press. Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T.A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 253–276. Campbell, A. (1983). Old English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English. Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cysouw, M. (2013). Inclusive/exclusive distinction in independent pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/39 (accessed 19 August 2021). Daniel, M. (2013). Plurality in independent personal pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/35 (accessed 19 August 2021). Filppula, M. and Klemola, J. (2014). Celtic influences in English: A re-evaluation. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 115(1): 33–53. Fishman, J. (1967). Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23(2): 29–38. Greenberg, J. (1963). Some universals of grammar, with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 58–90. Haspelmath, M. (2001). The European linguistic area: Standard Average European. In M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher and W. Raible (eds) Language Typology and Language Universals (Handbücher zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft vol. 20.2). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1492–1510. Haspelmath, M. (2013). Indefinite pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​ /chapter​/46 (accessed 19 August 2021). Helmbrecht, J. (2013). Politeness distinctions in pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/45 (accessed 19 August 2021). Hopper, P. and Closs Traugott, E. (2003). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hudson, R. (1995). Does English really have case? Journal of Linguistics 31(2): 375–392. Irslinger, B. (2014). Intensifiers and reflexives in SAE, Insular Celtic and English. Indogermanische Forschungen 119(1): 159–206. King Alfred’s Orosius. J. Bately (ed.) (1980). The Old English Orosius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koerner, E. (1997). Notes on the history of the concept of language as a system ’Où tout se tient’. Linguistica Atlantica 19: 1–20. Available at https://journals​.lib​.unb​.ca​/index​.php​/la​/article​/view​/22501 (accessed 30 April 2021). König, E. and Siemund, P. (2013). Intensifiers and reflexive pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/47 (accessed 19 August 2021). Krug, M. (2003). (Great) vowel shifts present and past: Meeting ground for structural and natural phonologists. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 9: Iss. 2, Article 10. Available at: https:// repository​.upenn​.edu​/pwpl​/vol9​/iss2​/10. Krug, M. (2017). The great vowel shift. In A. Bergs and L. Brinton (eds) The History of English (Vol.4): Early Modern English. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 241–266. Lange, C. (2010). Reflexivity and intensification in Irish English and other new Englishes. In H. Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Englishes IV. The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages. Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on the ‘Celtic Englishes’ Held at the University of Potsdam in Golm (Germany) from 22–26 September 2004. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, pp. 259–282. MacKay, D. and Konishi, T. (1980). Personification and the pronoun problem. Women’s Studies International Quarterly 3: 149–163. Mathiot, M. (assisted by M. Roberts) (1979). Sex roles as revealed through referential gender in American English. In M. Mathiot (ed.) Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf Revisited. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 1–47. Nichols, J. and Peterson, D. (2013a). M-T pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/136 (accessed 19 August 2021). Nichols, J. and Peterson, D. (2013b). N-M pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/137 (accessed 19 August 2021).

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On the alleged stability of pronouns OED (2021). The Oxford English Dictionary. www​.oed​.com. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Siemund, P. (2000). Intensifiers in English and German. A Comparison. London: Routledge. Siemund, P. (2008). Pronominal Gender in English: A Study of English Varieties from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. London: Routledge. Siemund, P. (2014). The emergence of English reflexive verbs: An analysis based on the Oxford English Dictionary. English Language and Linguistics 18(1): 49–73. Siemund, P. (2018). Speech Acts and Clause Types. English in a Cross-Linguistic Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Siemund, P. (2023). Multilingual Development: English in a Global Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Siemund, P. and Dolberg, F. (2011). From lexical to referential gender: An analysis of gender change in medieval English based on two historical documents. Folia Linguistica 45(2): 489–534. Siewierska, A. (2013). Gender distinctions in independent personal pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available at http://wals​.info​/chapter​/44 (accessed 19 August 2021). Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In P. Clyne, W. Hanks and C. Hofbauer (eds) The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 193–247. Svartengren, T. (1927). The feminine gender for inanimate things in Anglo-American. American Speech 3: 83–113. Thomason, S. (2001). Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomason, S. and Everett, D. (2001). Pronoun borrowing. In Ch. Chang, M. Houser, Y. Kim, D. Mortensen, M. Park-Doob and M. Toosarvandani (eds) Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language. Berkley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 301–315. Vennemann, T. (2002). On the rise of ‘Celtic’ syntax in Middle English. In P. Lucas and A. Lucas (eds) Middle English from Tongue to Text. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, pp. 203–234. Vezzosi, L. (2005). The development of himself in Middle English. A ‘Celtic’ hypothesis. In N. Ritt and H. Schendl (eds) Rethinking Middle English. Linguistic and Literary Approaches. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 228–243. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wee, L. and Ansaldo, U. (2004). Nouns and noun phrases. In L. Lim (ed.) Singapore English: A Grammatical Description. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 57–74.

Further reading Dryer, M. and Haspelmath, M. (eds) (2013). The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology 2013. Siemund, P. and Dolberg, F. (2011). From lexical to referential gender: An analysis of gender change in medieval English based on two historical documents. Folia Linguistica 45(2): 489–534. Thomason, S. and Everett, D. (2001). Pronoun borrowing. In Ch. Chang, M. Houser, Y. Kim, D. Mortensen, M. Park-Doob and M. Toosarvandani (eds) Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language. Berkley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 301–315.

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5 GRAMMATICALIZATION AS A PROCESS FOR PRONOUN CHANGE Gunther De Vogelaer

1. Introduction Pronouns have been investigated in the context of grammaticalization studies even before Meillet (1912) allegedly coined the term ‘grammaticalization’. Indeed, many 19th-century philologists hypothesized that grammatical agreement markers diachronically derive from pronouns (see Bosch 1983 and Lehmann 2015). More recently, Givón’s (1976) hypothesis on the mechanism by which pronouns grammaticalize to become agreement markers is among the publications that can be credited for the upsurge of grammaticalization studies in the 1980s. The grammaticalization framework since then has also been applied insightfully to the formation of new pronouns, which also involves processes of grammaticalization (Heine and Song 2011: 620–624). This chapter discusses both grammaticalization processes for which pronouns are the outcome and the processes in which they serve as sources for further grammaticalization. Section 2 offers an overview of the most important findings from the typological literature. It mainly draws on cross-linguistic overviews (most notably: Siewierska 2004; Heine and Song 2011), and includes examples from a wide range of languages. In contrast, the discussion of research methods in Section 3 zooms in on Germanic (and especially Dutch) to allow a more comprehensive account of different types of research. Sections 4 and 5 address the current and future directions of grammaticalization research on pronouns. This chapter is concerned with personal pronouns. Yet focusing on personal pronouns does not deny that the grammaticalization perspective has also been applied successfully to other types of pronouns. See, for instance, Diessel (1999) for demonstrative pronouns and Haspelmath (2001) for indefinites. Personal pronouns, as their name suggests, are understood primarily as markers of the grammatical category ‘person’. The extent to which the general person category and values like first, second, and third person in particular are universally applicable has been questioned (see, e.g., Cysouw 2003: 24–33). However, even if their universal applicability is as of yet ‘unproven’ (Cysouw 2003: 27), their usefulness for cross-linguistic research seems clear (see Siewierska 2004: 13; Cysouw 2007: 227; Heine and Song 2011: 590 for statements to this effect), provided that at least some notions related to the pronouns’ referents are subsumed, such as number, honorificity, and other aspects of the social relationship between the speaker and other referents (including social status, kinship, etc.).

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-6

Grammaticalization as a process for pronoun change

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics 2.1  Pronouns and agreement markers in grammaticalization research Grammaticalization is classically defined as ‘the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status’ (Kuryłowicz 1965: 52). While many alternative definitions exist, some of which build less heavily on the notion ‘grammatical’, Kuryłowicz’s definition nicely captures that pronouns may be involved in two distinct types of grammaticalization. First, pronouns can be the target of a development from a ‘lexical to a grammatical form’, whereby different types of elements evolve over time to become personal pronouns, which typically constitute a closed class and are, therefore, considered grammatical elements. Second, personal pronouns also commonly function as sources for the development of ‘more grammatical’ elements, particularly agreement markers to the verb. Both types of grammaticalization are usually studied independently. As a phenomenon, grammaticalization is generally seen as a composite change, consisting of several subchanges that often co-occur (e.g., Lehmann 2015: 129–169). In an account specifically geared at describing the formation of new personal pronouns, Heine and Song (2011: 591) distinguish four subprocesses: 1. 2. 3. 4.

pragmatic extension of the grammaticalizing expression to new contexts; desemanticization (or ‘semantic bleaching’); decategorialization (i.e. loss in morphosyntactic properties); and erosion (or ‘phonetic reduction’).

Accounts of personal pronouns grammaticalizing to become agreement markers (e.g., Siewierska 2004: 262, Corbett 2006: 265), in contrast, tend to use fewer dimensions, and they merely distinguish a formal and a functional dimension of change. Examples of the grammaticalization of both personal pronouns and agreement markers illustrating these subprocesses will be given below. Grammaticalization research commonly summarizes findings by means of clines (or gradients) representing diachronic pathways toward a given end state. While intuitively appealing, such representations risk projecting an unwarranted teleology on diachronic developments. Several caveats are, therefore, in order. First, the validity of a grammaticalization pathway is restricted by the degree to which its projected end state is universal. Personal pronouns have long been assumed to be universal (Cysouw 2003: 27–30), although a small number of potential exceptions are suggested (Siewierska 2004: 19–21, Heine and Song 2011: 588–590). Thus, pathways capturing their development enjoy a different ontological status from pathways for the grammaticalization of agreement markers, which are lacking in a substantial minority of the world’s languages. Within the category of pronouns, first- and second-person pronouns appear more widely found than their third-person counterparts (Bhat 2013), with languages making use of demonstratives or nominal elements as alternatives for third-person pronouns, which, incidentally, are generally considered to be among the sources for the grammaticalization of personal pronouns. The fact that, in some languages, non-pronominal elements fulfil functions associated with personal pronouns in other languages points to a second caveat: it is hard to draw clear boundaries between, on the one hand, personal pronouns and, on the other, the alleged sources (deictics, nominal elements) or targets (agreement markers) of the grammaticalization processes in which they are involved. The fluid boundary between nouns and pronouns is often illustrated with the example of Thai, as shown in (1). (1) mɛ̂ɛ´1 raág2 mother love ‘I love you’

lûug3 child

(mother speaking to child)

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(Thai; Cooke 1965: 13)

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In terms of the subprocesses constituting grammaticalization, Thai person markers show a hybrid behaviour. They do not form a closed class, which at least suggests that some have hardly extended their usage beyond their original domain (cf. above: ‘pragmatic extension’). Even more clearly, some Thai person markers have preserved a highly noun-like meaning (e.g., a kinship term like ‘mother’) and grammatical behaviour (e.g., they can be modified), which are indicative of a low degree of desemanticization (a loss in meaning) and decategorialization (a loss of morphosyntactic properties), respectively. Such markers also do not show any apparent formal differences from Thai nouns, and, hence, there are no apparent signs of phonetic erosion (i.e., their pronunciation does not change). This hybrid behaviour is typical in languages like Thai with large pronominal inventories, but when individual elements are considered, it is also common elsewhere. Given that intermediate stages in grammaticalization clines may be fully functional and diachronically stable states of development, this situation is, in fact, expected. A third caveat is illustrated with the Bokobaru example in (2). Grammaticalization clines involving pronouns contain a relatively poor inventory of potential sources and targets. Nearly all elements are deictics, agreement markers, or nouns (i.e., mostly referential expressions encoding person and a small number of other semantic features, such as number or information relating to the social status of the referent). Thus, most grammaticalization clines raise the impression that the category ‘person’ can be studied in relative isolation from other semantic domains. Such isolation, however, may not always be warranted. Indeed, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that all types of linguistic patterns fulfilling functions similar to pronouns could be potential source (or target) constructions for grammaticalization processes involving pronouns. For instance, pronouns are sometimes used in similar ways as constructions encoding notions like evidentiality, topicality, or focus. Regarding the latter domain, (2) illustrates how patterns from outside the realm of referential expressions are indeed a potential source for the grammaticalization of (emphatic) pronouns, namely cleft constructions (Siewierska 2004: 255–256). As is often the case for changes stretching over long periods of time, the analysis of the Bokobaru emphatic pronoun in (2) is somewhat tentative, but the proposed etymology is that it consists of the stative subject marker (ma in the first person singular), followed by a nasal connective and the erstwhile copula bé. (2) ma+m+bé ‘I (emphatic)’

(Bokobaru; Jones 1998: 141)

Similar pathways have been independently proposed for other languages, showing that more potential sources should be considered for the grammaticalization of pronouns than the referential expressions usually included in grammaticalization clines. The issue becomes especially problematic for clitic and bound person markers, which include ‘portmanteau morphemes’, i.e., single elements marking several grammatical categories. As a consequence, interaction with changes from outside the realm of person marking is to be expected. This chapter will not attempt to map all functions person markers may assume, however, but will focus on pronouns functioning as mere person markers. Still, both Sections 2.2 and 2.3, which describe the typical grammaticalization pathways leading to the emergence of new pronouns and the pathway from pronoun to agreement marker, respectively, will mention cases of less expected developments. Section 2.4 focuses on the alleged unidirectionality of grammaticalization.

2.2  The birth of new pronouns through grammaticalization According to both Siewierska (2004) and Heine and Song (2011), the most frequent source constructions for the grammaticalization of personal pronouns are nominal elements and deictics. An example of a grammaticalized nominal comes from the Central Khoisan language ||Ani as spoken in 60

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Botswana, where the noun khó(e)-mà (person-M.SG) ‘male person/man’ gave rise to a singular thirdperson masculine pronoun. A comprehensive illustration of the effects of the different subprocesses involved in grammaticalization would require a detailed evaluation of the pronoun’s morphosyntactic properties, which falls beyond the scope of this chapter. The sentence in (3), however, shows that the pronoun can also refer to crocodiles, and therefore has clearly assumed a more general meaning (desemanticization) than ‘man’. In the context of the example, the pronoun has also undergone phonetic erosion to khóm. (3) ... kánà khóm̀ hin-||òè kx'éí-hɛ̀. (||Ani; Heine 1999: 28) ... because he do-HAB manner-F.SG  ‘[The crocodile catches her] because this is the way he (=the crocodile) does it’. Nominals can be sources for pronouns in all grammatical persons (compare the 3SG form in (3) to the 1/2SG instances in (1) above). Siewierska (2004) observes a preference for words denoting ‘slave’ to develop toward first-person pronouns, whereas second-person pronouns often derive from ‘master’ and similar nouns. Similar observations lead Heine and Song (2011) to propose their ‘asymmetricrole model of speaker-hearer interaction’, which generalizes that speakers tend to understate their own social status, while treating hearers as personalities of high status, deserving a respectful form of address. It has been suggested that nominal classifiers in some languages behave like an intermediate category between nominals and personal pronouns, but they do not seem to form a necessary developmental stage (Helmbrecht 2004: 384–389). As for the second frequent source, deictics, the widespread use of third-person demonstratives as anaphors is indicative of their potential to become personal pronouns. In fact, in many languages lacking third-person pronouns, demonstratives assume functions typically fulfilled by personal pronouns (see Bhat 2013 for a typological overview). A historically documented case of third-person demonstratives grammaticalizing to become personal pronouns is that of Latin ille ‘that’, which evolved into the personal pronoun in younger Romance languages (e.g. French il ‘he’; see Danckaert, Haegeman, and Prévost 2021). Deictics, especially proximal/distal deictics, have also been hypothesized to be likely sources for first- and second-person pronouns, but convincing instances appear rare (Helmbrecht 2004: 318). A relevant example comes from Korean, where combinations of proximal demonstratives with locative nouns can be used as personal pronouns, such as i jjog ‘this side’/geu jjog ‘that side’ in (4). Thus, the example illustrates how spatial deixis helps to encode the contrast between first- and second-person referents. (4)

Standard Korean (Song 2002: 14) i jjog-eun gwaenchan-eunde geu jjog-eun eotteo-seyo ? this side-NOM good-CONN that side-NOM how-END ‘I am OK, and how about you?’

Nominals and deictics by no means exhaust the attested sources for the grammaticalization of pronouns, however additional pathways may be rarer or connected to specific grammatical persons. Siewierska’s (2004: 255–256) suggestion that clefts are a likely source for grammaticalizing personal pronouns has already been mentioned. In a comprehensive account, Helmbrecht (2004) also lists examples involving reflexives, conjunct markers, indefinites (mainly in the first-person plural), and verbs of saying (only in the third person). Of these examples, reflexives are also mentioned in Heine and Song (2011), but there they are subsumed under a broader category also containing intensifiers and identitives (e.g., expressions meaning ‘the same’). A final category of elements serving as potential sources for the development of new pronouns are compounds of personal pronouns and other elements. Compound pronouns are controversial 61

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instances of grammaticalization, since the pronominal element in the compound does not seem to become (more) ‘grammatical’, and, hence, does not fulfil the main criterion from Kuryłowicz’ (1965: 52) definition (see above). Compounds appear widely used to (re)incorporate number distinctions, as becomes apparent from English examples such as y’all or you guys, and there is a tendency to describe these as cases of reinforcement (or strengthening) or, alternatively, renewal. Terms such as reinforcement or renewal are often used in a pretheoretical and non-uniform way (see Reinöhl and Himmelmann 2017), and, willingly or unwillingly, project causality on changes in the pronominal domain, by which grammaticalization primarily serves to encode existing grammatical categories. Such a projection may be warranted, as seems the case for many innovative second-person plural pronouns deriving from English you, which include forms like youse (with plural -s) or y’all (with quantifying all) as well as compounds with nouns (such as you guys or you mob) (see Hickey 2003 for discussion). However, compounding may also lead to the introduction of new members to pronominal paradigms. This is shown by examples like yutupela (< ‘you + two + fellow’), used in Tok Pisin in addition to yupela (Mühlhäusler 1984: 336–337), or iutrifala, used in Solomon Islands Pidgin in addition to iufala and iutufala (Jourdan 2004: 707). Tok Pisin also yields the example of yumi, a compound of 2SG you and 1SG me used for first-person plural inclusive reference. Elsewhere in the world, Bantoid languages from Cameroon are especially well known for their use of compound pronouns. The compounding strategies in these languages differ substantially from the yumi instance from Tok Pisin (see Cysouw 2003: 166–184 for extensive discussion), but as in Tok Pisin, the resulting pronouns appear to have led to the introduction of additional distinctions in the pronominal paradigm, such as the marking of dual/plural and inclusive/exclusive (Helmbrecht 2004: 199–203, 245–246). Processes like reinforcement or renewal point to the potential relevance of paradigmatic structure for pronominal change, as they imply a tendency to avoid certain ‘paradigmatic gaps’. Heine and Song (2011) identify two processes commonly causing such gaps. The first one is plurification (i.e., the strategy to use a plural pronoun for singular reference), which is documented in all three grammatical persons (see Helmbrecht 2004: 253–258 for examples). A second process is shifts in deixis. While a wide array of different shifts have been documented (see Helmbrecht 2004: 258–266), Heine and Song 2011: 601) claim that the strong inclination in third-person pronouns to evolve toward second-person pronouns is particularly relevant, since it causes them to be among the most common sources of second-person pronouns. A well-known example here is German 3PL Sie ‘they’, which is also used as a second-person honorific, in both the singular and the plural.

2.3  From pronoun to agreement marker Apart from being the targets of grammaticalization processes, personal pronouns are common sources for further developments through which they can turn into person agreement markers. Such processes can be described in terms of the four subprocesses of grammaticalization discussed in Section 2.1, but they are more commonly captured in terms of the following two pathways: (5) Subprocesses of grammaticalization from pronoun to inflection (Corbett 2006: 265) a) formal dimension: free/independent > clitic > bound/obligatory b) functional dimension: referential > agreement In one influential account, Givón (1976) illustrates the process with the Tok Pisin example in (6). According to Givón, pronouns are turned into agreement markers as NP-detachment constructions tend to be overused and are subsequently reanalyzed as unmarked. As a result, the detached topic

62

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is promoted to become the subject to the verb rather than the erstwhile pronoun, and the erstwhile pronoun is ‘pushed’ into grammatical service. The reanalysis has a twofold effect on pronominal paradigms: apart from changes associated with the new morphosyntactic status of the verb-adjacent pronominal elements, pronominal elements commonly used as detached topics are becoming unmarked subject pronouns (in Tok Pisin this change has happened with em ‘he/him’). (6) From topic shifting to agreement marking (Tok Pisin; Givón 1976: 155) ol i-sindaun all he​-sit​.d​own ‘They sat down’ In an alternative account of the first stages of the grammaticalization of pronouns to agreement markers, Ariel (1999) attributes much more importance to pronominal morphology as a factor. In her account, pronouns referring to highly accessible subjects tend to be formally reduced. Such reduced forms may fuse with the verb, and turn into obligatory markers, at which point the complementary distribution with independent pronouns is given up in favour of a situation in which reduced and independent forms may freely combine. Ariel provides the instance of future tense in spoken Hebrew, where reduced forms, such as 1PL n- in (7), typically combine with the independent forms from which they historically derive (1PL anu in (7)). In contrast, the insertion of independent pronouns is much rarer in the past tense, where the etymological connection between both series of person markers remains much more transparent. (7)

Past vs. future tense in Hebrew (Ariel 1999: 238) (?anu) safar-nu ?(anu) n-ispor 1PL   count.PST-1PL 1PL   1PL-count.FUT ‘we counted’ ‘we will count’ anu > 80% zero anu (full form) preferred

Ariel’s account has interesting implications for the paradigmatic structure of elements further down the grammaticalization cline. Indeed, notions such as ‘accessibility’ and ‘degree of fusion’ also depend on a multitude of discourse factors and phonological properties of the elements involved, and, hence, asymmetrical and defective paradigms are expected. Ariel (1999: 211–215) adduces patterns by which languages show overt agreement only in the first and second person in support of her account since only these are consistently highly accessible and, therefore, more prone to be marked with reduced elements. The accounts of both Givón (1976) and Ariel (1999) have been used to explain attested (or alleged) grammaticalizations of agreement markers, but they leave some observations unexplained (see Siewierska 2004: 263–266). First, it is unclear why the development from pronoun to agreement marker in some languages runs to completion, whereas there are also languages without person agreement. In a related sense, a clear asymmetry between subjects and objects has been observed, in that object agreement is much rarer than subject agreement. With respect to subject agreement, the pattern by which inflected verbs are always accompanied by another person marker or nominal subject, also termed ‘non-pro-drop’ or ‘grammatical agreement’, appears extremely rare outside of western Europe (Siewierska 1999). Second, and perhaps more challengingly, both subprocesses in (5) appear relatively independent: indeed Corbett (2006) gives examples of both clitics functioning as agreement markers (8a from Skou, a Macro-Skou language spoken in New Guinea), and bound markers used as pronouns (see 8b from Bininj Gun-Wok, a Gunwinyguan language from Australia, for such ‘pronominal affixes’):

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(8) a) Agreement marking through clitics (Skou; Donohue 1999, as cited in Corbett 2006: 75) Ke   móe   ke=fue 3SG.M   fish   3SG.M=see.3SG.M ‘He saw a fish’ b) Pronominal affixes (Bininj Gun-Wok, Gun-djeihmi dialect; Evans 1999) al-ege  daluk  gaban-du-ng F-DEM  woman   3SG/3PL-scold-NON_PST (a) ‘That woman scolds people (generic)’ (b) ‘That woman scolds them (definite)’ Corbett (2006: 75–76, 103–104) argues that the instances in (8) combine features typically associated with both pronouns and inflectional endings. The fact that the sentence-initial pronoun ke in (8a) is normally present in Skou, and the preverbal marker ke is obligatory, makes the latter an apparent inflectional ending, serving no other role than person agreement. However, unlike canonical agreement markers, it is phonologically independent of the verb and may attach to non-verbal hosts. In this respect, it resembles clitics. Example (8b) shows how in Bininj Gun-Wok the affix gaban ‘3SG-to3PL’ can receive both a generic and a definite interpretation. The element is affixal, and it is also preserved if a free personal pronoun is added (this addition enforces the definite reading). Evans (1999) argues that gaban’s potential to refer to an actual entity by itself, as in (8b), indicates the pronominal character of the affix. In addition to elements resisting straightforward analysis in terms of the pathways in (5), some personal pronouns have also undergone changes that fall well outside the grammaticalization toward inflectional ending (see Givón 1976: 167–180 for examples). Most of these changes have not been described as instances of grammaticalization, with the development of pronouns out of copula and vice versa as a notable exception (see Katz 1996 and Lohndal 2009 on the 'copula cycle').

2.4.  Generalizing about pathways: unidirectionality and exceptions A strong claim about grammaticalization is that the process is unidirectional. The unidirectionality hypothesis already figures prominently in grammaticalization research from the 1970s (see Lehmann 2015: 18–21) and, despite having also met with scepticism, has been left mostly intact. This situation does not imply, however, that no counterexamples can be found. Indeed Norde (2004) provides a framework classifying counterexamples into three distinct types. (9) a) Is   muid-e a    rinne é   is   we-EMP    who   do.PST it     ‘It is we who did it.’ b) Folket på gatans      omdöme   [people on street-the]-S     opinion   ‘The man in the street’s opinion’. c) Is it a he or a she?

(Irish; Doyle 2002)

(Swedish; Norde 2001)

In (9a) the pronoun muid derives from the 1PL verb suffix and, thus, is an example of a bound morpheme regaining its independent status (‘debonding’ in Norde’s terms). A somewhat similar process is seen in (9b): there, an erstwhile case marker -s is used as a clitic attaching to phrases rather than to noun stems. In addition to gaining independence, it assumes a new function, and is, therefore, considered an instance of ‘deinflectionalization’. A final type of degrammaticalization is ‘degrammation’, also called ‘syntactic lexicalization’ by Willis (2007). Here, a function word is reintegrated in a major word class, thereby not only acquiring additional semantic substance but also morphosyntactic 64

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properties. The latter aspect is absent from the English lexicalizations in (9c), in which the pronouns he or she, here used as nouns, would have to develop a plural or a genitive form in order to qualify as legitimate examples. While (9c) shows a plausible mechanism by which degrammation may emerge in pronouns, Norde’s extensive list of examples of degrammaticalization does not contain any such examples. The same holds for Heine and Song’s (2011: 618) discussion of the grammaticalization of personal pronouns, which explicitly states that the process is unidirectional.

3.  Main research methods 3.1  Coming to terms with long-term historical change Empirical investigations of grammaticalization processes involving pronouns have been notoriously difficult: grammaticalization, as such, is a historical process that can extend over a long period of time, so most changes are badly documented, if at all. In addition, personal pronouns are considered to be among the most stable aspects of grammar. This stability, in fact, renders pronouns suitable for mass comparison aimed at revealing patterns of genealogical relatedness or language contact in eras predating the establishment of many of the world’s language families, which are generally seen as the deepest layer at which meaningful attempts toward historical comparison and reconstruction can be undertaken. Thus, Nichols and Peterson (2013) hypothesize that certain formal characteristics of pronominal systems may reflect older historical processes of geographical spread, tracing back to at least 10,000 BCE. In particular, they observe that so-called m-T sets of pronouns, with /m/ in the first person and a coronal obstruent in the second, are especially frequent in northern Eurasia (e.g., German, with 1SG mich ‘me’, 2SG dich ‘you’). The pattern is shared by many Indo-European and Uralic languages, but also connects these languages to additional Eurasian language families. Similarly, a second pattern of ‘n-m pronouns’ with /n/ in the first person and /m/ in the second (e.g., Wintu (Penutian; California), with 1SG ni ‘I’, 2SG mi ‘you’), is common in western America. Given the stability of pronoun systems and the difficulties in documenting historical changes, it may very well be impossible to ever gather enough data to engage in the solid quantification needed to properly test typological hypotheses on grammaticalization in pronouns. This section describes the methods that have been used to overcome these empirical difficulties. To obtain a somewhat comprehensive picture of the methodological diversity in the field, this section will mainly focus on Germanic, with particular reference to Dutch. Here too, hypotheses relating to grammaticalization are largely inferred from language comparison. Such a comparison can be based on synchronic sources, such as reference grammars, whereby the historical stages of the languages involved have to be reconstructed. The use of the comparative method in addressing grammaticalization is further discussed in Section 3.2. While historical sources are, of course, available for Germanic languages, those sources present proper challenges for linguistic analysis, as illustrated in Section 3.3. The Germanic languages also show various cases of ongoing grammaticalization involving pronouns, which allows for additional methods to map with more confidence how a change spreads through not only the linguistic system, but also the speaker community (Section 3.4).

3.2  Studying grammaticalization through language comparison By far the most typological generalizations on grammaticalization involving pronouns are based primarily on developments that are reconstructed on the basis of cross-linguistic comparison. An overview of the personal pronouns of several Germanic languages may illustrate this method. Table 5.1 contains the subject pronouns from English, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Icelandic, and also includes the reconstructed Proto-Germanic paradigm (from Lehmann 2005). As is well known, Germanic languages have undergone a strong drift to become more analytic, which has also impacted their pronominal paradigms (see Howe 1997 for an extensive overview). 65

Gunther De Vogelaer Table 5.1  Subject pronouns in Germanic languages

1SG 2SG 3SG.MASC. 3SG.FEM 3SG.NEUT 1PL (- DU) 2PL (- DU) 3PL

HON.

Proto-Germanic

Icelandic

Swedish

German

Dutch

English

*eka *þū *so *sā *tod (demonstratives) *weys (- *wet) *yūs (- *yut) *toy *tās *tā (demonstratives)

ég þú hann hún það

jag du han – den hon – den det

ich du er sie es

ik – ‘k jij – je hij – -ie zij – ze het – 't

I you he she it

við þið þeir þær þau

vi ni de

wir ihr sie

wij – we jullie – je zij – ze

we you they

2SG/PL: Sie

2SG/PL: u

1SG/PL: vér 2SG/PL: þér

While the table abstracts away from any effects of paradigmatic levelling in the case system, it illustrates that number marking in contemporary languages merely involves a binary distinction between singular and plural, and the dual is lost. Similarly, most languages have dispensed with gender distinctions in the third person plural. In other places, however, the paradigms have expanded. Three recurring developments have to be distinguished: 1. the grammaticalization of demonstratives into personal pronouns; 2. the emergence of honorifics, partly through grammaticalization of nouns into pronouns; 3. grammaticalization of independent pronouns into weak pronouns and clitics. As regards the first development, Germanic is reconstructed as a language with third-person demonstratives, and no personal pronouns. Modern Germanic languages, however, have such third-person personal pronouns, most of which show enough similarities to the Proto-Germanic demonstratives to assume that they are indeed cognates (words with a shared etymology). Hence, this seems like a textbook example of grammaticalization. Interestingly, the unmarked pronouns for reference to inanimates in Continental Scandinavian languages (viz., den/det) are believed to be grammaticalized demonstratives too (Howe 1997: 331–334). Second, honorifics have developed. Most examples in Table 5.1 are of pronominal origin and therefore do not qualify as instances of grammaticalization. Only Dutch u is believed to derive from the abbreviation UE, referring to the noun phrase Uwe Edele/Edelheid ‘your honourable/honour’, and thus exemplifies the typologically well-attested grammaticalization pathway from noun to pronoun discussed above. The development of honorifics is more pervasive than Table 5.1 shows: Swedish can use 2PL ni ‘you (plural)’ as an honorific, although this pattern is becoming obsolete. English no longer has an honorific at its disposal, but historically, you is the well-known former 2PL form, which was used as an honorific before it eventually replaced the former 2SG thou. Incidentally, Dutch has gone through a similar development in having adopted a former 2PL form (jij) as the singular form of address, with honorific usage as an intermediate stage. In contrast to what occurred with English, the number distinction was reintroduced in Dutch: it now has a distinctive 2PL form jullie, which historically derives from a compound of the 2SG pronoun (je or jij) and the noun lieden/ lui ‘men’. 66

Grammaticalization as a process for pronoun change

The third development, the grammaticalization of independent pronouns into weak forms or clitics, is only visible for Dutch in Table 5.1: Dutch reference grammars commonly include a separate category of weak pronouns, which are considered the first step on the grammaticalization pathway from personal pronoun to agreement marker. Nearly all forms in Dutch are transparent phonetic reductions of the independent pronouns. Such reductions are found across Germanic. Cliticization in Germanic will be discussed in more detail below.

3.3  Grammaticalization in historical sources When determining the precise course of the events behind the situation depicted in Table 5.1, it helps that some Germanic languages are among the best-studied languages in the world, and their historical stages are generally well documented. For instance, the etymology of English 2SG you and Dutch 2SG jij as 2PL forms would be obvious to anyone familiar with, say, Shakespearean drama or Middle Dutch poetry. English and Dutch historical sources also provide ample documentation of these forms being used as honorifics, illustrating that honorific usage often serves as a socalled bridging context, allowing the usage of a 2PL form to extend into 2SG reference. Sometimes a more meticulous analysis of historical documents is needed, however, as in the case of Dutch honorific u, which, through phonetic reduction of the pronunciation of the abbreviation UE became homophonous to the regional southern Dutch object pronoun u. This has long blurred its nominal origin Uwe Edele/Edelheid (‘your honourable/honour’), as even many linguists were unfamiliar with the small time frame in which this phonetic reduction took effect. Analyzing historical sources also yields additional examples of grammaticalization beyond those observed in contemporary sources. Thus, apart from honorific usage of pronouns like 2PL ihr ‘you (plural)’, 3SG er/sie ‘he/ she’, and 3PL sie ‘they’ in the history of German, Simon (2003: 92–133) also documents honorific dieselben ‘the same’, and shows a complex competition between different politeness strategies in the history of the language, including stages in which different degrees of honorificity could be encoded. Due to the nature of historical documents preserved from western Europe, which include many formal letters and religious and literary texts, the history of honorifics and other address forms can be mapped in detail. The analysis of other types of grammaticalization, however, can be hampered by data sparsity and/or orthographic conventions. For example, Middle Dutch texts provide ample examples of cliticization and, starting from the 15th century, also rare instances of clitic doubling patterns (10a). Within Dutch, clitic doubling constructions are typical for southern varieties (especially Belgian Dutch), where such constructions are still productively used ((10b) is an example from a contemporary West-Flemish pop song). (10) Clitic doubling in southern Dutch (Flemish dialects) a) Wil-de ghy zulcke zaken doen want=2SG 2SG such things do... ‘If you want to do such things...’ Aalst, 1496 (Vanacker 1963: 320) b) 'T Was voe de koers da=j' gie dien dag in Ploegsteert wierd geboren it was for the race that=2SG 2SG that day in Ploegsteert were born ‘It was for racing that you were born in Ploegsteert that day’. Lyrics from ‘Ploegsteert’ (by het zesde metaal, 2012) Clitic doubling indicates a further step on the grammaticalization pathway from personal pronoun toward agreement marker. Historical documents do not allow us to reconstruct the diachrony of the pathway, however. First, the oldest attestations of the phenomenon are found in judicial testimonies, 67

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and they are lacking from other sources from the same era, which suggests that they mark spoken registers. Second, as standardization proceeded, southern regions in the Low Countries increasingly adopted (aspects of) northern Dutch in written registers, thus causing clitic doubling to fall under the radar. As a result, most hypotheses on the diachrony of Dutch clitic doubling are based on the distribution of the phenomenon in contemporary dialects, rather than on historical sources (see below). Clitic doubling constructions are also well known to occur in southern German dialects, most notably Bavarian. Fuß (2005: 162–164) connects Bavarian clitic doubling to developments in the second-person singular agreement already observed in Old High German, where the 2SG agreement marker -s developed in -st, by reanalysis of the combination of verbal -s and cliticized –thu. (11) Agreement in 2SG, in the Old High German Tatian (Fuß 2005: 162)   Ih   forahta, uuanta   thu   grim   man   bist, nimi-st thaz thu   I   feared since    you   grim   man   are take-2SG that you   ni   sázto-s     inti   arno-st  thaz thu    ni   sáto-s   NEG   plant-2SG   and   earn-2SG   that   you   not  sow-2SG   ‘Since you are a grim man, I feared that you take what you haven’t planted and earn   what you haven’t sowed.’ The example in (11) shows that 2SG -st still alternates with -s and that the change is still incomplete in Old High German. The -st ending is mainly found in contexts in which a subject pronoun follows the verb, which Fuß (2005) interprets as an indication that it indeed emerged in a cliticization context, where the boundaries between verbs and pronouns are blurred. Second-person singular pronouns appear to show a stronger tendency toward cliticization than other pronoun across Germanic, so (11) does not warrant any extrapolation on cliticization in other contexts or even clitic doubling. But Fuß’s (2005) contemporary dialect data for 2PL and 1PL also point toward a similar conclusion as the historical 2SG data, i.e., that morphological innovations emerge in verb-pronoun sequences, and subsequently spread to other contexts. Thus, despite the relatively rich historical data sources on Dutch and German, some cliticization pathways affecting pronouns can more confidently be reconstructed using contemporary dialect data rather than historical sources.

3.4  Studying grammaticalization-in-progress When cases of ongoing grammaticalization are detected, the full array of methods to describe changes-in-progress becomes available. This includes qualitative studies on both written and spoken corpora, which are frequently used in present-day grammaticalization research to investigate the discourse context in which grammaticalization occurs. A recurrent theme are bridging contexts, which allow the reading of an element as both an earlier and a later stage on a grammaticalization pathway. Bridging contexts are especially relevant to understand early stages in grammaticalization, as they allow inferences that, in the long run, may be conventionalized. An example from a Dutch song is given below: (12) Willen de heren zo vriendelijk zijn zich want.3PL the gentlemen so friendly be REFL ‘Would the gentlemen be so friendly as to move over?’ Lyrics from ‘Majoor Kees’ (by Paul van Vliet, 1976)

in beweging te zetten? in movement to set

In (12), the noun phrase de heren ‘the gentlemen’ is used as an address term, in a sentence that is proposed as an alternative to the military command Voorwaarts, mars! ‘Forward, march!’. The use of third-person noun phrases is a common strategy to reduce the directness of an address, which 68

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explains why noun phrases are a typologically common source of honorific pronouns (Helmbrecht 2004: 360). The use of a question as a speech act and of the auxiliary willen ‘want’ in (12) further reduce the ‘face threatening’ character inherent to the original command (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987). The pattern leaves more ambiguity as to the intended referent of the address term, which makes it a suitable bridging context for third-person noun phrases to grammaticalize into address terms. Indeed in the context of the song, an interpretation of de heren ‘the gentlemen’ as an actual person (e.g., with an addressee acting as a representative for a group of gentlemen) would be impossible, and the most natural reaction to the question would include the pronoun wij ‘we’ rather than zij ‘they’. This, of course, does not imply that de heren ‘the gentlemen’ is indeed becoming a pronoun, but the pattern in (12) somewhat resembles the Thai person markers discussed in (1), and therefore illustrates the discourse context in which the potential for grammaticalization emerges. Of course, the research situation of Germanic languages also allows quantitative studies, tapping into both linguistic factors and sociolinguistic ones, which, following methods developed in Labovian sociolinguistics, may allow extrapolating diachronic hypotheses. An example of a study emphasizing linguistic factors was already given above: Ariel’s (1999) investigation of spoken Hebrew, which concluded from a higher frequency of overt pronouns in future tense that grammaticalization of pronouns into agreement markers has progressed further in this environment than in past tense. An example of a sociolinguistic study can be given for Dutch, for which Plevoets, Speelman, and Geeraerts (2008) investigate the use of Dutch address forms, including 2SG clitics as in (10), and conclude that they are typical for Belgian Dutch, in particular for colloquial and spontaneous registers, but are otherwise sociolinguistically stable since the forms are neither spreading nor disappearing. More importantly, contemporary data have also helped to reconstruct grammaticalization pathways (see example 11). The schedule in Table 5.2 provides comparable data from Dutch, from the first-person plural. The Standard Dutch 1PL pronoun wij relates straightforwardly to West-Germanic, and we is an equally straightforward phonetic reduction. In Middle Dutch, many instances of the innovative 1PL weak pronoun -me are documented, which, as expected in a grammaticalization scenario as sketched by Ariel (1999), shows the traces of a tendency to fuse with the verbal ending -n. Subsequent developments are better documented in dialects than in historical documents: first, a number of southwestern dialects of Dutch have developed clitic doubling patterns, in which clitics and strong pronouns combine. And second, many of these southwestern dialects have generalized the use of me to the proclitic position. This generalization turns me into a ‘special clitic’, which is no longer transparently related to its strong counterpart. Significantly, many dialects with clitic doubling and proclitic me have also replaced strong wij with a compound pronoun resembling Standard Dutch 2PL jullie (the schedule includes wullie, but a variety of different, etymologically related forms are used). Dialect geographical data (Barbiers et al. 2006) show how the different steps from the pathway can still be discerned quite clearly on the basis of their geographical distribution: the more one moves into the southwestern periphery of the Dutch

Table 5.2  Cliticization in Dutch, first person plural Standard Dutch

Middle Dutch

°Clitic doubling

°Proclitic me

we/wij gaan gaan we/wij

we/wij gaan ga-me - gaan wij

me gaan - wij gaan ga-me (wullie)

Pronouns: we wij

we/wij gaan ga-me (wij) also: wij > wullie

we / -me wij

we / -me wij (> wullie)

me wullie

69

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language area, the more steps from the pathway are implemented. This does not imply that current dialect geography perfectly reflects the historical process, though: at least in Middle Dutch, enclitic –me was probably found in a somewhat larger area than nowadays.

4.  Current contributions and research In the introduction, personal pronouns were noted to have played a substantial role in grammaticalization research. Apart from being among the first cases of grammaticalization to be detected, examples of pronouns shifting to agreement markers have, for instance, also figured in the debates on degrammaticalization, and they have been used in favour of both accounts building on pragmatic strengthening as the basic mechanism (as implied by Givón 1976, see above), and accounts seeing reduction as the main driver of grammaticalization (e.g., Ariel 1999). In some recent debates on grammaticalization, such as the description of discourse contexts in which grammaticalization takes effect (e.g., Heine 2002), and/or constructional perspectives on the process (Traugott and Trousdale 2013), grammaticalization of personal pronouns into person agreement (as summarized in Section 2.3) has become a more peripheral theme, partly due to the (relative) simplicity of the changes involved, which are usually described in terms of two rather than four subprocesses (see above). From a contemporary perspective, the formation of new pronouns may even have become a more prominent theme, where the typological literature has helped supply a wealth of additional data (see Section 2.2). Since gaining traction in the 1970s, grammaticalization research has often challenged assumptions of universality and innateness in grammar, and such research continues to do so today. One returning point of debate in the recent grammaticalization literature concerns the question whether the process involves discrete shifts (e.g., between different steps included in grammaticalization pathways) or whether the process should be seen as a continuous, gradual development that cannot be captured using discrete (and potentially innate/universal) categories (Haspelmath 1998). The former position is, among others, upheld in most generative accounts, which emphasize the role of reanalysis as a mechanism driving forward grammaticalization since a priori or even innate categories are projected on the linguistic input. For instance, during a grammaticalization from independent pronoun to agreement marker, an element would progress through two discrete intermediate steps, namely, that of a weak pronoun and that of a clitic (see Fuß 2005 for an implementation). Recent generative accounts have also proposed such a process to be cyclical, thus yielding a ‘pronoun cycle’, which, in general terms, involves ‘the disappearance of a particular word and its renewal by another’ (Van Gelderen 2016: 3). In contrast to such generative accounts, usage-based models of grammaticalization are reluctant to acknowledge the role of a priori categories in linguistic change, and, instead, emphasize the role of analogy in grammaticalization processes (see De Vogelaer 2010). Both types of accounts also share a number of insights and questions. For instance, a long tradition exists to explain grammaticalization (and renewal) in terms of the contradicting effects of tendencies toward the economy of expression, on the one hand, and explicitness, on the other. Without additional mechanisms, however, such accounts leave unexplained why languages show substantial differences in the extent to which grammaticalization involving personal pronouns is observed, and the speed with which it takes effect. A pattern that has drawn some attention in recent years is the subject/object-asymmetry also observed by Siewierska (1999), i.e., the fact that, in comparison to subjects, object pronouns rarely grammaticalize to become agreement markers. Frequency-based explanations of the type discussed by Ariel (1999) would attribute this asymmetry to the fact that the object function is typically fulfilled by discourse participants ranking lower in terms of accessibility, which also manifests itself in the fact that they are less consistently encoded with pronouns. Haig (2018), however, observes that the rarity of object agreement only concerns person agreement, whereas number and gender agreement with objects are typologically widespread. Rather than frequency, the added information of markers 70

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appears relevant: given that objects show a strong cross-linguistic tendency to encode third-person referents, the category of person is relatively uninformative for objects, causing languages to remain at the stage of so-called Differential Object Indexing, in which object markers are used to express more informative semantic factors, such as gender, number, or pragmatic factors relating to information structure (Haig 2018: 813–814).

5.  Future directions Given that personal pronouns are among the most stable domains of grammar, and many cases of grammaticalization are reconstructed rather than documented, a large need still exists for examples to be identified or described in more detail. Apart from typological research, which has amply proven to be a rich data source of data ever since grammaticalization research manifested itself, sign languages may provide an interesting perspective (Pfau and Steinbach 2011). The need for additional examples seems more pressing for grammaticalization into personal pronouns than for the development of pronouns into agreement markers. Indeed, Heine and Song (2011: 605) explicitly mention the rarity of examples of grammaticalization into first-person singular pronouns, as well as of their category of ‘intensifiers’ evolving to become second-person pronouns. Even if the data situation would improve, however, solid quantification of grammaticalization pathways may well remain impossible. Given the ubiquity of personal pronouns in first and second person, the actual pathways by which first- and second-person pronouns emerge from scratch, and, in fact, the grammatical category of pronouns in general, are bound to remain undocumented. Apart from new data, further progress can be expected from new methods gaining ground in linguistics. In fact, the possibilities of integrating findings from quantitative corpus research have been illustrated above to some extent, with reference to (statistically rudimentary) frequency counts by Ariel (1999) and Haig (2018), and results will only become more solid as the available corpora cover more languages and become more representative of spoken language. On the explanatory level, computational models allow more rigid testing of hypotheses on diachronic developments, against attested or reconstructed historical data in a given language (i.e., ‘predicting the past’), or using artificial languages (Van Trijp 2010). To my knowledge, little such modelling has been undertaken on examples of grammaticalization and none on the processes involving personal pronouns discussed in this chapter.

References Ariel, M. (2000). The development of person agreement markers: From pronouns to higher accessibility markers. In M. Barlow and S. Kemmer, S. (eds.) Usage-based Models of Language. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications, pp. 197–260. Barbiers, S., van der Auwera, J., Bennis, H., Boef, E., de Vogelaer, G. and van der Ham, M.H. (2006). Dynamic Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (DynaSAND). Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. Bhat, D.N.S. (2013). Third person pronouns and demonstratives. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Bosch, P. (1983). Agreement and Anaphora. London: Academic Press. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooke, J. (1965). Pronominal Reference in Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese. UC Berkeley Ph.D dissertation. Corbett, G. (2006). Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cysouw, M. (2003). The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cysouw, M. (2007). Building semantic maps: The case of person marking. In M. Miestamo and B. Wälchli (eds) New Challenges in Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 225–248. Danckaert, L., Haegeman, L. and Prévost, S. (2021). How lexical merger can drive grammaticalization: Third person pronouns from Latin to Old French. Journal of Historical Syntax 5: 16–25.

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Gunther De Vogelaer De Vogelaer, G. (2010). Does grammaticalisation need analogy? Different pathways on the ‘pronoun/agreement marker’-cline. In K. Stathi, E. Gehweiler and E. König (eds) Grammaticalization: Current Views and Issues. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 221–240. Diessel, H. (1999). Demonstratives: Form, Function and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Doyle, A. (2002). Yesterday’s affixes as today’s clitics. A case-study in degrammaticalization. In I. Wischer and G. Diewald (eds) New Reflections on Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 67–81. Evans, N. (1999). Why argument affixes in polysynthetic languages are not pronouns: evidence from Bininj Gunwok. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 52: 255–281. Fuß, E. (2005). The Rise of Agreement. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Givón, T. (1976). Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In C. Li (ed.) Subject and Topic. New York: Academic, pp. 151–188. Haig, G. (2018). The grammaticalization of object pronouns: Why differential object indexing is an attractor state. Linguistics 56(4): 781–818. Haspelmath, M. (1998). Does grammaticalization need reanalysis? Studies in Language 22: 315–351. Haspelmath, M. (2001). Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heine, B. (2002). On the role of context in grammaticalization. In I. Wischer and G. Diewald (eds) New Reflections on Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 83–101. Heine, B. and Song, K.-A. (2011). On the grammaticalization of personal pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 47: 587–630. Helmbrecht, J. (2004). Personal Pronouns - Form, Function, and Grammaticalization. Erfurt: Habilitationschrift University of Erfurt Hickey, R. (2003). Rectifying a standard deficiency: Second-person pronominal distinction in varieties of English. In I. Taavitsainen and A. Jucker (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 345–374. Howe, S. (1997). The Personal Pronouns in the Germanic Languages. Berlin: de Gruyter. Jourdan, C. (2004). Solomon Islands English: Morphology and syntax. In B. Kortmann, E. Schneider et al. (eds) A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 702–719. Katz, A. (1996). Cyclical Grammaticalization and the Cognitive Link between Pronoun and Copula. Rice University Ph.D dissertation. Kuryłowicz, J. (1965). The evolution of grammatical categories. Diogenes 51: 55–71. Lehmann, C. (2015). Thoughts on Grammaticalization (3rd edition). Berlin: Language Science Press. Lehmann, W.P. (2005). A Grammar of Proto-Germanic (edited by Jonathan Slocum). Austin, Texas: University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Research Center. Lohndal, T. (2009). The copula cycle. In E. van Gelderen (ed.) Cyclical Change. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 209–242. Meillet, A. (1912). L’évolution des formes grammaticales. Scientia 12: 384–400. Mühlhäusler, P. (1984). Inflectional morphology of Tok Pisin. In S.A. Wurm and P. Mühlhäusler (eds) Handbook of Tok Pisin (New Guinea Pidgin). Canberra: Australian National University, pp. 335–340. Nichols, J. and Peterson, D.A. (2013). m-T Pronouns / n-m pronouns. In M. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Norde, M. (2001). Deflexion as a counterdirectional factor in grammatical change. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 231–264. Norde, M. (2004). Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pfau, R. and Steinbach, M. (2011). Grammaticalization in sign languages. In B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 683–695. Plevoets, K., Speelman, D. and Geeraerts, D. (2008). The distribution of T/V pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch. In K.P. Schneider and A. Barron (eds) Variational Pragmatics: A Focus on Regional Varieties in Pluricentric Languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 181–209. Reinöhl, U. and Himmelmann, N. (2017). Renewal: A figure of speech or a process sui generis? Language 93: 381–413. Siewierska, A. (1999). From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: Why objects don’t make it. Folia Linguistica 33(1–2): 225–251. Siewierska, A. (2004). Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H. (2003). Für eine grammatische Kategorie ‘Respekt’ im Deutschen. Synchronie, Diachronie und Typologie der deutschen Anredepronomina. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Grammaticalization as a process for pronoun change Song, K.-A. (2002). Korean reflexives and grammaticalization: A speaker–hearer dynamic approach. STUF Language Typology and Universals 55: 340–353. Traugott, E.C. and Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vanacker, V.F. (1963). Syntaxis van gesproken taal te Aalst en in het Land van Aalst in de XVde, de XVIde en de XVIIde eeuw. Brussels: Belgisch Interuniversitair Centrum voor Neerlandistiek. Van Gelderen, E. (2016). Cyclical change continued. In E. van Gelderen (ed.) Cyclical Change Continued. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 3–17. Van Trijp, R. (2010). Grammaticalization and semantic maps: Evidence from artificial language evolution. Linguistic Discovery 8(1): 310–326. Willis, D. (2007). Syntactic lexicalization as a new type of degrammaticalization. Linguistics 45: 271–310.

Further reading Bakker, D. and Haspelmath, M. (2013). Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska (eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Forker, D. and Haig, G. (2018). Person and gender in discourse: An empirical crosslinguistic perspective (eds.). Special issue of Linguistics 56(4). Song, K.-A. and Heine, B. (2017). Some patterns of grammatical change in personal pronouns. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal 25(1): 139–162.

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6 THE FUTURE OF PRONOUNS IN THE ONLINE/OFFLINE NEXUS Brian W. King and Archie Crowley

1. Introduction Advances in electronic communications technology can call attention to pronoun use in new ways as part of the generation of text types and social interaction in multiple languages. Pronouns tend to be very resistant to change in a lexicographic sense and are traditionally treated as a ‘closed class’ of lexical items in grammar books. Essentially this quality means that in most varieties one cannot coin or borrow new pronouns as prolifically as one can borrow nouns and verbs and expect them to be understood or circulated in any comparable ways. It is important to note that pronouns in some varieties are considered to be an open class, quite a common tendency in Australasia (Thomason 2001) with Japanese, for instance, allowing the use of some nouns as first-person pronouns, resulting in twenty-five versions of ‘I’ (Nishimura 2017). When the topic shifts to pronouns in use, however, much more variation and space for creative expression are evident (Wales 1996). In this chapter the focus will be on how digital platforms might (or might not) be mediating pronoun use in ways that require creative expression, exploring how researchers attempt to detect the role those online technologies play. Online platforms can each introduce novel affordances and constraints for pronoun use. For instance, early computer-mediated communication research (Maynor 1994, Uhlirova 1994, Du Bartell 1995, Yates 1996, Gruber 1997, 2000) often pointed to the ‘peculiar’ characteristics of written English in online mailing list postings and emails (the dominant genres during the internet’s nascent phase), citing among other factors a reduced use of pronouns. It was soon realized that such effects were highly context dependent based on a number of factors, including whether the communication was synchronous (e.g., online chatting in real time) or asynchronous (e.g., bulletin boards and email) as well as various other social motivators (Gruber 2013). Even in asynchronous ‘one to many’ postings, the desire to create an in-group feeling and interactivity could override other register demands, such as providing factual information. Moving beyond being informative to the expression of views and feelings soon leads to a more ‘socially aligned’ orientation than might otherwise be expected and thus we might come to expect a greater frequency of pronouns, for example first person voice (‘I think….’) and appeals to other users (‘You guys shouldn’t….) (Herring 1996). Thus, language use online is, unsurprisingly, sociolinguistically rich and varied, with pronoun usage being no exception. It is also crucial to keep in mind that, for those with Internet access, contemporary social life occurs on a constantly shifting continuum of online and offline. The behaviors that we see online

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-7

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are mostly influenced by patterns of use that were developed during offline interaction and brought online (Berber Sardinha 2022); furthermore, contemporary communities (of various definitions) often do not interact entirely online or entirely offline even at a given moment, with their attention rapidly shifting between the two (Jones 2010). Even for aggregates of people who do interact entirely online, their spaces often represent different kinds of places to different people who interact there, with some feeling a sense of belonging to a community and others experiencing a given site as an online information space, feeling no need to belong (King 2019). Forgetting about this inseparability and interpenetration of online and offline, and the multiplicity of online spaces, can render our assumptions about the influence of technology exaggerated or erroneous, and to investigate ‘how language is used online’ has not been found to be a particularly tenable or useful position to take (Androutsopoulos 2006, Georgakopoulou 2006). Of course, emergent web interfaces and their widely variant and constantly proliferating technological innovations can make a difference as cultural tools, presenting affordances and constraints that are then responded to socially and creatively (Crowley and Chun 2021, Jones and Hafner 2021). These effects will be explored in some detail in relation to pronoun use in the next sections.

2.  Pronoun use in online spaces – what do we know? The key to understanding more about how pronouns are used online is to focus on what people do, in various online contexts, by choosing between them, using them more or less prolifically, or even avoiding them altogether. Equally important is to maintain an awareness that the identification of patterns is partly dependent upon the ‘tuning’ of our research instruments and the questions we ask (or do not) – issues that will be attended to as the chapter progresses. When it comes to variation in the frequency of pronoun use online in various social domains and text types, indeed there are some useful findings that have emerged from ‘big data’ studies like corpus linguistics. The variations identified can be at the level of genres and registers, communicative aims, or even localized community practices and various interactions between these levels.

2.1  Pronouns and register Pronoun density has been identified, in combination with other features, as an important part of register variation, and it turns out that the identification of online registers can both support and challenge assumptions about pronoun usage in digital settings. Extensive studies in corpus linguistics have presented useful findings about how pronoun use (among other features) is dependent on register and discourse type (Biber 2019), factors that matter across the online/offline nexus (Berber Sardinha 2018, Biber and Egbert 2020). This type of corpus linguistics, called Multi-Dimensional Analysis, focuses on register variation and was first developed by Douglas Biber (1988). According to Biber and Conrad (2009), registers are distinctive systems of speaking or writing that have developed for specific purposes of communication in a situation. Register analysis categorizes these text types by identifying sets of features (e.g., pronouns, clausal structures) that occur together to characterize a type of text – a register (e.g., face-to-face conversation or academic prose). In describing these registers, Biber (2019) reveals that spoken conversation is characterized by the frequent grouping together of present tense verbs, possibility modals (e.g., could), pronouns, wh-questions, and the other ‘oral’ features. Academic prose is more ‘informational’, relying on more nouns, long words, prepositional phrases, and attributive adjectives (e.g., big man vs. the man was big). Through Multi-Dimensional Analysis, discourse styles (in this tradition simply taken to mean the use of language to generate meaning in a social context and to organize talk/writing into coherent units) have been identified that ‘rely’ on a set of features (e.g., pronouns, adverbs, nouns), meaning these features are used together to form that discourse style. To identify these features, millions of words of text are examined using specialized software to look for co-occurrence patterns (i.e., 75

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properties clustering together in texts). Each text is tagged with over 100 grammatical, syntactic, and semantic aspects, and these features are counted by the software. These feature counts are then put through a statistical calculation called ‘factor analysis’ to find groups of features that frequently appear together and statistically confirm the relevance of their co-occurrence. The results are then interpreted using text samples and qualitative assessments in relation to the identified functions of the register or sub-register in the corpus. The assumption is that linguistic features occur together in texts because they serve related communicative functions (Biber 2014). A most robust finding using these methods is that there are two discourse styles that contrast – oral and literate – and linguistically ‘orality’ is more heavily characterized by use of pronouns, verbs, and adverbs and is ‘involved and interactive’ due to a focus on personal concerns, interpersonal interactions, and the expression of stance (Biber 2019). The literate style, on the other hand, focuses on the presentation of information with little overt acknowledgment of audience, relying more on nouns and nominal modifiers (Biber 2019). These insights have since been applied to corpus-analytic investigations of electronic communication platforms, and it has been noted that the patterns hold for texts produced on online platforms (Berber Sardinha 2018, Biber and Egbert 2020). Indeed, pronoun use online seems to vary by discourse type. Registers with ‘involved’ characteristics that reflect interpersonal interaction (Twitter, emails, and Facebook) contain a density of personal pronouns more akin to spoken discourse while registers with informational production characteristics (webpages and blogs) do not (Berber Sardinha 2018). This variation is a matter of degree, however, for Multi-Dimensional Analysis has gone on to demonstrate that these more interpersonal online registers are less marked for involvement and interactivity than is spoken conversation (Biber and Egbert 2020). As previously outlined, Multi-Dimensional Analysis techniques are a method in which researchers use corpus linguistics software to find groups of features that frequently appear together in a large set of texts and statistically confirm the relevance of their co-occurrence. Yet surprisingly, in ‘supersynchronous’ texts online (i.e., synchronous chat realized keystroke by keystroke), Ewa Jonsson found that these conversations, unfolding in what appears to be a uniquely alphabetic version of real-time action, ‘bristle with first and second person pronouns’ (Jonsson 2015: 215). That is, in supersynchronous online texts, frequent pronouns co-occur with other frequent features like direct WH questions to generate a high orality score. Supersynchronous texts are actually more ‘oral’ and ‘involved’ in their linguistic characteristics than face-to-face conversation (Biber and Egbert 2020). So, the picture is somewhat more complicated register-wise than previously thought. And yet for our purposes here, it is quite useful to know that electronic communication registers vary in ways that can challenge assumptions in terms of pronoun usage online. One limitation of this methodology is that treating a whole online platform as an over-arching category during analysis (e.g., Twitter tweets) obscures the ways that tweets can vary in their communicative aims. They can be aimed at either interaction or public broadcasting of information, or both, and this difference influences the degree of ‘involvedness’ and ‘orality’, so to group all tweets together in one corpus can unhelpfully erase internal variation within the identified register (Clarke 2018). This is where it becomes obvious that the ‘tuning’ of our research instruments matters. For instance, in one study it was seen that despite Twitter’s 140-character limit, which has been assumed to lead to pronoun dropping to save space, tweets about Brexit (the 2016 referendum in which the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union) relied on a highly involved style for their messaging, and so personal pronouns indeed featured heavily despite space constraints (Jaworska and Sogomonian 2019). This orientation to involvement via pronouns is best exemplified by the use of we to speak on behalf of communities: (1) Another great interview @patel4witham @itvnews! £350m recognition of money we don’t control! #VoteLeave #TakeControl (2) If we #VoteLeave on 23 June we can #TakeControl of the £350m we send to the EU every week. 76

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On the flipside of the involved vs. informational coin, although it is widely assumed that bloggers, for example, target a mass audience using an informative orientation, this does not hold for all, as many blogs are more ‘involved’ in orientation. As such, the differences in pronoun use that emerge during audience design can end up being unhelpfully erased by categorizing all blogs together (Puschmann 2013). Research on corporate blogs in the mid-2000s found that bloggers were likely to use first person singular pronouns, as the bloggers themselves feature heavily in their posts as part of the structure of the discourse domain (Puschmann 2010). These contrasting pronoun findings further support the assertion made in the previous section that blogs do not represent a single register but can be more or less ‘involved’ in orientation. This point emphasizes the importance of register in understanding how pronouns get taken up online, and what type of connections users are trying to make with their audiences. Along such lines, Eric Friginal, Oksana Waugh, and Ashley Titak (2017) set out to examine the overall linguistic profile of Facebook and Twitter texts, querying their predominant classification together in one register labelled ‘microblogging’. Multi-Dimensional Analysis was used. Their study built on Titak and Roberson’s earlier (2013) analysis, using the same methodology, in which they had identified four dimensions of web registers: (1) Personal Narrative Focus versus Descriptive, Informational Production; (2) Involved, Interactive Discourse; (3) Complex Statement of Opinion; and (4) Past versus Present Orientation. The result was that Facebook and Twitter texts sat on opposite sides of all four dimensions, creating a sense that the two platforms represent distinct registers. After qualitative analysis of the texts, they concluded that prolific use of hashtags on Twitter (when compared with Facebook posts) has an influence on the surrounding language use. Among other differences was a reduction in the number of pronouns used by making them optional where they would not normally be so (Friginal, Waugh, and Titak 2017). So, it seems that caution is required when making statements about any perceived or assumed decrease in the use of pronouns online; rather, one must consider genre, register, and pragmatic norms used by the same people as they traverse the online/offline nexus (De Oliveira 2013). Communities of practice can develop their own ways of using pronouns online, and despite the potentially global dispersal of a community’s members, their frequent interaction together online can lead to idiosyncratic patterns that do not align with the findings of more generalized studies of how pronoun usage is, on the whole, related to online genres and registers. These exceptions are often attributable to the fact that people use platforms for various purposes depending on their priorities at the time, or the priorities of a community.

2.2  Flouting or ignoring established norms Zakia Bano and Aleem Shakir (2015) conducted a corpus analysis of personal pronouns on university websites. Their corpus included one hundred ‘About Us’ sections from universities in India, eightythree from Pakistan, eighty-seven from the United Kingdom, one hundred from the United States, and ninety-three from Australia. In creating online marketing information, writers of websites’ ‘about us’ sections in all five countries prioritized using first person plural we to talk about university communities to ‘evoke camaraderie, unison, familiarity and friendship’ and encourage applications (Bano and Shakir 2015: 138). This trend is notable because other conceivable approaches could create a separation of campus communities and the administration, interpreting ‘About Us’ to mean ‘About the Institution’. Hypothetically, use of third person they to refer to the communities and what they do could create social distance between the website writers and the students. Alternatively, they could refer to the communities without using any pronouns (e.g., ‘This community supports students’ or ‘The campus culture encourages’). Instead, the inclusive we blurs the line between administration and students. Another instructive example of expected register norms not being followed is in a study by Lexi Webster (2019) on an online forum for transgender people. It emerged that first-person singular 77

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pronouns were the most prevalent type of pronoun used, which sits against the expectation that forum posts will be mostly informative. Webster argues that this is both due to the genre predominant in the forum (i.e., introduction posts), but also representative of the fact that there is not one, homogeneous transgender identity and that most posters focused on describing their own personal experience rather than generalizing. In another example, Wang Fang and Sahar Karimi (2019) studied how individuals evaluating online product reviews generally rated reviews that included firstperson pronouns (e.g., ‘this product was helpful “for me”’) as less helpful than reviews that did not use first-person pronouns. In these cases, pronoun usage created different moves of alignment and dealignment with stances in the review depending on the goals of both the poster and the reader. In addition to cases where norms are not followed, as above, Roel Coesemans and Barbara De Cock (2017) found that register conventions such as those revealed via Multi-Dimensional Analysis (see section on Pronouns and Register above) can also be flouted in ways that are useful on platforms like Twitter. In their study, personal pronouns were often avoided by politicians communicating in Belgian Dutch on Twitter for professional branding and identity, with the 140–character limit being a motivating factor; however, equally important was a motivation to refer to themselves in the third person using ‘hashtagged’ proper nouns and Twitter handles (e.g., @name) because one’s name is more eminently ‘searchable’ (Coesemans and De Cock 2017). This internal variation serves as a reminder that the identification of registers via Multi-Dimensional Analysis of corpora is based not on an expectation that there will be unique features between compared platforms but rather that features vary by frequency of co-occurrence between those platforms. In other words, there is a finite set of linguistic features that are shared across platforms, but they combine together in distinctive ways that differentiate platform-based registers. These methods do not provide much insight into what effects might drive internal variations that flout register conventions for pronoun use or even flout grammatical requirements. Rather, we must turn to pragmatics for these insights. Null subject, or the absence of subject pronouns, is a case in point. Standard English is considered a non-null subject variety because subject pronouns are standardly overtly realized; for instance, a speaker must say It is raining and not Is raining. Yet a ‘diary style’ also occurs in which phrases like Went to the chemist are common (Haegeman and Ihsane 1999). This style was first identified in diaries but has also been observed in phone text messages and emails, and yet it is still marked as exceptional (Scott 2013) and so serves as an example of pragmatics-driven flouting of conventions. However, in some varieties of English (e.g., Hong Kong English, Indian English, and Singaporean English) null subjects are less marked in this way (Schröter 2019). For example, in Singaporean English it is common to use constructs such as Don’t know when can get a car and this variation is explained as an influence from Hokkien (Schröter and Kortmann 2016). But the diary style identified above (e.g., Went to the store) is possible in standard English despite its marked status and has sometimes been attributed to the accessibility of the writer as referent (i.e., it’s clear who is being referred to), an observation that also extends to various forms of electronic communication in which referents remain clearly in view on the screen. On closer analysis, however, it appears that the pragmatics of null subjects in standard English as used online might be better explained using relevance theory. Along such lines, Kate Scott (2013) has questioned the accessibility of the intended referent as the sole cause for this use of null subjects, because otherwise null subjects would be evident in a wider range of contexts and more consistently used in blogs, emails, and text messages (where a null subject remains optional). Instead, applying relevance theory, she suggests that it is more productive to query the degree to which a language producer feels a formal requirement of a variety can be relaxed because it is superfluous (e.g., realized subject pronouns) and leaving it out produces effects that justify the extra effort required by the receiver to understand. She categorizes these effects into null subject cases producing: an intimate tone of mutual understanding (e.g., Forgot to mention, saw my ex-boyfriend Mike at the weekend); a freeing up of more crucial resources under time or space pressure (e.g. note-taking, Can 78

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be integrated. Needs investigation); or directly communicating the very irrelevance of the subject so as to highlight something else (e.g., desired action, To be collected. Spoke to waste services.). All of these pragmatic effects can be generated online or offline, so if we are to frame a pronoun pattern as more relevant to electronic communication than other contexts, the burden lies with the analyst to demonstrate that its relevance is entangled with technological mediation on some level.

2.3  Pronouns and politeness on the Web Another topic that appears in the literature on the use of pronouns online is that of the T (informal) and V (formal) second-pronoun distinction in European languages (e.g., French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and German). Between unacquainted adults face to face, the V pronoun is the unmarked form of address in German, and yet Heinz Kretzenbacher and Doris Schüpbach (2015) argue that there is a lingering perception in Germany about the high prevalence of T use online, a sensibility left over from the early days of the Internet when a sense of comradery existed among the relatively small numbers of people using it regularly. They point out that this sense is not born out in research, with present-day German writers on news forums rarely using it, instead opting to elide pronouns or use the V variant (Kretzenbacher and Schüpbach 2015). What they found was that the distribution of V and T varied from one online community of practice to another, with V actually more common overall. Then again, there are some studies on other languages where T emerges as prevalent in online spaces. Daniel Foster, Suzanne Aalberse, and Wessel Stoop (2019) have used corpus linguistics to investigate Colombian Spanish on Twitter, revealing that previously documented offline differences between regions hold true online (i.e., significantly higher use of V in Cali and Medellín regions than Bogotá). On the other hand, in all regions, T occurs at a higher frequency in Twitter. They suggest the informal nature of the medium probably explains their results. In the case of Bahasa Indonesia, Aisahand Saifullah (2020) examined the use of Indonesian pronouns in Tweets directed at the president, finding that online users could connect directly with authority figures by using informal pronouns to put themselves on the same level as the president. Polite address to a president in Bahasa Indonesia calls for use of the neutral pronoun Bapak/Pak or alternatively Bapak Presiden, but netizens alternated these address terms with informal pronouns such as Lu/Loe or Kamu, which show equality. The authors attribute this finding to a greater level of incivility and impoliteness online and not to more positive phenomena like empowerment or equality. Clearly more research is needed to develop a clearer picture of how online pronoun usage and politeness interact in different varieties and cultures around the globe.

3.  Innovation in pronoun practices in online spaces As reviewed above, extensive research has shown the role that pronouns play in indexing social register, politeness, and community identity both online and offline. Online platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter have been shown to be crucial spaces for the innovation and spread of ‘neopronouns’ – that is, newly coined pronouns (Storoshenko 2021), and inclusive pronoun forms in languages, such as French (Swamy and Mackenzie 2019). Ehm Milternsen’s (2016) survey of 134 transgender Tumblr users identified 78 unique sets of personal pronouns, the majority being neopronouns or ‘nounself pronouns’, which are ‘pronoun [sets] derived from a noun’. Some of the trans Tumblr users surveyed by Miltersen in that study developed new pronoun sets that were in line with aspects of their gender identities or other nouns they felt an affinity with (e.g., a pronoun set derived from ‘bunny’: bun/bun/ buns/bunself or a more commonly used neopronoun set derived from ‘fae’: fae/faer/faers/faerself). However, most survey respondents reported primarily using neopronoun sets in online spaces, asking only online friends to refer to them with these neopronouns because of the anticipated stigma of asking friends and family outside of online communities to use these innovative forms. Ultimately, 79

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the Internet has been a critical site for the increased awareness of pronoun inclusivity and innovation, which will be discussed more in the following section.

3.1  ‘Pronouns in bio’: Metalinguistic awareness of pronouns online The earlier sections in this chapter outlined research on changes in pronoun usage in online spaces as well as studies on register, pragmatics, politeness, and connection through pronouns online. Often these aforementioned changes are happening below the level of awareness of the language user. However, over the past decade there has been an increased recognition of pronouns as a grammatical category due to the efforts of transgender communities to raise awareness about misgendering and the importance of respecting a person’s pronouns. Looking at posts from English-using Twitter and Instagram users, this section will explore how the affordances of online platforms, specifically ‘pronouns in bio’, has led to certain social and political effects. One aspect of the social Internet (i.e., online websites or applications that promote communication between users) that has created a greater awareness of pronouns, specifically third-person (gendered) pronouns, is the practice of putting one’s pronouns in an account profile description, or ‘bio’. Putting one’s ‘pronouns in bio’ tells other users how to appropriately refer to the user, especially in a context where there is often no other gender information available. This practice began within trans communities as a way to make sure that people were being appropriately referred to and rose in popularity presumably in tandem with the practice of pronoun introductions in IRL (‘in real life’) settings, such as asking all members of a meeting to go around and introduce themselves with their names and pronouns. The increase of people including pronouns in their bios has led to growing metalinguistic discussion about pronouns and their relevance as part of trans-inclusive language practices. This section will explore how ‘pronouns in bio’, as a uniquely online practice, has led to a broader metalinguistic awareness of pronouns and their role in discourse, but, in turn, has to led to their politicization. Platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook have space for users to describe themselves and provide context (and sometimes even disclaimers) for what will be found on their profile. For example, Twitter bios might include things like ‘linguist’, ‘cat person’ or ‘retweets ≠ endorsements’ or ‘opinions are my own and not the views of my employer’. Users find creative ways to identify themselves in their bios, and it has become increasingly commonplace for users to display their pronouns. People often include their pronouns in addition to other descriptive information, typically including the nominative and accusative forms (i.e., subject and object forms) of the pronouns in one or more languages.​ As seen in the examples above, users can display their pronouns both in the name field as well as in the bio. Some users identify multiple pronoun sets in English, and others identify sets in various languages. They can be seen both in more personal profiles as well as in professional ones. Further, it is not only trans and gender-diverse people who include ‘pronouns in bio’, some high-profile cisgender celebrities and politicians also have included their pronouns in their social media profiles. For example, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris putting their pronouns in their bio made headlines (Powys Maurice 2020), apparently being the first presidential candidates who had featured their pronouns in their social media.​ While users initially took initiative to use the affordances and customizability of social media profiles to include pronoun information, now some social media sites are creating built-in places for users to provide personal pronoun information. For example, Instagram created a unique field where people can input their pronouns and it will populate on a person’s Instagram profile in small text next to their name. The feature, rolled out in May of 2021, allows users to edit their profile information to add their pronouns. The VP of Instagram announced on Twitter that the feature is ‘another way to express yourself on Instagram and we’ve seen a lot of people adding pronouns already, so hopefully 80

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Figure 6.1  Four Twitter bios with pronouns represented in various ways

Figure 6.2  Elizabeth Warren’s Twitter bio with pronouns ‘she/her/hers’ listed

this makes it even easier’ (Shah 2021). This reflects the current social understanding of pronouns as far more than a grammatical category, but rather a way that people can ‘express [themselves]’ on a social media site. The prominence of ‘pronouns in bio’ is not restricted to social media, however. The practice has gained traction in other domains, such as the inclusion of pronouns in email signatures along with other contact information. The inclusion of pronouns in email signatures serves a similar function to that of pronouns in bios but signifies the move of this practice from social spaces to professional spaces. Additionally, some dating apps (e.g., Grindr) have now added sections for pronouns in people’s bios (Colvin 2020). However, while the ability to add gender pronouns in a dating app bio is an important recognition of gender diversity, most of these apps still maintain a binary gender sorting system for the sorting algorithm (i.e., you have to sort by men or women). The infrastructure of the app is still trans-exclusive and reinforces a gender binary system; this is a clear example of the ways in which the recognition of pronouns in online spaces does not necessarily lead to an overall understanding of trans identities. There are varying stances towards the effectiveness of including pronouns in online platforms (e.g., in a profile bio or an email signature). On one hand, the practice of listing pronouns is a tool to normalize the fact that all people have pronouns that they want others to use in reference to them. When cis and trans people indicate a ‘pronoun in bio’ it may serve as a reminder that it is not always possible to assume the pronouns that a person would like for others to use in reference to them based on gender expression or presentation. However, the question remains if adding pronouns to the bio can be a superficial act of allyship when trans-inclusive practices do not extend beyond that. That is because adding one’s own pronouns into a bio is often an easy change, but there is currently no 81

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empirical evidence that it leads to the usage of trans people’s correct pronouns by cisgender people more widely in the online/offline nexus. Additionally, there are cases where transgender people may not want to out themselves, or disclose a transgender identity, and thus may not feel comfortable highlighting their pronouns in such a way. An instructive example of the polarization of the practice of putting ‘pronouns in bio’ is that an online search for the phrase yields two opposing journalistic op-eds: ‘Putting your pronouns in your bio is a revolutionary act’ (Dudenhoeffer 2020) and ‘Putting your pronouns in your bio is not the revolutionary step you think it is’ (De Fritas 2021). Further, there is no evidence that the salience of pronouns within popular discourse leads to greater metalinguistic awareness of how pronouns function in English. In fact, within debates about the use of singular they as a gender-neutral alternative, it becomes clear that many users, in fact, are not aware of their own pronoun usage (as in 3). (3) Why would I discuss a person that is not in my presence; and not know whether they identify as he or she? (Facebook comment about singular they) The user seems to imply that they would never have to use singular they, because they would know if the person they are talking about used he or she pronouns, but, while doing so, does in fact use the generic singular they in the same sentence. Furthermore, the increased awareness of pronoun practices in online spaces has led to a politicization of pronouns. Some trans advocates anticipated that the increasing awareness around pronouns would lead to normalization of gender-inclusive pronoun practices, yet the current climate of political polarization in the United States can serve as an example of what can go wrong. Online discourses about pronouns have led to the creation of a specific characterological figure of a ‘woke liberal’ who displays ‘pronouns’, while other ‘regular’ people do not do so. The two examples below show how a disparaging use of ‘pronouns’ often appears on Twitter: (4) Some of y’all have more pronouns than brain cells. (Twitter post from Blaire White) (5) My preferred pronouns are: MA/GA (Twitter post from Madison Cawthorn) In (4), popular conservative Twitter user Blaire White characterizes people who use multiple sets of personal pronouns (generally transgender and nonbinary individuals) as being unintelligent. In (5), North Carolina Republican State Senator Madison Cawthorn plays off the growing practices of sharing pronouns by inserting a political slogan (‘MAGA’, ‘make America Great Again’, the slogan of former US President Donald Trump) into a popular pronoun format. These two examples demonstrate how both the recognition of ‘having’ pronouns (4) as well as the practice of sharing personal pronouns are politicized as belonging to the left in current US politics (5). As discourses about pronouns continue to circulate online, pronouns will continue to become tied to ideological positions and it remains to be seen if that, in turn, impacts their use.

4.  Future directions Pronouns play a large role in online communication, and there are still many areas in which future research can continue to explore and develop these areas of scholarship. One possible line of future inquiry is to expand on the examination of online use of pronouns at the interface of genres, registers, sociolinguistic performances, pragmatic conventions, and social spaces. For example, future research might expand to emerging platforms, as many previous studies focus on platforms that are quickly becoming outdated (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), as well as to attend to platforms that feature multimodal engagement (e.g., TikTok). As online spaces continue to expand and shift, research employing corpus linguistics methods, metalinguistic approaches, and qualitative descriptions of 82

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community practices can explore if some web environments are more pronoun-flexible than others, and how this impacts pronoun usage. Further, keeping in mind the online/offline nexus and how our lives are lived, more or less, across both time and space (if we have access to online spaces), future research should continue to consider how decisions about pronoun use between interlocutors can be made offline and then influence their interaction online (and vice versa). Importantly, future research should work to further broaden the scope to include pronoun usage in (thus far) unexamined varieties, allowing for a clearer picture of how much the medium is shaping the message – do we all tweet alike cross-linguistically? Do pro-drop language varieties still drop freely? Different varieties will be associated with different pronoun habits, and there is much research to be done into null pronouns in Chinese or, contrastingly, the apparently much more productive nature of pronouns in Japanese. How does the expanded ability to use nouns as pronouns in Japanese (Nishimura 2017) and other languages (varieties in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and Thailand among others; Thomason 2001) get taken up on various electronic communication platforms in distinctive and creative ways as language users interact with the various types of mediation these platforms entail? As more and more communities of language users gain access to online platforms, future research can continue to explore the online language practices of these communities and how their pronoun usage appears in these contexts. Following the increased metalinguistic discourses about how pronouns are used online, future research should explore how the inclusion of pronouns in online social media bios impacts pronoun use going forward. While online spaces have facilitated some trans-inclusive pronoun practices, there has also been the reactionary politicization of pronouns, and we have yet to see how/if that process could have an impact on pronoun usage online and offline in years to come. Finally, online platforms are shifting, with new and emerging digital technologies bearing their own affordances and constraints, and Internet users will likely continue to adapt and shift their pronoun practices in these new spaces. It will be the task of language researchers to keep abreast of these changes through innovative research.

References Androutsopoulos, J. (2006). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 419–438. Bano, Z. and Shakir, A. (2015). Personal pronouns in ‘about us’ section of online university prospectus. Journal of Education and Practice 6(1): 133–139. Berber Sardinha, T. (2018). Dimensions of variation across internet registers. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23(2): 125–157. Berber Sardinha, T. (2022). A text typology of social media. Register Studies 4: 138–170. Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. and Conrad, S. (2009). Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biber, D. (2014). The ubiquitous oral versus literate dimension: A survey of multidimensional studies. In J. Connor-Linton and L. Wander Amoroso (eds) Measured Language: Quantitative Approaches to Acquisition, Assessment, and Variation. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 1–20. Biber, D. (2019). Multi-dimensional analysis: A historical synopsis. In T. Berber Sardinha and M. Veirano Pinto (eds) Multi-Dimensional Analysis: Research Methods and Current Issues. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 11–26. Biber, D. and Egbert, J. (2020). Orality on the searchable web: A comparison of involved web registers and face-to-face conversation. In E. Jonsson and T. Larsson (eds) Voices Past and Present – Studies of Involved, Speech-Related and Spoken Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 317–336. Clarke, I. (2018). Stylistic variation in Twitter trolling. In J. Golbeck (ed.) Online Harassment. Cham: Springer, pp. 151–178. Coesemans, R. and De Cock, B. (2017). Self-reference by politicians on Twitter: Strategies to adapt to 140 characters. Journal of Pragmatics 116: 37–50. Colvin, C. (2020). Putting your pronouns in your dating app​.b​io can mean everything to GNC people. Elite Daily 9 October 2020. Available at https://www​.elitedaily​.com​/p​/heres​-why​-you​-should​-put​-your​-pronouns​ -in​-your​-dating​-app​-bio​-even​-if​-youre​-cis​-32800602.

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Brian W. King and Archie Crowley Crowley, A. and Chun, E. (2021). Online research and new media. In S.M. Perrino and S.E. Pritzker (eds) Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 297–330. De Fritas, S. (2021). Putting your pronouns in your bio is not the revolutionary step you think it is. The Journal 28 June 2021. Available at https://www​.queensjournal​.ca​/story/(2021-06-27/opinions/ putting-your-pronouns-in-your-bio-is-not-the-revolutionary-step-you-think-it-is/. De Oliveira, S.M. (2013). Address in computer-mediated communication. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein and T. Virtanen (eds) Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 291–313. Du Bartell, D. (1995). Discourse features of computer-mediated communication: ‘spoken-like’ and ‘writtenlike’. In B. Wårvik, S. Tanskanen and R. Hiltunen (eds) Organization in Discourse: Proceedings from the Turku Conference. Turku: University of Turku, pp. 231–239. Dudenhoeffer, D. (2020). Putting your pronouns in your bio is a revolutionary act. The Standard 1 October 2020. Available at https://www​.the​-standard​.org​/opinion​/dudenhoeffer​-putting​-your​-pronouns​-in​-your​-bio​-is​ -a​-revolutionary​-act​/article​_0446538e​-03e3​-11eb​-a135​-1fe10d212707​.html. Foster, D., Aalberse, S. and Stoop, W. (2019). Examining twitter as a source for address research using Colombian Spanish. In B. Kluge and M.I. Moyna (eds) It’s Not All about You: New Perspectives on Address Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 75–97. Friginal, E., Waugh, O. and Titak, A. (2017). Linguistic variation in Facebook and Twitter posts. In E. Frignal (ed.) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 342–362. Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Postscript: Computer-mediated communication in sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 548–557. Gruber, H. (1997). E-mail discussion lists: A new genre of scholarly communication? Wiener Linguistische Gazette 60–61: 24–43. Gruber, H. (2000). Scholarly email discussion list postings: A single new genre of academic communication? In L. Pemberton and S. Shurville (eds) Words on the Web: Computer-Mediated Communication. Exeter: Intellect Books, pp. 36–44. Gruber, H. (2013). Mailing list communication. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein and T. Virtanen (eds) Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 55–82. Haegeman, L. and Ihsane, T. (1999). Subject ellipsis in embedded clauses in English. English Language and Linguistics 3(1): 117–145. Herring, S.C. (1996). Two variants of an electronic message schema. In S.C. Herring (ed.) Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 91–109. Jaworska, S. and Sogomonian, T. (2019). After we #VoteLeave we can #TakeControl: Political campaigning and imagined collectives on Twitter before the Brexit vote. In U. Lutzky and M. Nevala (eds) Reference and Identity in Public Discourses. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 181–202. Jones, R.H. (2010). Cyberspace and physical space: Attention structures in computer-mediated communication. In A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum, pp. 151–167. Jones, R.H. and Hafner, C.A. (2021). Understanding Digital Literacies (second edition). Abingdon: Routledge. Jonsson, E. (2015). Conversational Writing: A Multidimensional Study of Synchronous and Supersynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. King, B.W. (2019). Communities of Practice in Language Research: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Kretzenbacher, H.L. and Schüpbach, D. (2015). Communities of addressing practice? Address in internet forums based in German-speaking countries. In C. Norrby and C. Wide (eds) Address Practice as Social Action: European Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 33–53. Maynor, N. (1994). The language of electronic mail: Written speech? In G.D. Little and M. Montgomery (eds) Centennial Usage Studies. Publication of the American Dialect Society 78. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 48–55. Miltersen, E.H. (2016). Nounself pronouns: 3rd person personal pronouns as identity expression. Journal of Language Works-Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift 1(1): 37–62. Nishimura, Y. (2017). Age, gender and identities in Japanese blogs: Analysis of role language as stylization. In S. Leppänen, E. Westinen and S. Kytölä (eds) Social Media Discourse, (Dis)Identifications and Diversities. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 263–86. Powys Maurice, E. (2020). Kamala Harris’s simple act of trans solidarity proves why she’ll be the most inclusive vice president in history. PinkNews 7 November 2020. Available athttps://www​.thepinknews​.com/ (20(20/11/07/kamala-harris-trans-transgender-lgbt-pronouns-vice-president-elect-joe-biden/.

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The future of pronouns in the online/offline nexus Puschmann, C. (2010). Thank you for thinking we could: Use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs. In H. Dorgeloh and A. Wanner (eds) Syntactic Variation and Genre. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 167–191. Puschmann, C. (2013). Blogging. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein and T. Virtanen (eds) Pragmatics of ComputerMediated Communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 83–108. Schröter, V. (2019). Null Subjects in Englishes: A Comparison of British English and Asian Englishes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Schroeter, V. and Kortmann, B. (2016). Pronoun deletion in Hong Kong English and colloquial Singaporean English. World Englishes 35: 221–241. Scott, K. (2013). Pragmatically motivated null subjects in English: A relevance theory perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 53: 68–83. Shah, V. (2021). Now you can add pronouns to your profile with a new field. It’s another way to express yourself on Instagram and we’ve seen a lot of people adding pronouns already, so hopefully this makes it even easier. Available in a few countries today with plans for more. Https://T.Co/2JBD8WHI4H. Tweet @vishalshahis (blog) 11 May 2021. Available at https://twitter​.com​/vishalshahis​/status​/1392(198164422139908. Storoshenko, D.R. (2021). Online communities of use for neoreflexives. Presented at Lavender Languages and Linguistics 27. California Institute of Integral Studies, 5 May 2021. Swamy, V. and Louisa, M. (2019). Legitimizing ‘iel’? Language and trans communities in francophone and anglophone spaces. H-France Salon 11(14): 1–9. Thomason, S.G. (2001). Language Contact. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Titak, A. and Roberson, A. (2013). Dimensions of web registers: An exploratory multidimensional comparison. Corpora 8: 235–260. Uhlirova, L. (1994). E-mail as a new subvariety of medium and its effects upon the message. In S. Cmejrkova (ed.) The Syntax of Sentence and Text. Festschrift for Frantisek Danes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 273–282. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang, F. and Karimi, S. (2019). This product works well (for me): The impact of first-person singular pronouns on online review helpfulness. Journal of Business Research 104(November): 283–294. Webster, L. (2019). ‘I am I’: Self-constructed transgender identities in internet-mediated forum communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 256: 129–146. Yates, S.J. (1996). Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing: A corpus based study. In S.C. Herring (ed.) Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 29–47.

Further reading Berber Sardinha, T. (2022). Corpus linguistics and the study of social media: A case study using multi-dimensional analysis. In A. O’Keeffe and M.J. McCarthy (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (second edition). London: Routledge, pp. 656–674. Katta, S. (2021). Why are they all obsessed with gender? — (non)binary navigations through technological infrastructures. Designing Interactive Systems Conference (2021 (DIS '21), 28 June 28–2 July 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York.

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PART 2

Processing and categorisation

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7 PRONOUNS IN THE BRAIN Joanna Porkert, Hanneke Loerts, Anja Schüppert, and Merel Keijzer

1. Introduction Linking a pronoun to a previously mentioned referent is generally referred to as pronoun resolution. The processing of pronoun resolution is a subject that is widely investigated within psycholinguistics, as it can lead to a better understanding of general language processes in the human mind. Much about these language processes is still unclear, which makes it especially interesting to explore how the language processing system responds to grammatically erroneous sentences, for example, as with pronoun disagreement (see example (1)), as this may help to understand how language processing in general unfolds. (1) The hungry waitress ordered *himself a burger. (2) The hungry waitress ordered herself a burger. (Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin 1997: 284) In what sense does the processing of an ungrammatical sentence, such as example (1), differ from the processing of a sentence where the pronoun matches the head noun in terms of biological gender (2) and what does that reveal about how language processing unfolds in real-time? These questions are at the basis of this chapter which aims at (1) giving a general introduction to the event-related potential (ERP) technique; a method that is being used widely in psycholinguistic research for the observation of language processing; (2) giving a general overview over ERP research on pronoun processing; and (3) making a systematic review of psycholinguistic ERP research on gender stereotype processing in order to highlight current developments within ERP research and pronoun processing. The ERP technique applied to electroencephalography (EEG) data has been shown to be particularly useful for investigating language processing in real time (i.e., it is called an online method). EEG records changes in the electrical signal at various locations on the scalp using electrodes. This technique is very useful to study the time-course of language processing due to its high temporal resolution: it can uniquely record changes in the brain signal as the brain responds to a given stimulus, within the millisecond range. Other brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) cannot show the brain’s immediate response to input in this way (Tolentino and Tokowicz 2011). The high temporal resolution of EEG methods is highly relevant when focusing on the different steps of language processing, as it captures these steps as the input unfolds. The output of an EEG measurement is generally visualized as separate lines (Figure 7.1), with each line reflecting miniscule

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-9

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Figure 7.1  Left: A subject performing an ERP task; right: continuous raw EEG data measured during reading task

voltage changes of one electrode at a specific scalp site over a continuous time course (measured in microvolts (mV)). However, these continuous waves are of little use to linguists in their raw form: they lack information as to when and which word a research participant was attending to. Researchers are interested in the brain signal changes in response to a critical word of a sentence. The brain signal in response to, for example, the incongruent reflexive pronoun himself in example (1) can be compared to the congruent reflexive pronoun herself in (2). In a basic psycholinguistic EEG paradigm, example (2) as the correct sentence forms the control baseline, and responses to this baseline are compared to responses to an experimental condition (where sentences contain reflexive pronoun disagreement). To do that, the so-called event-related potential technique (ERP) is applied to the EEG data. With this technique, a marker is added to the continuous EEG data whenever a critical word is shown or played to the subject. This marker also indexes the condition to which the critical word belongs to allow for a comparison between baseline (control) and experimental (or nonstandard) conditions. After recording the EEG for many different sentences in the control condition and as many different sentences in the experimental condition, the brain signal time-locked to the critical words is extracted and averaged for all sentences per condition across all subjects and then compared. The results of this grand averaging process are typically visualized in a graph (such as Figure 7.2). The control condition is understood as the default language processing trajectory, while changes in an experimental condition in comparison to this control condition can be attributed to the only difference between the two: in this case pronoun (dis)agreement. The averaged lines in Figure 7.2 thus depict language processing of a specific word. They usually contain positive and/or negative peaks, which have been shown to reflect the different mental processes that take place during language processing. These peaks are called components and are mostly classified and named according to how many milliseconds after the onset of the critical word they appear (i.e., their onset latency), whether their voltage is more positive or more negative than in the control condition (i.e., their polarity), and/or their scalp distribution (i.e., their topography). There are some exceptions to this naming convention, such as the LAN (left anterior negativity) for example. Conventionally, in graphs, negative polarity is plotted upward and positive polarity downward (cf. Luck 2014). The amplitude of a component, i.e., the peak’s magnitude, is of great interest and is usually compared between conditions. If the mean amplitude of the peak (within a specified time-window) of the experimental condition is significantly higher than in the control condition, it implies that the process associated with the component took place in a more pronounced way for the experimental condition. But what exactly do all of the different components 90

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Figure 7.2  Summary of ERP technique: Markers of the critical words in the continuous EEG data, and subsequent averaging of the signal per condition as visualization of the components

during language processing reflect? That is still a matter of debate. Currently, the N400 and the P600 are the most widely studied and, therefore, the most prominently described components in the psycholinguistic language processing literature.

2.  The N400 and the P600 The N400 is a negative-going voltage deflection in a time-window between 200 and 600 ms after critical-stimulus onset, usually peaking around 400 ms. It is typically largest in right centro-parietal sites of the scalp (Swaab et al. 2012). However, it is important to note that the fact that a component is maximal at one brain area does not imply that that brain area is the origin of the brain activity associated with that particular component (Meulman et al. 2016). The N400 is a widely studied component whose amplitude is highly sensitive to semantic violations and is traditionally found for unexpected words given the context. Consider examples (3) and (4). (3) The Dutch trains are sour and crowded. (4) The Dutch trains are yellow and crowded. (Hagoort et al. 2004: 439; translated from Dutch) In example (3), the description of a train as being sour will most likely be highly unexpected for listeners/readers. Processing this sentence, therefore, typically elicits an N400 when compared to a sentence like (4), in which no such unexpectancies occur. There are several factors that influence the amplitude of the N400, such as cloze probability (that is, the likelihood that a sentence will end with a specific word; e.g., Loerts, Stowe, and Schmid 2013), word frequency (e.g., Barber, Vergara, and Carreiras 2004), or word repetition (the critical word has been mentioned in the word list, sentence, or text before; e.g., van Petten et al. 1991). The P600, by contrast, is a slow and generally long-lasting positive voltage shift of the brain signal with a post-stimulus onset at around 500 ms and peaking at around 600 ms (although a clear peak is often absent, see Swaab et al. 2012). The P600 is usually observed at centro-parietal and sometimes frontal brain electrode sites (e.g., Kaan and Swaab 2003). The P600 was originally called a syntactic positive shift (SPS; Hagoort, Brown, and Groothusen 1993) because the component reflects a drift rather than a peak and it is sensitive to (morpho-)syntactic violations such as disagreement of phrase 91

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structures (e.g., Hagoort, Brown, and Groothusen 1993), tense (e.g., Osterhout and Nicol 1999), number (e.g., Coulson, King, and Kutas 1998), case (e.g., Lamers et al. 2006), or grammatical gender (e.g., Loerts, Stowe, and Schmid 2013). Furthermore, syntactically ambiguous or syntactically complex sentences (e.g., garden-path sentences) are known to influence the P600 amplitude as well (e.g., Kaan and Swaab 2003). While the N400 is traditionally viewed as a semantic component modulated by meaning violations or unexpectancies, the P600 is conventionally regarded as a syntactic component influenced by grammatical violations. Thus, covering the two central aspects of language processing, word meaning and grammatical structure, they have been viewed as complementary components (Swaab et al. 2012). However, more and more research suggests that the underlying processes reflected by the two components, especially by the P600, are more complex and might not even be specific to human language. Deacon et al. (2004) proposed that the N400 reflects an orthographic/phonological analysis before semantic integration takes place, as its amplitude also increases for pseudo-words. Hagoort, Baggio, and Willems (2009), by contrast, interpret the N400 amplitude as reflecting the difficulty of integrating meaning within the given discourse context. Yet others have taken the N400 to reflect semantic access and its amplitude to be ‘a general index of the ease or difficulty of retrieving stored conceptual knowledge associated with a word (or another meaningful stimuli [sic])’ (Kutas, Van Petten, and Kluender 2006: 669). However, according to Kutas and Federmeier (2011), none of these theories fully explain all conditions and circumstances under which an N400 is elicited. In attempting to merge these different views, Nieuwland et al. (2020) recently suggested, based on evidence by a large-scale replication study, that the N400 reflects a cascaded process of both semantic retrieval and integration, as both word predictability and sentence plausibility affected the N400 emergence in their study. Conventionally, theories claimed the P600 to reflect the syntactic re-analysis of a sentence (e.g., Friederici 1995) or its amplitude to index the difficulty of syntactic integration (e.g., Kaan, Harris, and Gibson 2000). The unexpected discovery of the so-called semantic P600, a P600 elicited for grammatically correct sentences but with a specific case of semantic violations, was a turning point. Specifically, grammatically correct sentences in which the sentence parts were semantically related, but erroneous in thematic role order (see example (5)), were found to elicit a P600. (5) The hearty meal was devouring the kids (Kim and Osterhout 2005: 208). Researchers have tried to resolve this issue in two ways: (1) by proposing multi-stream models of language processing that challenge dominant, traditional syntacto-centric processing views (i.e., that the syntactic structure is central when processing a sentence and cannot be overruled by semantic aspects, for example; e.g., Kim and Osterhout 2005, van Herten et al. 2006, Hagoort, Baggio, and Willems 2009), or (2) by proposing that the P600 does not reflect syntactic processing, but semantic integration instead, a process that has conventionally been associated with the N400 (Brouwer, Fitz, and Hoeks 2012). The latter proposal would also raise serious questions about what the N400 actually reflects. In addition, research has cast doubt on the premise that there is only one type of P600. A thorough discussion of this is beyond the scope of this chapter, but for further reading, see Gonda, Tarrasch, and Ben (2020), Leckey and Federmeier (2020), and Tanner, Grey, and van Hell (2017). In sum, many language processing questions investigated by means of ERP research remain unanswered, especially as they relate to the P600(s). On top of that, there is currently much uncertainty about which processes the various components exactly reflect and whether they are language-specific or, rather, they reflect general cognitive processes involved in language processing. One way in which more light can be shed on these issues is by looking at ERP responses to pronouns, which is what this chapter sets out to do.

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3.  Pronoun processing and ERPs Research has shown that the process of pronoun resolution takes place immediately when encountering the pronoun (Streb, Henninghausen and Rösler 2004). This is why the ERP technique, with its high temporal resolution, is one of the online methods that have been commonly used to study the processing of pronouns. A pronoun is usually linked to and replaces a previously mentioned noun or noun phrase (NP) and it serves in making language more efficient. Pronoun resolution is a form of anaphora resolution, in which an anaphor (here: a pronoun) has to be linked to an earlier presented antecedent (here: a noun or NP). In example (2) – The hungry waitress ordered herself a burger – the antecedent is the noun waitress, and the anaphor the pronoun herself. Anaphora resolution in the case of pronoun resolution thus involves linking the pronoun with the appropriate antecedent. When doing so, we look out for cues that help us establish coherence between the information just processed and previous information. Research has shown that, in addition to grammatical cues, world knowledge, such as gender stereotype information, helps to establish coherence between the pronoun and its antecedent (Pyykkönen, Hyönä, and van Gompel 2010). In the Finnish eye-tracking study by Pyykkönen and colleagues, subjects based on the gender stereotype information of the antecedent preferred to link a gender-neutral pronoun with a referent of the stereotypically appropriate gender. Making use of the gender stereotype knowledge in order to link the current information in a discourse with previous information, is called a bridging inference or a backward inference (Clark 1975; Pyykkönen, Hyönä, and van Gompel 2010). In contrast to bridging inferences, we can also make forward inferences (Clark 1975). In gender stereotyping, an example of a forward inference would occur when encountering a stereotypical role noun such as “waitress” at the beginning of a sentence, and we come to expect a female referent. In summary, gender stereotype information can be a powerful cue during language processing, that can influence our expectations during language processing, and determines how we interpret language. In addition to linguistic and world knowledge (cf. Mitkov 2014), successful anaphora resolution is also influenced by factors such as working memory capacity (Fleva et al. 2017). Researchers have linked pronoun processing to four specific ERP components: the already mentioned N400, and P600, but also the LAN (Left Anterior Negativity), and the so-called Nref (whose name refers to the fact that the critical word can be linked to more than one referent). The LAN is an early negative shift that is commonly observed on the left side of the scalp (Swaab et al. 2012). Streb, Henninghausen, and Rösler (2004: 177) state that ‘LAN effects can be said to index increased load due to complex syntactic constructions’. Swaab et al. (2012) characterize it as similarly sensitive to syntactic violations as the P600, especially to agreement and word category violations. However, the two components do not reflect the same processes, because the LAN is always followed by a P600, while a P600 can be elicited independently (Swaab et al. 2012). With respect to pronoun processing, LANs have been found especially in response to incongruent sentences (depending on the listener’s/reader’s frame of reference) such as in the Spanish example (6) below. In this sentence, the pronoun’s gender is in disagreement with the clause to which it refers, where the neuter demonstrative pronoun in Spanish (ésto) should have been used instead. (6) La renuncia fue aceptada pero *éste no molestó al gerente. ‘The resignation was accepted, but *thisDEM-masc did not bother the manager’ (García-Sierra et al. 2021: 6) It is relevant to note that Kluender (2021: 659) describes the LAN as ‘perhaps the least well understood of the linguistic ERP components’, which actually may be an artifact that results from an overlap of the N400 and the P600 in the data, rather than a component on its own based on research by Tanner and van Hell (2014). The Nref is a negative shift in the brain signal of the frontal electrodes that is elicited for a specific case of referential ambiguity, when a pronoun could equally likely be linked to two antecedents (first described in van Berkum, Brown, and Hagoort 1999, van Berkum et al. 2003). Consider (7) below: 93

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(7) John saw David because he... (Nieuwland 2014: 4) In this sentence, it is ambiguous to which of the two antecedents (John or David) the pronoun he refers to. It has been reported that the Nref can be modulated by working memory capacity: Nieuwland and van Berkum (2006) and Nieuwland (2014) found that subjects with a high working memory capacity are more likely to show an Nref for a sentence like (7) than those with lower working memory capacity. This, in turn, suggests that people with a higher working memory capacity take plausible alternative referents more into account during language processing than those with a low working memory capacity. N400s have been found for very specific cases of pronoun processing, mostly in studies employing anaphora processing within a more extensive discourse rather than just in single sentences, for example, a pronoun as the first word of a new sentence following in the context of a short story (e.g., Streb, Rösler, and Henninghausen 1999, Streb, Henninghausen, and Rösler 2004, Filik et al. 2011, see example (8)). (8) The dietician had set high standards for her clients. A few of them lost enough weight. Their failure was reported to the consultant. (Filik et al. 2011: 3793) However, these studies did not look into pronoun disagreement, but rather into the effect of specific sentence manipulations, such as the usage of different kinds of quantifiers to which the pronoun refers (Filik et al. 2011, see example (8)), or they compared pronoun processing to proper name processing, while manipulating the length of distance between the antecedent and the anaphor (Streb, Rösler and Henninghausen 1999, Streb, Henninghausen and Rösler 2004). While Streb, Rösler, and Henninghausen (1999) and Streb, Henninghausen, and Rösler (2004) found that the distance between antecedent and anaphor affected the N400 amplitude, other studies (e.g., Hammer et al. 2008, Qiu et al. 2012) report an N400 when the antecedent and anaphor are in close proximity of each other, and a P600 for longer distances (see examples (9) and (10)). (9)

In the new round of competition for the outstanding individual, Panzhen (male name) earned acclaim. *She won the Model Worker award with an absolute advantage. (10) Panzhen (male name) earned acclaim. In the new round of competition for the outstanding individual, *she won the Model Worker award with an absolute advantage. (Qiu et al. 2012: 4; translated from Mandarin). The finding of an N400 for some types of pronoun mismatching is surprising given that these pronoun disagreements are traditionally regarded as syntactic anomalies. Indeed, as with other agreement violations, most studies examining pronoun processing at the sentence level report a P600 effect for pronoun violations (exemplified in (1)), especially with respect to gender mismatches (e.g., Osterhout and Mobley 1995, Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin 1997, Nieuwland and van Berkum 2006). P600s in response to gender mismatches are often reported when subjects are asked to judge every sentence on their grammaticality and, hence, expect some sentences to be ungrammatical; Nieuwland (2014) found Nrefs when no grammaticality judgements were required. Moving away from definitional gender mismatches, psycholinguistic ERP research has also widely investigated gender stereotype mismatches. Many of the studies investigating gender stereotypes used anaphora resolution paradigms in which the pronoun could be assumed to violate social gender norms. Example (11) illustrates this.

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(11) Our aerobics instructor gave himself a break. (Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin 1997: 284) The study by Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin (1997) was the first to compare ERP responses to gender stereotype mismatches, such as in example (11), to those elicited by definitional gender mismatches (like in example (1)). Contrary to expectations, they found a P600 effect for both types of mismatches, although the stereotype mismatch in (11) is considered to be of a semantic nature and was therefore hypothesized to elicit an N400. Following this early and seemingly contradictory work, subsequent psycholinguistic ERP studies investigating gender stereotype violations produced mixed results, and found either N400 (e.g., Molinaro, Su, and Carreiras 2016, Grant, Grey, and van Hell 2020) or P600 components (e.g., Canal, Garnham, and Oakhill 2015). However, these studies differ in the tasks they employed (especially the stimuli modality: spoken or written), which may have caused the differences in the ERP components elicited. Therefore, a brief systematic review of the psycholinguistic studies that investigated gender stereotyping with the ERP technique is warranted. The goal of this overview is to gain insight into the task-specifics that may have an effect on how such a semantic pronoun mismatch is processed. This may pave the ground for further in-depth analyses that will help to better understand the underlying nature of the N400 and the P600.

4.  ERPs and gender stereotypes 4.1  Methods For this overview, all psycholinguistic ERP studies investigating gender stereotype violations were gathered based on several inclusion criteria. First of all, gender stereotype violation studies that employed the ERP technique published in English and that used spoken or written linguistic stimuli consisting of single words or sentences were searched (see appendix for search methods). The search was performed as thoroughly as possible; however, it cannot be excluded that not all ERP studies that fit criteria were found. The studies found based on the search criteria consisted of three task types: reading tasks, priming tasks, and auditory tasks. For the scope of this overview, the studies were compared within their task type, as task type has implications with respect to the language structure and language processing. A summary of each task type and an overview of the different studies is given below. Studies were included only if they comprised one gender-stereotype congruent and one incongruent condition that were directly compared. The step-by-step search and inclusion procedure can be found in the Appendix of this chapter. Fourteen studies fit the inclusion criteria: seven studies employing a reading task, five studies a priming task, and two studies an auditory task. Coincidentally, participants in all fourteen studies were university students. Arguably, as gender stereotyping is likely to be affected by age and/or education, this limits the studies’ representativeness. Table 7.1 gives an overview of the selected studies, categorized according to task type. With the exception of two studies (Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin 1997, Lattner and Friederici 2003), all included studies are quite recent (2009–2020) and could be interpreted as representing a contemporary view on gender stereotyping in highly educated young adults in Western countries and China, which is coincidental and was not part of the selection criteria.

4.2  Reading tasks Half of the included studies (seven out of fourteen) were reading tasks that presented participants with single sentences, either word-by-word (Molinaro, Osterhout, Bersick. and McLaughlin 1997, Kreiner et al. 2009, Canal, Garnham, and Oakhill 2015, Su and Carreiras 2016, Su et al. 2016), phrase-by-phrase (Irmen, Hold, and Weisbrod 2010), or as an entire sentence (Proverbio, Orlandi, 95

96 lexical word - adjective

not applicable

not applicable

not applicable

Wang et al. (2017)

Pesciarelli, Scorolli and Cacciari (2019)

functional word - personal pronoun

lexical word - adjective, role noun

functional word - personal pronoun

lexical word - adjective

lexical word - noun

not applicable

not applicable

middle

Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli and Cacciari, (2012) Wang et al. (2016)

Grant, Grey and van Hell (2020) White et al. (2009)

final

Italian

Mandarin

Mandarin

Italian

English

English

German

Italian

Mandarin

Spanish

English

German

English

English

Task Language

30 (16 f.; 14 m.) 20 (11 f.; 9 m.) 26 (13 f.; 13 m.)

28 (14 f.; 14 m.) 23 (13 f.; 10 m.) 27 (14 f.; 13 m.)

34 (17 f.; 17 m.) 24 (12 f.; 12 m.) 40 (20 f.; 20 m.) 15 (7 f.; 8 m.) 32 (16 f.; 16 m.)

24 (13 f.; 11 m.)

28 (14 f.; 14 m.) 2 x 20 (no further information)

Number of Participants

yes (personal pronoun)

no

no

yes (personal pronoun)

no

yes (combining voice characteristics and self-referential sentences) no

yes (anaphora resolution; reflexive pronoun) no

yes (anaphora resolution; reflexive pronoun) no

yes (anaphora resolution, reflexive pronoun) yes (anaphora + cataphora resolution; reflexive pronoun) yes (anaphora resolution; noun phrase)

Forward inference?

1

We followed the naming of this ERP component as ‘early mismatch effect’ according to the paper of Kreiner et al. (2009) as this effect could not be related to an already known ERP component.

Priming Tasks (single words)

Auditory Tasks (sentences)

lexical words (role nouns, adjectives, proper names, verbs) lexical word - noun

functional word - reflexive pronoun

middle

final

lexical word - role noun

front

Proverbio, Orlandi and Bianchi (2017) Lattner and Friederici (2003)

functional word - reflexive pronoun

middle

Canal, Garnham and Oakhill (2015) Molinaro, Su and Carreiras (2016) Su et al. (2016)

functional word - reflexive pronoun

front or middle

lexical word - noun phrase

functional word - reflexive pronoun

middle

Word class critical word

middle

Osterhout, Bersick and McLaughlin (1997) Kreiner et al. (2009)

Reading Tasks (sentences)

Sentence position critical word

Irmen, Hold and Weisbrod (2010)

Study

Task Type

Table 7.1 Overview of task specifics of reviewed ERP studies for this chapter

N400

N400

N400

N400 (50%) for feminine role nouns only

N400

N400

P600

N400 and LAN

P600

P600 (50%) for anaphora; early mismatch effect1 for cataphora (see Endnotes) P600 (50%) for stereotypically masculine role nouns only P600 (and Nref for some subjects) N400

P600

Found Component Stereotype Incongruency

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and Bianchi 2017). Participants had to silently read the sentences while their brain signal to the critical words was recorded. Five out of seven of the reading studies (Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin 1997, Kreiner et al. 2009, Canal, Garnham, and Oakhill 2015, Su et al. 2016) used a stereotypical occupation as the subject of the main sentence and opted for anaphora resolution-type sentences with a reflexive pronoun, as in example (11), or a noun phrase as anaphor and critical word (e.g., ‘these men/women/people’; Irmen, Hold, and Weisbrod 2010). Molinaro, Su, and Carreiras (2016) decided to time-lock the ERP directly at the sentence-initial gendered occupational noun (e.g., ‘prostitutos’ - ‘prostitutesMASC’), as in Spanish, role nouns are generally marked for the biological sex of the referent. Proverbio, Orlandi, and Bianchi (2017) did not only examine occupational stereotypes, but also included, among other things, stereotypical housework and sport activities in Italian. They time-locked the ERP measurement to different kinds of sentence-final lexical items. As Italian is a pro-drop language and allows for the pronoun to be dropped, the actual sex of the subject could be made explicit at the end of the sentence. Consider the sentence-final adjective in example 12. (12) Finito di imbiancare, era stravolta. ‘Finished with painting, [she] was tiredthird.fem.’ (Proverbio, Orlandi, and Bianchi 2017: 11) Reading studies employing grammaticality judgement tasks always found a P600 for the genderstereotype incongruent tasks. This supports former findings (Nieuwland 2014) and confirms that the elicitation of a P600 is related to judging stimuli as ungrammatical. This is corroborated by a German reading study by Irmen, Hold, and Weisbrod (2010). German does not have gender-neutral singular role noun forms. Therefore, this study was restricted to sentences with role nouns in the masculine plural form. The masculine plural version of occupational nouns typically cannot be used as a masculine generic term for a group only consisting of feminine referents, but they can be used to denote mixed-gender groups in contemporary German, although a usage of both the masculine and the feminine form is the preferred gender-inclusive option (see De Backer and De Cuypere 2012 or Misersky, Majid, and Snijders 2019). Therefore, the sentences used by Irmen, Hold, and Weisbrod (2010) with a female referent are incongruent with definitional gender (see example (13)). This could have contributed to the fact that a P600 was elicited instead of an N400. (13) Viele Informatiker tragen eine Brille, denn *diese Frauen arbeiten viel am Rechner ‘Many computer scientistsMASC wear glasses since *these women often work with a computer’. (Irmen, Hold and Weisbrod 2010: 141) Another aspect that appears to have been decisive for the elicitation of either an N400 or a P600 was whether the gender stereotype information served in establishing coherence in a forward inference (see section ‘Pronoun Processing and ERPs’). The only reading studies that found an N400 for the gender stereotype incongruent condition were the two studies that did not employ an anaphora resolution-type of reading task, but encoded the referent’s biological sex morphologically at lexical words (e.g., ‘peluqueros’ - ‘hairdresserMASC’, Molinaro, Su, and Carreiras 2016, Proverbio, Orlandi, and Bianchi 2017). It is relevant to mention though that the critical word in Proverbio, Orlandi, and Bianchi (2017) was at the sentence-final position and some researchers have suggested that the N400 can be found in response to sentence-final words, even when processing acceptable sentences (Kutas and Federmeier 2011), while others disagreed (Stowe et al. 2018). So, for the studies that employed anaphora resolution, the subjects used the stereotypical information of the antecedent at the beginning as a strong cue to predict the referent’s gender and had, therefore, difficulties to link it to the anaphor. This becomes even more apparent in the two experiments by Kreiner et al. (2009): the first employed anaphora-resolution, and the second cataphora-resolution. In cataphora-resolution type 97

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sentences, the cataphor (usually a pronoun) is mentioned first, and the postcedent (usually a noun) is mentioned subsequently (see example (14)). (14) After reminding herself about the letter, the minister left London (Kreiner et al. 2009: 109). However, in the cataphora resolution-type sentences, as they are in English, the gender stereotype does not serve to establish coherence between the cataphor and the postcedent, as the stereotypical role is mentioned second, and the biological sex of the referent is already made explicit at the beginning of the sentence. This may explain why the researchers found different ERP patterns when comparing anaphora and cataphora sentences.

4.3  Auditory tasks Two auditory tasks met the inclusion criteria: a study by Lattner and Friederici (2003) and one by Grant, Grey, and van Hell (2020). One widely cited auditory study on gender, age, and social stereotypes by van Berkum et al. (2008) was not included because some examples they provided could be considered definitional gender violations rather than stereotypical ones (see (15) as an illustration). (15) A male voice saying: ‘I recently had a check-up at the gynecologist in the hospital’ (van Berkum et al. 2008: 589) In the study by Lattner and Friederici (2003), the subjects listened to four female and four male speakers who produced single, independent sentences about themselves in which the last noun (mis-) matched with stereotypical expectations based on the speaker’s supposed gender (see example (16)). Assumptions were thus made on the basis of the speaker’s voice features. (16) I like to wear lipstick (Lattner and Friederici 2003: 192) In the study by Grant, Grey, and van Hell (2020), subjects either listened to a list of gender stereotype congruent or incongruent sentences about fashion and sports produced by female and male speakers (see example (17)), in which, stereotypically, listeners would expect a male person to know that a punter hits a football, not a baseball. (17) After the punter missed the baseball, the entire team felt defeated (Grant, Grey, and van Hell 2020: 5) The stimuli of neither study involved anaphora resolution and the critical word for both studies was a lexical word (e.g., shirt or football). The two auditory studies found different components for the gender stereotype incongruent condition: Lattner and Friederici (2003) found a P600, while Grant, Grey, and van Hell (2020) found an N400. A reason for this difference could also be based on whether the gender stereotype information serves in establishing coherence in a forward inference, as was the case for the reading studies. These two studies differ on one crucial dimension: in the study by Lattner and Friederici (2003), the listener could not construct a cohesive identity for the individual speakers, as the same voices produced both stereotype congruent and incongruent sentences, while in the study by Grant, Grey, and van Hell (2020), the individual subjects listened to male and female voices stating only gender stereotype congruent or incongruent sentences per speaker. That the same speakers both produce stereotype congruent and incongruent sentences in the study by Lattner and Friederici (2003) is problematic because 98

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the listener gets contradictory information for the same speaker. In most auditory tasks, however, the listeners typically construct an identity for the different speakers (Regel et al. 2010). This mapping of stereotypical content information of a speaker onto the specific voice of each speaker can be also interpreted as a form of forward inference. These differences between the two tasks could be the reason why Lattner and Friederici (2003) found a P600, while Grant, Grey, and van Hell (2020) found an N400 for gender stereotype violations (see Table 7.1).

4.4  Priming tasks Priming paradigms differ from reading or auditory task types in that they do not focus on language processing at sentence-level; rather, they show two individual words subsequently to each other. The first word shown is called a prime and is meant to activate semantic knowledge in the participant’s lexicon. The second word shown is the target, and participants are asked to make a decision concerning this target (e.g., a button press when the target is a word starting with a ‘p’). If the target is semantically related to the prime (e.g., the word pair dog and cat), it is expected that responses to the target will be faster and more accurate compared to when this is not the case (e.g., the word pair dog and fork). In addition, there is also the so-called masked priming paradigm, in which the primes are shown during such a short time window (30–60 ms) that it is impossible to consciously perceive them. This is theorized to reflect early, subconscious processes of semantic word processing (Pesciarelli, Scorolli, and Cacciari 2019). According to Chwilla (2012: 255), ‘semantic priming offers a window into the structure of semantic memory’ and the fact that a word is processed faster when preceded by a semantically related word is one of the most robustly documented findings in cognitive psychology. The five priming studies included in this overview took the form of traditional semantic priming tasks, and the study by Pesciarelli, Scorolli, and Cacciari (2019) additionally employed a masked priming paradigm. Three of the five studies (White et al. 2009, Wang et al. 2016, 2017) selected gender categories as primes (‘Women’ and ‘Men’ or ‘female’ and ‘male’) and stereotypical traits (e.g., ‘nurturing’) and/or nouns (e.g., ‘make-up’) as targets. Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli, and Cacciari (2012) and Pesciarelli, Scorolli, and Cacciari (2019), however, based their Italian studies on the automatic stereotyping task by Banaji and Hardin (1996), which includes stereotypical occupations in gender-neutral form (e.g., insegnante - ‘teacher’) as primes and the two personal pronouns lei (‘she’) or lui (‘he’) as targets. Pesciarelli, Scorolli, and Cacciari (2019) went a step further and also compared masked priming to regular (unmasked) priming in order to investigate how automatic and subconscious gender stereotype activation is as a process. The included reaction time tasks of the priming studies varied somewhat between the five studies: most asked for button press reactions depending on the target (White et al. 2009, Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli, and Cacciari 2012, Wang et al. 2017, Pesciarelli, Scorolli, and Cacciari 2019), while Wang et al. (2016) used different font colours for the targets and prompted their subjects to indicate the target’s colour by means of a button press. Despite the fact that the five priming tasks differed considerably in their setup, especially given that the target could either be a lexical item (noun) or a functional word (personal pronoun), all studies found an N400 (however, Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli, and Cacciari (2012) only for the female role nouns) for the gender stereotype mismatch (see Table 7.1). This is not surprising given that priming studies are a tool to investigate semantic memory (Nieuwland et al. 2020).

5.  Future directions This chapter has summarized how the ERP technique is employed in psycholinguistic research investigating pronoun processing and has given an overview of different studies that investigated 99

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gender stereotyping with this technique. Our overview also revealed that the underlying nature of the two major ERP components in language processing are still debated. The summarized studies are cases where pronoun processing is combined with world knowledge violations, which makes the elicitation of P600s remarkable. Especially when it comes to the P600, research currently provides more questions than answers (see introduction). The picture of what the N400 reflects is clearer in comparison, but still inconclusive. While it is true that the N400 is sensitive to semantic manipulations, and the P600 to syntactic manipulations, this does not subsequently mean they are exclusively sensitive to these manipulations, nor that they necessarily reflect language-specific processes. (Psycho-)linguists would do well in being more open to the idea that these components might be more complex than serving as complementary language-specific components. As mentioned before, discussing these implications lies beyond the scope of this chapter and will be further discussed in a forthcoming paper. When it comes to pronoun resolution, a more holistic approach combining behavioural and ERP work is warranted. Including other online methods, such as eye-tracking, in order to better understand what humans do when they process pronouns and pronoun violations will ultimately also result in more psycholinguistic insights. Such a holistic approach to the processing of pronoun agreement is more relevant than ever as we need to investigate pronoun processing from new perspectives as gender equality and gender-fair language are more in the societal focus. This would also imply that experimental linguistic research would take factors such as gender identity and the understanding of gender as expanding on a spectrum instead of being of a dichotomous nature more into account when designing studies.

Appendix The search and inclusion of the studies involved the following steps:

• the SmartCat search engine for research publications at the University of Groningen by the library cooperative OCLC (search: ‘event-related potential*’ OR ‘ERP*’ AND ‘gender stereotyp*’) • Google Scholar (search: ‘event-related potentials’ OR ‘event related potentials’ OR ‘ERP’ OR ‘ERPs’ AND ‘gender stereotype’ OR ‘gender stereotypes’ OR ‘gender stereotyping’) • going through reference lists of the selected publications

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(2021). Nothing entirely new under the sun: ERP responses to manipulations of syntax. In G. Goodall (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 641–686. Kutas, M. and Federmeier, K.D. (2011). Thirty years and counting: Finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annual Review of Psychology 62(1): 621–647. Kutas, M., van Petten, C.K. and Kluender, R. (2006). Psycholinguistics electrified II (1994–2005). In M.J. Traxler and M.A. Gernsbacher (eds) Handbook of Psycholinguistics (second ed.). Boston, MA: Elsevier/ Academic Press, pp. 1–67. Kreiner, H., Mohr, S., Kessler, K. and Garrod, S. (2009). Can context affect gender processing? ERP differences between definitional and stereotypical gender. In K. Alter, M. Horne, M. Lindgren and J.V.K. Torkildsen (eds) Brain Talk: Discourse with and in the Brain: Papers from the first Birgit Rausing Language Program Conference in Linguistics, Lund, June 2008, pp. 107–119. Lamers, M.J.A., Jansma, B.M., Hammer, A. and Münte, T.F. (2006). Neural correlates of semantic and syntactic processes in the comprehension of case marked pronouns: Evidence from German and Dutch. BMC Neuroscience 7(1): 23–23. Lattner, S. and Friederici, A.D. (2003). Talker’s voice and gender stereotype in human auditory sentence processing – Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Neuroscience Letters 339(3): 191–194. Leckey, M. and Federmeier, K.D. (2020). The P3b and P600(s): Positive contributions to language comprehension. Psychophysiology 57(7): 13351–13351. Loerts, H., Stowe, L.A. and Schmid, M.S. (2013). Predictability speeds up the re-analysis process: An ERP investigation of gender agreement and cloze probability. Journal of Neurolinguistics 26(5): 561–580. Luck, S.J. (2014). 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Joanna Porkert, Hanneke Loerts, Anja Schüppert, and Merel Keijzer Misersky, J., Majid, A. and Snijders, T.M. (2019). Grammatical gender in German influences how role-nouns are interpreted: Evidence from ERPs. Discourse Processes 56(8): 643–654. Mitkov, R. (2014). Anaphora Resolution. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis (Studies in Language and Linguistics). Available at: https://ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/rug​/detail​.action​?docID​=1638452#. Molinaro, N., Su, J.J. and Carreiras, M. (2016). Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension. Brain and Language 155–156: 36–43. Nieuwland, M.S. (2014). ‘Who’s He?’ event-related brain potentials and unbound pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language 76: 1–28. Nieuwland, M.S., Barr, D.J., Bartolozzi, F., Busch-Moreno, S., Darley, E., Donaldson, D.I., Ferguson, H.J., Fu, X., Heyselaar, E., Huettig, F., Husband, E.M., Ito, A., Kazanina, N., Kogan, V., Kohút, Z., Kulakova, E., Mézière, D., Politzer-Ahles, S., Rousselet, G., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., Segaert, K., Tuomainen, J. and Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthun, S. (2020). Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 375: 20180522–20180522. Nieuwland, M.S. and Van Berkum, J.J.A. (2006). Individual differences and contextual bias in pronoun resolution: Evidence from ERPs. Brain Research, 1118(1): 155–167. Osterhout, L., Bersick, M. and McLaughlin, J. (1997). Brain potentials reflect violations of gender stereotypes. Memory and Cognition 25(3): 273–285. Osterhout, L. and Mobley, L.A. (1995). Event-related brain potentials elicited by failure to agree. Journal of Memory and Language 34(6): 739–773. Osterhout, L. and Nicol, J. (1999). On the distinctiveness, independence, and time course of the brain responses to syntactic and semantic anomalies. Language and Cognitive Processes 14: 283–317. Pesciarelli, F., Scorolli, C. and Cacciari, C. (2019). Neural correlates of the implicit processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender violations: A masked and unmasked priming study. Biological Psychology 146: 107714. Proverbio, A.M., Orlandi, A. and Bianchi, E. (2017). Electrophysiological markers of prejudice related to sexual gender. Neuroscience 358: 1–12. Pyykkönen, P., Hyönä, J. and van Gompel, R.P.G. (2010). Activating gender stereotypes during online spoken language processing: Evidence from visual world eye tracking. Experimental Psychology 57(2): 126–133. Qiu, L., Swaab, T.Y., Chen, H.C. and Wang, S. (2012). The role of gender information in pronoun resolution: Evidence from Chinese. Plos One 7(5): e36156. Regel, S., Coulson, S. and Gunter, T.C. (2010). The communicative style of a speaker can affect language comprehension? ERP evidence from the comprehension of irony. Brain Research 1311: 121–135. Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Pesciarelli, F. and Cacciari, C. (2012). The electrophysiological underpinnings of processing gender stereotypes in language. Plos One 7(12): 48712. Stowe, L.A., Kaan, E., Sabourin, L. and Taylor, R.C. (2018). The sentence wrap-up dogma. Cognition 176: 232–247. Streb, J., Rösler, F. and Hennighausen, E. (1999). Event-related responses to pronoun and proper name anaphors in parallel and nonparallel discourse structures. Brain and Language 70(2): 273–286. Streb, J., Hennighausen, E. and Rösler, F. (2004). Different anaphoric expressions are investigated by eventrelated brain potentials. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 33(3): 175–201. Su, J.J., Molinaro, N., Gillon-Dowens, M., Tsai, P.S., Wu, D.H. and Carreiras, M. (2016). When ‘he’ can also be ‘she’: An ERP study of reflexive pronoun resolution in written Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 151–151. Swaab, T.Y., Ledoux, K., Camblin, C.C. and Boudewyn, M.A. (2012). Language-related ERP components. In E.S. Kappenman and S. Luck (eds) Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 397–440. Tanner, D., Grey, S. and van Hell, J.G. (2017). Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension. Psychophysiology 54(2): 248–259. Tanner, D. and Van Hell, J.G. (2014). ERPs reveal individual differences in morphosyntactic processing. Neuropsychologia 56: 289–301. Tolentino, L.C. and Tokowicz, N. (2011). Across languages, space, and time. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33(1): 91–125. van Berkum, J.J.A., Brown, C.M. and Hagoort, P. (1999). Early referential context effects in sentence processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Memory and Language 41(2): 147–182. van Berkum, J.J.A., Brown, C.M., Hagoort, P. and Zwitserlood, P. (2003). Event-related brain potentials reflect discourse-referential ambiguity in spoken language comprehension. Psychophysiology 40(2): 235–248.

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Pronouns in the brain van Berkum, J.J.A., van den Brink, D., Tesink, C.M., Kos, M. and Hagoort, P. (2008). The neural integration of speaker and message. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20(4): 580–591. van Herten, M., Chwilla, D.J. and Kolk, H.H. (2006). When heuristics clash with parsing routines: ERP evidence for conflict monitoring in sentence perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18(7): 1181–1197. van Petten, C., Kutas, M., Kluender, R., Mitchiner, M. and McIsaac, H. (1991). Fractionating the word repetition effect with event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3(2): 131–150. Wang, P., Tan, C.-H., Yang, Y.-P., Cantfort, T. and Chen, Q.-W. (2017). Gender stereotype activation versus lexical semantic activation: An ERP study. Journal of General Psychology 145(2): 283–308. Wang, P., Yang, Y.-P., Tan, C.-H., Zhao, X.-X., Liu, Y.-H. and Lin, C.-D. (2016). Stereotype activation is unintentional: Behavioural and event-related potentials evidence. International Journal of Psychology 51(2): 156–162. White, K.R., Crites, S.L.J., Taylor, J.H. and Corral, G. (2009). Wait, what? assessing stereotype incongruities using the N400 ERP component. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4(2): 191–198.

Further reading Luck, S.J. (2014). An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique (second edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meulman, N., Seton, B.J., Stowe, L.A. and Schmid, M.S. (2016). EEG and event-related brain potentials. In M.S. Schmid, S.M. Berends, C. Bergmann, S.M. Brouwer, N. Meulman, B.J. Seton, S.A. Sprenger and L.A. Stowe (eds) Designing Research on Bilingual Development: Behavioral and Neurolinguistic Experiments. Cham: Springer, pp. 81–107. Swaab, T.Y., Ledoux, K., Camblin, C.C. and Boudewyn, M.A. (2012). Language-related ERP components. In E.S. Kappenman and S. Luck (eds) Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 397–440.

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8 PRONOUNS AND APHASIA Eleni Peristeri

1. Introduction The production and comprehension of pronouns are a prerequisite for successful communication. Research has shown that semantic similarity among referents in a discourse context leads to explicit referring expressions, like repeated, fully lexicalized noun phrases, whereas low semantic competition among referents tends to favor less explicit expressions, such as pronouns (Karmiloff-Smith 1985, Fukumura et al. 2011). Pronouns also carry grammatical features, including gender, case, number, and person (Reifegerste and Felser 2017, Torregrossa 2017, Matthews, Biney, and Abbot-Smith 2018). The speaker’s referential choices as well as the listener’s linguistic antecedent choices (i.e., picking the entity the pronoun refers back to) seem to be guided by a variety of constraints, including grammar, structural prominence factors (like pronouns’ strong bias to be linked to antecedents in syntactic subject position), and implicit causality biases encoded in verb clauses (Cardinaletti 1997, Arnold 2010, Hartshorne, O'Donnell, and Tenenbaum 2015, Kehler and Rohde 2013, Hinzen 2017). Domain-general cognitive processes, such as working memory and attention, seem to also play a critical role in the choice and comprehension of pronouns (Light and Capps 1986, Qiu et al. 2012), but much uncertainty still remains over the precise nature of these roles. Pronoun research is relevant to cases of aphasia mainly because persons with aphasia (PWA) suffer from a syntactic impairment. Aphasia literature has evinced that pronoun processing is highly vulnerable in PWA. However, it is still unclear whether this processing deficiency stems from a representational syntactic impairment that hinders access to the grammatical features of pronouns, such as number (e.g., it vs them) or gender (e.g., her vs him), or to a decline in the memory capacity caused by aphasia. What are the causes of pronoun difficulties in aphasia: do they stem from PWA’s syntactic or memory deficits or, alternatively, from a combination of these factors? This chapter aims to tackle these issues by investigating Greek-speaking PWA’s structural language abilities in encoding pronouns, as well as possible interactions between pronoun use and the aphasic individuals’ working memory skills. We first provide an overview of studies that have examined pronouns in PWA in language production and comprehension. Moreover, in an attempt to further disentangle the explanations behind PWA’s difficulty with pronouns, we provide empirical evidence from an experimental study that evaluates pronoun use in a group of 14 Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s/nonfluent aphasia through a story retelling task. For context, we first introduce a description of the Greek pronominal system. We then present a task (2-back task) that measured the patients’

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memory abilities, which were then associated with their pronoun use in the story retelling task. Finally, we present the results of the study, an interpretation of the findings, and directions for future research.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics involving pronouns in aphasia Aphasia is an acquired disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. Aphasia treatment research lacks a uniform approach to outcome measurement. A wide range of treatment options have been used across trials (including treatments targeting functional communication, social activity or participation, and impairment levels), but there is a lack of research evidence exploring the outcomes most important to stakeholders (patients, researchers, medical professionals, etc.). The standardisation of aphasia research, treatment, and outcome measures would facilitate greater rigour in the evaluation of aphasia treatments and improve the quality of data available about treatment efficacy and effectiveness for individuals with aphasia. Pronouns in the aphasia literature have been systematically studied along the fluency-nonfluency dimension, which is associated with the language phenotype of persons with Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasia, respectively. Wernicke’s aphasia results from damage to the temporal lobe of the brain and it is the most common type of fluent aphasia, since individuals may speak in long, complete sentences that have no meaning, adding unnecessary words and even creating made-up words. On the other hand, persons with Broca’s aphasia have damage that primarily affects the frontal lobe of the brain; they may understand speech and know what they want to say, but they frequently speak in short, ungrammatical phrases that are produced with great effort. Pronoun studies in aphasia have mainly focused on the interpretation of pronouns (it, her, him) and reflexives (itself, herself, himself) which have often been reported to be performed differently by PWA. For instance, Choy and Thompson’s (2005, 2010) studies, which used eye-tracking (i.e. a participant views a scene and concurrently listens to a short discourse; also known as the visual world while-listening paradigm), found that individuals with Broca’s aphasia exhibit normal fixation patterns at points of referentially dependent items, such as reflexive pronouns embedded in complement phrase constructions, and that the number of fixations to the correct antecedent were significantly greater than those to the incorrect antecedent in the time window corresponding to the reflexive pronoun. So, for example, in the sentence The soldier told the farmer to shave himself in the bathroom, the PWA were able to understand that the correct antecedent of the reflexive pronoun himself was the farmer, and not the soldier. The same PWA, however, were considerably more erroneous in complement constructions involving pronouns (e.g., The soldier told the farmer to shave him in the bathroom), in which Choy and Thompson found delayed looks to targets in correct trials (in which the scene depicted the farmer shaving the soldier), and abnormal fixation patterns in incorrect trials (in which the scene depicted the farmer shaving himself), mainly due to late looks to inappropriate antecedents. This impaired comprehension of pronouns relative to reflexives has been observed in several studies with individuals with fluent and nonfluent aphasia (Grodzinsky et al. 1993, Ruigendijk and Avrutin 2003, Engel, Shapiro, and Love 2018), while others report significant impairments in reflexive pronoun comprehension (Grodzinsky et al. 1993, Jarema and Friederici 1994, Love et al. 1998, Avrutin, Lubarsky, and Greene 1999, Edwards and Varlokosta 2007). This discrepancy across studies has been accounted for in terms of the fact that the experimental samples across studies included PWA of different ages, education levels, and aphasia types. Regarding the causes of pronoun difficulties in PWA, the debate is far from being settled. Recently, study findings have suggested that PWA demonstrate difficulty when processing pronouns in contexts in which the antecedents are marked with the same grammatical number and gender features, thus, causing discourse ambiguity (e.g., The nurse was waiving at the old-lady, while she was crossing the street) (Avrutin 2000, 2006, Bastiaanse 2011, Bos et al. 2014). Peristeri and Tsimpli (2013), for 105

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example, have examined how discourse constraints modulate pronoun interpretation in a group of Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia to better understand how structural and discourse processes interact in aphasia. As with other null-subject languages, Greek has two subject pronouns (null and overt) that differ in their preferences for antecedent retrieval. Specifically, null pronouns in (Ø in (1)) tend to pick the antecedent in syntactic subject position (the young woman), while overt pronouns (she in (1)) have been claimed to be discourse-marked with a topic-shift feature that biases comprehenders to link the overt pronoun to a non-topic antecedent, usually identified with entities appearing in syntactic object position (the old-lady). (1) Η νέα γυναίκα χαιρέτησε τη γιαγιά ενώ Ø/αυτή περνούσε τον δρόμο. The young woman.FEM waived at the old-lady.FEM while Ø.NULL/she.OVERT was crossing the street. The specific utterance involves two same-gender linguistic antecedents (the young woman and the old-lady) and, thus, both pronominal forms, the null and the overt, can theoretically retrieve them. According to Peristeri and Tsimpli’s (2013) findings, the PWA exhibited distinct preference biases for the overt pronouns as compared to the control group; specifically, while controls showed clear preference to co-index overt pronouns to the noun phrases in syntactic object position (i.e., the young woman), the PWA faced great difficulty linking the overt pronoun to the syntactic object. On the other hand, the aphasic individuals exhibited similar preference rates to controls when linking null subject pronouns to the antecedent in syntactic subject position. These findings suggest that pronouns can be discourse-linked, and this may have direct implications for the pronoun processing difficulties encountered in PWA. This evidence contradicts the representational account, which assumes that the difficulty with pronouns in aphasia is underpinned by a global syntactic processing impairment, and rather shows that the difficulty surfaces when pronouns are processed as discourse-linked items, requiring greater computational resources and exhausting PWA’s linguistic processing capacity (Grodzinsky et al. 1993, Kohn, Cragnolino, and Pustejovsky 1997, Love et al. 1998, Love, Swinney, and Zurif 2001, Piñango and Burkhardt 2001, de Roo 2003, Varlokosta and Edwards 2003, Choy and Thompson 2005, 2010, Edwards and Varlokosta 2007). Turning to production, the research that has been conducted with PWA is more limited relative to that investigating pronoun comprehension. Existent studies across various languages have focused on the grammaticality of object clitic pronouns produced by individuals with Broca’s aphasia, most of them showing that the patients produce fewer pronominal elements and more erroneous clitics due to wrong gender and number marking as compared to controls (Ishkhanyan et al. 2017, Nespoulous et al. 1990 for French, Martinez-Ferreiro 2010 for Spanish, Miceli and Mazzucchi 1990 for Italian, Stavrakaki and Kouvava 2003 for Greek). Also, in Manning and Franklin’s (2016) narrative study with 22 persons with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia, the patients with Broca’s aphasia tended to produce more pronoun omissions (e.g., the man saw the woman and gave Ø the bag) than their Wernicke’s counterparts, who made more morpho-phonological errors on pronouns (e.g., the man saw the woman and gave him the bag). Though grammatical accuracy and discernible patterns of morpho-syntactic errors have been investigated in pronoun production in PWA, the referential appropriateness of pronominal elements has received less attention. Cummings’ (2019) narrative elicitation study with individuals diagnosed with nonfluent and fluent primary progressive aphasia revealed that the patients produced grammatically licit, yet referentially ambiguous subject pronouns and object clitics, so that the listener of the narration could not unambiguously retrieve the intended antecedents (e.g., Cinderella was very disappointed with her stepsisters, Anastasia and Drizella…she was very mean to Cinderella).

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Cummings’ (2019) study has provided the first evidence that pronoun use in continuous discourse contexts in aphasia may reveal deficits in the patients’ ability to incorporate discourse/pragmatic knowledge and to produce referentially appropriate pronouns. We tentatively take these findings to suggest that pronoun processing difficulties in PWA are not only due to a syntactic impairment but also stems from difficulties with processing discourse-linked information in language. Besides syntactic and discourse deficits, an alternative interpretation based on domain general processing limitations in aphasia claims that pronoun comprehension deficits in PWA arise from impairments in cognitive mechanisms during pronoun resolution. Caplan, Michaud, and Hufford (2013) found that PWA with better memory capacity exhibited higher accuracy rates when comprehending sentences involving pronouns relative to individuals with lower memory capacity. Similarly, Zahn, Schnur, and Martin’s (2021) recent narrative production study with chronic PWA revealed a positive relationship between the individuals’ phonological working memory, measured through a digit matching task, and the proportion of pronouns they produced during a narrative task. These studies provide converging evidence that pronoun processing in PWA reflects differences in antecedent retrieval speed from working memory and/or working memory-related differences in antecedent representation quality and availability. In the experimental study described below, we present empirical evidence that supports the involvement of domain general cognitive procedures in pronoun processing in aphasia by testing a group of Greek-speaking nonfluent aphasic patients on both narrative elicitation and a working memory and updating task. Before presenting the experimental study, we briefly describe the Greek personal pronoun paradigm.

3.  Investigating PWA’s use of pronouns in Greek The Greek language allows both null and overt subject pronouns. Null subject pronouns (the Ø in (2)) are used in topic-continuous contexts, in which the antecedent of the null pronoun is usually identified with the context-induced topic, i.e., the woman. Overt subject pronouns, on the other hand, (she in (3)) are used to denote a topic-shift in discourse and tend to be linked to antecedents in syntactic object position (Miltsakaki 2002, 2007, Papadopoulou et al. 2015). (2) i           jineka            δen   theli    na     the.SG.FEM.NOM   woman.SG.FEM.NOM not want.PRES.ACT.IND.3SG to fai.     Ø    theli na eat.PRES.ACT.SUBJ.3SG   want.PRES.ACT.IND.3SG  to pai   volta go.PRES.ACT.SUBJ.3SG   walk.SG.FRM.ACC ‘The woman doesn’t want to eat. (She) wants to go for a walk’. (3) i           jineka               heretise the.SG.FEM.NOM woman.SG.FEM.NOM waved.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ti          jiajia        eno   afti the.SG.FEM.ACC old-lady.SG.FEM.ACC while she.PR.SG.FEM.NOM efevge. was leaving.PAST.PROG.ACT.IND.3SG ‘The woman waved at the old-lady while she (i.e., the old-lady) was leaving’. Greek also has pronominal clitics with distinct morphological inflections for accusative and genitive case. Greek clitics (it in (4)) always appear in syntactic object position and they precede verb forms

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in matrix and embedded clauses. Also, clitics morphologically agree with the phi-features (i.e., case, number, gender, and person) of the object of the verb. (4) I            jata               kinijise the.SG.FEM.NOM cat.SG.FEM.NOM hunted.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG to          podiki            ke to the.SG.NEUT.ACC mouse.SG.NEUT.ACC and it.SING.NEUT.ACC epiase caught.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ‘the cat hunted the mouse and it caught it’. Note: SG = singular; 3SG = 3rd person singular; FEM = feminine; NEUT = neuter; NOM = nominative case; ACC = accusative case; PRES = present tense; PAST = past tense; PROGR = progressive tense; ACT = active voice; IND = indicative mood; SUBJ = subjunctive mood.

4. Methodology To investigate pronoun use in PWA, we implemented a narrative design that would allow us to examine the discourse factors that regulate pronoun use in narrative production. We tested persons with Broca’s aphasia since this is the main type of aphasia that is characterized by syntactic deficits. A group of 14 Greek-speaking male individuals with Broca’s aphasia participated in the study (age range 42–74; mean age: 61; 2 years, Standard Deviation (SD): 8.9; mean years of education: 12;1; SD: 1.5). They were all pre-morbidly right-handed individuals, who had suffered a left hemisphere stroke. Across patients, damage covered frontal and pre-frontal areas of the left hemisphere, including left inferior and middle frontal gyri, superior and middle temporal gyri, and basal ganglia. All of them had normal or corrected-to-normal visual and auditory acuity, and all were at least two years post-onset. No participant had a previous history of strokes, drug abuse, psychiatric illness, or other brain disorder or dysfunction. Each patient was administered a series of standardized aphasia examinations, including the Short Form of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination that tests general language ability in both production and comprehension (Goodglass and Kaplan 1972, adaptation in Greek: Tsapkini, Vlahou, and Potagas 2010), the Boston Naming Test that tests picture naming abilities (Kaplan, Goodglass, and Weintraub 1983, adaptation in Greek: Patricacou et al. 2007), and syntactic comprehension measures of the Bilingual Aphasia Test that included active sentences (e.g., The dog hunts the cat), reversible passive sentences (e.g., The cat is hunted by the dog), focused sentences (e.g., It is the man that kisses the woman), and object relative sentences (e.g., The man that the boy pushes kisses the old lady) (BAT; Paradis and Kehayia 1987, Peristeri and Tsapkini 2011). As revealed by the scores in the BAT subtest, the PWA faced pronounced comprehension difficulty with these particular structures. Table 8.1 lists demographic and clinical information for the study participants. A group of 14 age- and education-matched Greek-speaking male adults (age range 40–75; mean age: 58;1 years, SD: 13.8; mean years of education: 11;3; SD: 1.6) served as the control group. The two experimental groups did not significantly differ in either age, F(1 27) = .507, p = .483, or education, F(1,27) = 1.730, p = .200. The study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association 2013). Written informed consent was obtained from all the PWA prior to inclusion in the study. The scores in the BAT represent mean percentages; the language-unimpaired adults that served as the control group scored near ceiling level (≈ 100%) in the same task. The study comprised two parts, an oral narrative production task and a working memory 2-back task. Each part is discussed in turn below. 108

Pronouns and aphasia Table 8.1  Demographic and clinical information for each PWA in the study PWA

Age

Education (years)

Years (post stroke)

Syntactic comprehension (%) (BAT subtest)

Lesion Site

P#1 P#2 P#3 P#4 P#5 P#6 P#7 P#8 P#9 P#10 P#11 P#12 P#13 P#14

58 47 66 68 73 74 42 55 65 66 62 61 59 61

12 13 14 9 9 13 12 13 12 14 13 12 12 12

2 6 10 7 10 12 2 5 5 12 20 3 3 3

52.86 42.86 62.86 60.00 71.43 52.86 68.57 71.43 70.00 52.86 60.00 62.86 55.71 60.00

L IFG L IFG L frontal, MFG L STG, insular L MTG L IFG, MFG L IFG L IFG L STG L IFG, MFG L MTG L frontal, MFG L IFG L IFG

PWA = person with aphasia; BAT = Bilingual aphasia test; L = left; IFG = inferior frontal gyrus; MFG = middle frontal gyrus; STG = superior temporal gyrus; MTG = middle temporal gyrus

4.1  Oral narrative production task Materials. PWA’s oral retellings (i.e., telling a story after having listened to it) were elicited using a story from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider, Dubé, and Hayward 2005). Retelling was used instead of telling because it is easier, since the participants retelling a story have already been familiarized with the story plot. The story used in the present study was the A2 Giraffe/Elephant story, which includes eight pictures and two main characters, an elephant-girl and a giraffe-girl, at a swimming pool. The elephant notices a diving board from which they can dive, but neither of the two friends notices the sign which says ‘NO RUNNING!’. The elephant tries to reach the diving board first, and she starts running with the giraffe following her. While the giraffe tries to reach her, the elephant slips, falls, and hurts her leg. She starts crying. A male lifeguard-elephant sees them and walks towards them to see what the problem is. With tears in her eyes, the elephant explains to the lifeguard what has happened. The lifeguard puts a band-aid on the elephant’s wound, while the giraffe is kneeling next to her friend. The lifeguard and the giraffe help the elephant walk over to a bench and the giraffe is relieved that her friend looks well. When the giraffe leaves the pool, the lifeguard looks strictly at the elephant and points to the sign that says ‘NO RUNNING!’. Procedure. Each participant listened to the story through headphones while viewing two pictures per screen on a computer. Once the story finished, the participant viewed all eight pictures on a single slide on the computer screen and was asked to retell the story to the examiner, who entered the room only after the participant had listened to the whole story. Transcription and coding. Participants’ retellings were audiotaped and transcribed. The pronouns used to maintain reference to the story characters throughout the retelling were subsequently coded. The reason for focusing on the maintenance function of the narrative production (i.e., when the character has already been introduced in the story and the thematic focus is still on the particular character), and not on introducing or reintroducing referents, was that maintenance in a null subject language like Greek is accomplished mainly through the use of null subject pronouns (Ø in (5)) and clitic pronouns (her in (6)), while introduction and reintroduction are accomplished through the 109

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use of fully lexicalized noun phrases, either definite (e.g., the elephant-girl), or indefinite (e.g., an elephant-girl). (5) Null pronoun (in subject position) i           elefadina              erikse the.SG.FEM.NOM elephant-girl.SG.NEUT.NOM threw.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG to       aeroplano      stin the.SG.FEM.ACC plane.SG.FEM.ACC into-the.SG.FEM.ACC pisina           ke   ø ekleje. swimming pool.SG.FEM.ACC and   cried.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ‘the elephant-girl threw the plane in the swimming pool and ø cried’ (appropriate and grammatical) (6) Clitic pronoun o           navajosostis              prosekse the.SG.MASC.NOM lifeguard.SG.MASC.NOM noticed.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG tin       elefadina         ke   tin the.SG.NEUT.ACC elephant-girl.SG.FEM.ACC and her.CL.SG.FEM.ACC malose scolded.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ‘The lifeguard noticed the elephant-girl and he scolded her’ (appropriate and grammatical) The pronouns were coded in terms of pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy. More specifically, referentially appropriate pronouns consisted of unambiguous null pronouns in subject position, and pronominal clitics in object position (see 5 and 6, respectively), while inappropriate pronouns consisted of referentially ambiguous null subject pronouns and clitics, whose antecedent could not be unambiguously detected through the narrative discourse (see 7 and 8, respectively). (7) Ambiguous null pronoun (in subject position) i        elefadina             kinijise the.SG.FEM.NOM elephant-girl.SG.NEUT.NOM chased.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG tin        kamiloparδali.           ø             emine piso the.SG.FEM.ACC giraffe-girl.SG.NEUT.NOM stayed.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG behind ‘the elephant-girl chased the giraffe-girl. ø stayed behind’ (inappropriate and grammatical) (8) Ambiguous clitic pronoun Itan          i         elephant-girl          ke was.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG the.SG.FEM.NOM elephant-girl.SG.FEM.NOM and i          kamiloparδali       δipla. O the.SG.FEM.NOM giraffe-girl.SG.FEM.NOM next the.SG.MASC.NOM navajosostis       ti          malose lifeguard.SG.MASC.NOM her.CL.SG.FEM.ACC scolded.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ‘there was the elephant-girl and the giraffe-girl next (to her). The lifeguard scolded her’ (inappropriate, grammatical) We also distinguished between grammatical and ungrammatical pronouns, irrespective of their referential appropriateness. Ungrammatical expressions consisted of substitution errors (i.e., wrong person/case/number/gender feature) on pronominal clitics, and null pronouns in obligatory object clitic contexts (see 9 and 10, respectively). 110

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(9) Substitution errors on clitics pije         stin         elefadina went.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG to  the.SG.FEM.NOM elephant-girl.SG.FEM.NOM ke  to        malose and it.CL.SG.NEUT.ACC scolded.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG ‘the lifeguard went to the elephant-girl and scolded it’ (ungrammatical) (10) Null pronoun in object position o          navajosostis          iδe the.SG.MASC.NOM lifeguard.SG.NEUT.NOM saw.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG to          aeroplanaki       ke piγe the.SG.NEUT.ACC plane.SG.FEM.ACC and went.PAST.ACT.IND.3SG na ø pjasi to    catch.PAST.ACT.SUBJ.3SG ‘the lifeguard saw the plane and went to catch (it)’ (ungrammatical)

4.2  2-back task Besides syntax and discourse information, the appropriate use of pronouns also needs to draw on efficient memory resources in order for the individual to be able to link the pronoun to an antecedent that appears in previously mentioned discourse. The speaker/comprehender needs to retain in memory all possible antecedents in order to be able to make the appropriate referential choice. Participants’ working memory and updating abilities were measured using a variation of the classic N-back task (Smith and Jonides 1999). In this version, participants viewed a sequence of digits in a computer screen and were instructed to press a certain button when the number on the screen was the same as the one that appeared two trials (2-back) before, and not press any button if the item was different. Participants completed 20 practice trials before completing the actual task. Each digit was presented for 500 msecs with an inter-stimulus interval of 2500 msecs. Across 60 trials 20 were the ‘correct hit’ trials. Accuracy scores (i.e., composite score of the number of corrects hits minus wrong hits) and reaction times on correct hits only indexed updating and working memory. The online 2-back task with digits was designed with E-Prime software (Schneider, Eschman, and Zuccolotto 2002).

4.3 Analysis We first ran a one-way ANOVA analysis to investigate differences in narrative length between PWA and the control group. We next computed the percentages of referentially appropriate vs inappropriate forms, as well as the percentages of grammatical vs ungrammatical referential forms in the participants’ narrative production. The percentages were taken from the total number of referring expressions per participant. Logit mixed effects models were then performed, one for referentially appropriate vs inappropriate, and one for grammatical vs ungrammatical forms. Aphasia disorder was the predictor in each model. Logit mixed effects models were also run for each type of referentially appropriate, inappropriate, and ungrammatical form in each group. In the 2-back task, we ran a one-way ANOVA analysis to investigate differences in accuracy between the two experimental groups. To determine how inappropriate and ungrammatical referential forms in the narrative task are linked to performance in the 2-back task, we utilized linear regression modelling for each group. Accuracy in the 2-back task was the predictor in each model,

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and inappropriate and ungrammatical forms were the dependent measures. The models were fitted in R using the lmer function from the lme4 package (Bates and Maechler 2009).

5. Results 5.1  Oral narrative production task Narrative length was measured in terms of verb clauses (Mean length: 13.8 (SD: 2.3) for the PWA; Mean length: 22.0 (SD: 2.7) for controls). As expected, the PWA produced significantly fewer verb clauses in their narrative production as compared to healthy adults, F (1, 27) = 78.443, p < .001). To control for this difference, the narrative length measure was used in the analyses for the narrative production task as a covariate. Aphasia Disorder effect in narrative production: Figure 8.1 presents the distribution of the total (raw) numbers of null subject and clitic pronouns, which were used by the two experimental groups in their narrations. We next ran ANCOVA analyses with null subject pronouns and clitics as the dependent measures, Group as the fixed factor, and narrative length as the covariate. For null subject pronouns, there was a significant Group effect, F (2, 27) = 5.617, p = .026, η2 = .18, after controlling for length, F (2, 27) = 2.576, p = .121, η2 = .09. For clitic pronouns, the Group effect, F (2, 27) = .497, p = .487, η2 = .02, and the narrative length effect, F (2, 27) = .020, p = .890, η2 = .01, were non-significant. The comparisons show that the PWA used fewer null subject pronouns than controls. Yet, the clitic rates were similar across the two groups, after taking into account the two groups’ narrative length. Table 8.2 illustrates the distribution of the percentages of referentially appropriate (i.e., unambiguous null pronouns in subject position, unambiguous pronominal clitics) and inappropriate expressions (i.e., ambiguous null subject pronouns, ambiguous clitic pronouns) by experimental group. The mixed effects model in Table 8.3 showed non-significant effects of Disorder or narrative length on referentially inappropriate forms.

Figure 8.1  Sums of null subject and clitic pronouns in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group (PWA vs Controls)

112

Pronouns and aphasia Table 8.2  Percentages (%) of referentially appropriate (i.e., unambiguous null subject and clitic pronouns) and inappropriate expressions (i.e., referentially ambiguous null subject and clitic pronouns) in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group

Referentially appropriate pronouns Unambiguous null subject pronouns Unambiguous clitics Referentially inappropriate pronouns Ambiguous null subject pronouns Ambiguous clitics

PWA (Ν=14)

Controls (Ν=14)

65.1 18.9 46.2 34.9 5.5 29.4

93.5 22.3 71.2 6.5 2.2 4.3

Table 8.3  Summary of logit mixed effects model: Referentially appropriate vs inappropriate forms Predictors

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

Intercept Disorder Narrative length

1.18 3.06 -0.03

3.63 4.52 0.25

.32 .67 -.40

.748 .506 .686

Intercept = the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable; SE = standard error; Reference level for Disorder: Aphasia

Table 8.4  Summary of logit mixed effects models: Types of referentially appropriate and inappropriate forms Predictors

Intercept Disorder Narrative length

Ambiguous null subject pronouns

Ambiguous clitics

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

7.69 -6.17 -0.09

2.92 3.64 0.13

2.63 -1.69 -0.71

.015* .103 .348

9.12 -11.10 -0.32

2.41 3.01 0.11

3.77 -3.67 -2.96

.001** .001** .007**

Intercept = the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable; SE = standard error; Reference level for Disorder: Aphasia *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001

Percentages of inappropriate forms were split by type (i.e., ambiguous null subject pronouns and ambiguous clitic pronouns) and further analyses were performed on each type. Table 8.4 presents the results of the mixed effects models. There was a significant effect of Disorder for the model on referentially inappropriate clitic pronouns, which stemmed from the fact that the PWA tended to use significantly more ambiguous object clitics than the control group. Also, there was a significant effect of narrative length on ambiguous clitic pronouns. Table 8.5 presents the distribution of the percentages of grammatical (i.e., pronominal clitics) and ungrammatical forms (i.e., substitution errors on clitics, null object pronouns) by experimental group. The mixed effects model in Table 8.6 shows a significant effect of Disorder for the model on ungrammatical referential forms, which stemmed from the fact that PWA tended to use significantly more ungrammatical forms than controls.

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Eleni Peristeri Table 8.5  Percentages (%) of grammatical (i.e., pronominal clitics) and ungrammatical (i.e., substitution errors on clitics, null object pronouns) used in the maintenance narrative function by experimental group

Grammatical pronouns Ungrammatical pronouns Substitution errors on clitics Null object pronouns

PWA (Ν=14)

Controls (Ν=14)

29.8 70.2 37.2 33.0

98.7 1.3 1.3 0

Table 8.6  Summary of logit mixed effects model: Grammatical vs ungrammatical forms Predictors

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

Intercept Disorder Narrative length

7.57 -7.86 -0.08

3.14 3.92 0.21

2.40 -2.00 0.91

.024* .046* .373

Intercept = the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable; SE = standard error; Reference level for Disorder: Aphasia *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001

Table 8.7  Summary of logit mixed effects models: Types of ungrammatical forms Predictors

Intercept Disorder Narrative length

Substitution errors on clitics

Null object pronouns

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

Coefficient

SE

z

p value

-0.14 2.42 7.11

4.08 0.67 5.09

-0.04 3.60 1.39

.971 .001** .05*

-2.10 1.86 0.09

0.96 0.41 0.04

-2.17 4.49 2.20

.0.39* kiep > kiep-ie ‘chicken-DIM; little chicken’). It is strongly associated with the nursery rhyme Kiepie, Kiepie, kom tog gou ‘Kiepie Kiepie come quickly’, where Kiepie is a gullible chicken. Outside nursery rhymes, it has been ironically recycled to name a hapless stock character, Kiepie die Kont ‘Kiepie the Cunt’. Additionally, the name has been employed as a self-disparaging term of self-address. In (3), the speaker refers to herself as kiepie instead of the default 1SG ek, which conveys her negative self-perception and highlights her gratitude for the help she received. 149

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As we will show, APIs like zhèn, mị, and kiepie are not imposters. We call them ‘noncanonical pronouns’ to distinguish them from the other API types mentioned above. A main distinctive characteristic of NCPs is that they carry conventionalized interpretive effects that vividly reflect speakers’ personalities or emotions. Syntactically, they behave more like textbook pronouns (and paranouns to some extent) than imposters or camouflage constructions. Unlike textbook pronouns, however, they are usually register-specific. In Chinese and Vietnamese, for instance, they are mainly used (informally) online, while, in Afrikaans, they most commonly surface in informal narratives. These characteristics make NCPs of potential interest to both theoretical linguists and sociolinguists. This chapter is structured as follows. In Section 2, we present a critical summary of the issues and topics concerning APIs, especially their most well-studied subtype: imposters. We argue that NCPs form a category of their own. In Section 3, we describe our main research methods, followed by the key findings in Section 4. Specifically, we discuss the extragrammatical effects and conditions associated with NCPs as they manifest in all three languages under discussion here, highlighting their nonareal nature. We also briefly consider how this phenomenon might fit into modern syntactic theory. In Section 5, we propose some directions for future research.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics: Imposters or noncanonical pronouns? The only book-length publications on APIs, to our knowledge, are Collins and Postal’s (2012) monograph on imposters and the subsequent crosslinguistic survey volume Collins (2014). Imposters look like normal R-expressions but refer to the first/second person instead of a real third person, as in (4). (4) a. Daddy1SG is going to get you an ice cream cone. b. Is the general2SG going to dine in his suite? (Collins and Postal 2012: 1–3) Both daddy and the general are notionally non-third person despite the third-person agreement, and this kind of grammatical/notional person mismatch has motivated Collins and Postal’s imposter theory. However, their point of departure is not suitable for languages with no overt agreement. Thus, Wang (2014) calls the Chinese equivalents of imposters ‘pseudo imposters’. Similarly, in Vietnamese, imposters are not only everywhere but have partly taken over the role of textbook pronouns as well, becoming speakers’ natural choices as terms of (self-)address (Nguyen 2020). In view of this broader crosslinguistic landscape, perhaps it is more appropriate to define imposters, at least synchronically, as normal R-expressions temporarily used as pronominal items. The crux of the matter is the on-the-fly recategorization and its concomitant referential shift. As we show in Section 3, this redefinition forces us to reclassify some of the imposters identified in Collins and Postal’s work. We propose two key differences between imposters and textbook pronouns based on our redefinition. First, imposters may have flexible person-indexing. While daddy in (4a) is 1SG, it can also be used as 2SG, as in (5). A true pronoun like I can never mean ‘you’. (5) Is daddy2SG going to get me an ice cream cone? Second, imposters have synchronically correlated R-expression bases, which underlie their temporary pronominal usage. Thus, daddy and the general, but not I or you, can be normally used as R-expressions. By both criteria, the NCPs in Section 1, especially those in Chinese/Vietnamese, resemble true pronouns. Specifically, (6) shows that they have fixed referents. Afrikaans is different in this respect for independent reasons, which we will return to in Section 4.2.

150

Alternative pronominal items

(6) a. *Zhèn        yōushāng   ma? zhèn.*2SG/*3SG   sad     Q Intended: ‘Are you / Is he sad? (jocularly arrogant)’ b. *Mị       hiểu     hông?  Mị.*2SG/*3SG   understand NEG Intended: ‘Do you / Does he understand? (deliberately naive)’

[Mandarin] [Vietnamese]

We suspect similar APIs exist in other languages too. For instance, some of the items that Collins and Postal (2012) classify as imposters behave more like NCPs once we forgo the agreement-centered definition. Among others, we find English yours truly and French bibi to be in this distinctive subcategory. First, neither term has flexible person-indexing, as in (7). (7) a. Yours truly1SG/*2SG/*3SG got stuck with this job. (humorously humble; Merriam-Webster) b.  Cette année,   la dinde et les marrons   c’est    pour bibi.    [French] this  year   the   turkey   and  the   chestnuts   it​.​is   for   bibi.1SG/*2SG/*3SG ‘This year, the turkey and the chestnuts are for me. (humorously humble)’ (https: //fre​​nch​-w​​ord​-a​​-day.​​typep​​ad​.co​​m​/mot​​dujou​​r​/200​​9​​/11/​​bibi.​​html)​ A typical imposter, by contrast, readily allows multiple person indices, so the sentences in (8) can have multiple readings depending on the context. (8) a. Lǎoshī                       yǒu   yì  shuāng  fāxiàn  liáng-mǎ  de   yǎnjīng.[Mandarin] teacher.1SG/2SG/3SG   have  one  pair     discover  fine-horse     POSS   eye ‘I/you/he/she (who is a teacher) has an eye for fine horses.’     b. Jīn-nián  de    huǒjī   gēn    lìzi    dōu   shì    gěi   lǎoshī this-year POSS   turkey   and   chestnut all    COP    give     teacher.1SG/2SG/3SG/3PL de. NMLZ ‘This year’s turkey and chestnut are all for me/you/him/her/them (who is/are teachers).’ Second, yours truly clearly has no common R-expression usage, as evidenced by the ungrammaticality of *a yours truly, *the yours truly, and so on. French bibi can be used as a noun, but none of its contemporary nominal senses (‘a small lady’s hat’, ‘a small ornament’, or ‘a type of sea worm’) is the basis of its pronominal usage. Thus, we reclassify these two terms as NCPs. Finally, unlike typical imposters, which are extensively used in languages that rely on them, NCPs tend to be limited to certain registers or subgroups of speakers. In Chinese and Vietnamese, they are mostly limited to informal online discourse, especially on social media, where speakers use them to highlight personal styles. In Afrikaans, they are most commonly used in spoken narrative contexts and are associated with more rural, unpretentious, laid-back, and/or humorous speakers.

3.  Methodological considerations and clarification of terms Considering the register/speaker-specific nature of NCPs, we have paid close attention to social media data for Chinese/Vietnamese and face-to-face and online storytelling contexts for Afrikaans. These are clearly standout contexts that native speakers can immediately associate with the relevant forms. In accord with the discussion in Section 2, we have adopted the following diagnostic for API classification.​

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Figure 11.1  API diagnostic (for imposters and NCPs)

What we are essentially suggesting by ‘noncanonical pronoun’ is that the relevant items are true pronouns in the lexicon, whereas imposters are only makeshift, quasi-pronominal items. That is, the distinction between textbook pronouns and imposters is one of syntactic (re)categorization, whereas that between textbook and noncanonical pronouns is not. Some clarifications are in order regarding the API diagnostic above. First, it is intended as a synchronic diagnostic. Some NCPs have developed from imposters, but the diagnostic is meant to apply to a fixed moment in time. Second, when we apply the diagnostic to an item, we apply it to the entire term rather than to part of it. This is especially relevant for terms with deictic components, like this reporter (+R-expression, +flexible person-indexing) and muggins here (−R-expression, −flexible person-indexing). Particularly, this means that even though muggins alone might be an ordinary epithet (as in He’s a real muggins.), muggins here as a whole (as in I’ve not had time to go to any meetings. Muggins here1SG has had to prepare lunch) (Oxford English Dictionary) is better classified as a lexicalized term. Third, by ‘synchronically correlated R-expression basis’ we mean an imposter is a temporarily pronominalized term, so the only lexical entry associated with it should be that of the R-expression it is based on. In other words, the imposter usage of a term, if any, is syntactically linked to its R-expression usage. This is self-evident for typical imposters. For instance, the 1SG usage of daddy in (4a) simply identifies the discourse referent picked out by the R-expression with the speaker—there is no [1SG] in the lexical entry of the word. When no such clear referential correlation exists, that usually signals that what we are tackling is not a typical imposter or not an imposter at all. Due to complicating factors like the above, there are inevitably borderline cases. Languages are in constant flux, and some of the textbook pronouns we see now may once have been NCPs or imposters. For instance, the 2SG pronoun in Thai, khun, is derived from ‘virtue’ (Diller 1994: 168), so when khun first acquired its pronominal usage, it could have been noncanonical. The same is true for the Japanese 1SG and 2SG pronouns watakushi and anata, which, according to Sugamoto (1989: 271–272), are derived from ‘privateness’ and ‘distance’. Some Vietnamese textbook pronouns have nominal origins too. According to Nguyen (1996: 8), the respectful 1SG tôi and the general-person mình are derived from ‘servant’ and ‘body’. For reasons of space, we leave aside the circumstances under which such ‘canonicalization’ (or grammaticalization) can happen. In a more elaborate API classification, some of these terms may be identified as paranouns (Ritter and Wiltschko 2019). This means that paranouns are more ‘grammaticalized’ than NCPs.

4.  What we currently know about noncanonical pronouns Having established the insufficiency of the imposter category as a characterization of NCPs, we devote this section to what our research to date has shown about these items. We focus on Chinese and Vietnamese in Section 4.1, on Afrikaans in Section 4.2, and on a more theoretical discussion in Section 4.3.

4.1  Chinese and Vietnamese Chinese and Vietnamese are highly similar in the makeup of their NCP inventory. They both have three main subtypes of NCPs: ancient terms, dialectal terms, and creative coinages. 152

Alternative pronominal items

4.1.1  Ancient terms The first noticeable NCP subtype in Chinese and Vietnamese centers on ancient terms, a major class of which are royal terms revived by Internet users, usually under the influence of popular TV series about love and power struggles in the imperial palace (e.g., Hòugōng Zhēn Huán Zhuàn ‘Empresses in the Palace’). Such TV series are generally popular in the ESA area and feature complicated pronominal systems, where the choice of term strictly depends on the rank and gender of the interlocutors. See (9) for an illustration. To better distinguish imposters from NCPs, we use ‘R-expressionPERSON-INDEX’ to notate the former and ‘PronounLITERAL-MEANING/NCP-EFFECT’ to notate the latter. In both notations, the primary reading is set as normal text, while the secondary reading is set as a subscript. (9) Conversation between the empress and a powerful consort (Empresses in the Palace): Empress: Mèimei       de    yìsi    shì   xǐhuān   běn-gōng     [Mandarin] younger​.sister.​​2SG POSS meaning COP   like     this-palace.1SG huánghòu  de   bǎozuò le? empress    POSS   throne CRS                  ‘Does younger sister2SG mean that (you) like myTHIS PALACE’S empress throne?’ Consort: Niángniang    duōxīn     le.   Chénqiè         zhǐshì imperial​.lady.​​2SG worry​.too​.m​uch CRS slave.consort.1SG just tīng-shuō … hear-say ‘Your Highness2SG is worrying too much. ISLAVE-CONSORT just heard that…’ There are four APIs in (9). The underlined mèimei and niángniang are imposters, while the boldfaced běn-gōng and chénqiè are NCPs, since they do not have flexible person-indexing or R-expression usage but are lexicalized terms. Note that even though běn-gōng contains a deictic component, it cannot pick out any referent other than the speaker, as evidenced by the failed interpretation in (10). (10) *Běn-gōng      bǐ   bié-gōng    měi. [Mandarin] *this-palace.3SG  than   other-palace beautiful Intended: ‘This consort3SG is more beautiful than other consorts.’ Compare: This reporter3SG is better than other reporters. (Song and Nguyen 2022: 215) Although běn-gōng literally means ‘this-palace’, it is more naturally rendered ‘this consort’ in English. Chinese compounds often have idiomatic meanings, and it is impossible to get a literal ‘this palace (i.e., a building)’ from běn-gōng. That meaning is expressed by a different deictic cǐ ‘this’ instead. Thus, běn-gōng is like muggins here, which also contains a ‘fake deictic’ that is part of a lexicalized term (Diessel 1999 calls this a ‘recognitional’ deictic). Both NCPs in (9) have been revived by Internet-users, and in online discourse they respectively sound jocularly arrogant and jocularly humble. Also note that while both terms are feminine in origin, there are no strict gender rules on their revived usage, as in (11). Table 11.1 presents the common ancient royal terms that have been revived in Chinese as NCPs. (11) a. Zuì   tǎoyàn de     jiù-shì    cā-bōli.   Chénqiè        cā-bù-gānjìng most  detest   NMLZ   just-COP    wipe-glass   slave.consort.1SG.F wipe-NEG-clean a!

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EXCL ‘I dislike wiping windows the most. ISLAVE-CONSORT really can’t wipe them clean! (jocularly humble)’ (Weibo, female) b. Wǒ   hěn   xiǎng yī-yī    huífù,  dànshì chénqiè …      shǒu  má    le. 1SG   very  want   one-one  reply   but     slave.consort.1SG.F   hand  numb CRS ‘I do want to reply to all of you, but mySLAVE-CONSORT’S hands are already numb (from typing). (jocularly humble)’ (Weibo, male) The situation in Vietnamese is similar to that in Chinese. In fact, some royal terms have been revived in Vietnamese under the influence of the same TV series. Two common examples are trẫm ‘emperor.1SG.M’ (by emperors) and ái-phi ‘beloved-consort.2SG.F’ (by emperors to consorts). The former corresponds to Chinese zhèn, and the latter to ài-fēi ‘beloved-consort’ (which is an imposter in Chinese). See (12) for an illustration. (12) a. Trẫm      tha    tội       haha.      [Vietnamese] emperor.1SG   forgive  wrongdoing  haha ‘IEMPEROR-LIKE forgive (you) haha. (jocularly arrogant)’ b. Ái-phi          hôm-nay  đẹp      quá! beloved-consort.2SG    today       pretty   INTS ‘YouBELOVED-CONSORT look gorgeous today! (jocularly flirtatious)’ (Song and Nguyen 2022: 212–213) Similarly to the terms in Table 11.1, trẫm and ái-phi convey various shades of jocularity and highlight the speaker’s (consciously styled) outgoing or cool personality. There are also nonroyal-ancient-termbased NCPs, such as the Vietnamese fictional character name mị mentioned in Section 1. Vietnamese differs from Chinese in the use of revived royal terms in at least one respect: while Chinese speakers do not strictly follow the inherent genders of royal terms, Vietnamese speakers do (within the limitation of our study). Both utterances in (12) were posted by male users, and the Tweet in (12b) is addressed to a female audience. Why such a gender-related difference exists between Vietnamese and Chinese NCPs is an interesting question for future research.

4.1.2  Dialectal terms Compared to the NCPs above, those discussed below are much less complicated. They are all items of dialectal origin, which, after entering the national language via mass media, acquired new, conTable 11.1 Ancient royal terms revived in Modern Chinese Term

Meaning

zhèn guǎ-rén āijiā běn-gōng

‘1SG’ ‘lack-person; 1SG’ ‘mourner; 1SG.F’ ‘this-palace; 1SG.F’

chénqiè pínqiè

‘slave consort; 1SG.F’ ‘slave concubine; 1SG.F’

Historical usage

NCP effect

by state rulers by empress dowagers by mid/high-rank consorts to inferiors by high-rank consorts to superiors by low-rank concubines to superiors

154

jocularly arrogant

jocularly humble

Alternative pronominal items Table 11.2 Dialectal-origin noncanonical pronouns in Chinese Term

Index

Original dialect

NCP effect

ǒu é yā

‘1SG’ ‘1SG’ ‘3SG’

Southern (e.g., Min) dialects Shaanxi Mandarin Beijing Mandarin

deliberately cute jocular offensive

ventionalized uses beyond their basic pronominal function. For instance, Northern Chinese Internet users in the early 2000s used to mock Southern speakers’ pronunciation of the 1SG pronoun wǒ as ǒu. Later, however, the mockery faded away, and the term gained a cute-sounding effect among the younger generation, as illustrated by the Weibo examples in (13). (13) a. Zǒngjié    yíxià  ǒu      de     zhè   gè   yuè.         [Mandarin] summarize  once  1SG.CUTE  POSS  this  CL  month ‘Let us do a summary of this month of mineCUTE. (deliberately cute)’ b. Cǎigòu  huílái  le,   muā-ma    bǎ   ǒu     mà    le      yí dùn. shopping   return   CRS  mom.CUTE   DISP 1SG.CUTE   scold PRF   one  CL ‘ICUTE came back from shopping, and got scolded by my mom. (deliberately cute)’ The underlined muā-ma in (13b) is a deliberately distorted pronunciation of māma ‘mom’ with a cute-sounding effect. This is stylistic agreement. Table 11.2 shows the popular dialectal-origin NCPs in Chinese, and (14) gives some examples. (14) a. É         dī   gè lǎotiān’é ya!    Shuài-cǎn       le!     [Mandarin] 1SG.JOC POSS.JOC  CL God.JOC   EXCL   handsome-tragic CRS ‘Oh myFUNNY God! He’s so handsome! (deliberately funny)’ b. Wǒ  zhēn   xiǎng  shàngqù  zòu   yā     yí    dùn… 1SG so   want  go​.​up   beat  3SG.OFF  one  CL ‘I want to go up and beat himOFFENSIVE up so much… (very offensive)’ Among the four items in Table 11.2, the first two are ordinary pronouns in their original dialects, while yā is already offensive in Beijing Mandarin (it is not limited to online discourse but widely used in colloquial speech). Note that the aforementioned stylistic agreement shows up in (14a) again, where the possessive de and the nominal lǎotiānyé ‘Sir Heaven’ are distorted as dī and lǎotiān’é – the former sounds more dialectal, while the latter literally means ‘old swan’. The situation in Vietnamese is again analogous to that in Chinese: default pronouns in dialects tend to acquire a deliberately funny or cute effect when they enter the national language. Two of the most common Vietnamese NCPs of this type are y and hắn, both 3SG. Specifically, y is from Northern dialects, and hắn is from Central and Southern dialects. See (15) for two Facebook examples. (15) a. Tôi  nói  lời   yêu  y,   nhưng  sao  y   không  hiểu?     [Vietnamese] 1SG   say   word love       3SG but   why   3SG NEG understand ‘I said loving words to himFUNNY, but why hasn’t heFUNNY understood? (deliberately funny)’

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b. Chính   hắn   cục   vàng của    tui. precisely   3SG  CL  gold  POSS   1SG ‘It is precisely himCUTE, my piece of gold. (deliberately cute)’ (Song and Nguyen 2022: 216) In particular, y is usually used to refer to a male criminal in its source dialect, and this connotation is apparently inherited in its NCP usage. The speaker’s crush in (15a) is humorously considered a ‘criminal’. Overall, the use of hắn and y in Vietnamese online discourse adds a dramatic or comic effect to the utterance, which helps convey the speaker’s illocutionary emotion.

4.1.3  Creative online coinages The third NCP subtype in Chinese and Vietnamese involves creative coinages. While items of the previous two types have regular sources, those of this type are based on miscellaneous lexical materials, some totally novel. Thus, they are ‘native’ to Internet language. Take the e-shopping context, where traders need to build rapport in the absence of gestures and facial expressions. A commercial-purpose 2SG term has emerged in both Chinese and Vietnamese: qīn and cưng respectively, both meaning ‘dear’ literally. Since these terms have fixed person-indexing and no R-expression basis, we identify them as NCPs. See (16) for an illustration. (16) a. Qīn    kěyǐ   shōucáng    wǒ-men   de    diànpù   hé    liànjiē...  [Mandarin] dear.2SG can   save    1SG-PL POSS    store  and link ‘YouDEAR can save our store and link... (friendly and welcoming)’ (Taobao) b. Cưng   muốn   gì    từ   anh    nào?            [Vietnamese] dear.2SG want  what from 1SG.M AFFECT ‘What do youDEAR want from me? (friendly and welcoming)’ (Facebook) Terms like qīn and cưng sound friendly but not overly intimate, hence their suitability for e-commerce purposes. Two intriguing terms of this subtype are Vietnamese con-quỷ ‘devil.2SG’ and người-đẹp ‘beautiful person.2SG’. These are borderline NCPs since they do have R-expression uses but are subject to peculiar morphosyntactic conditions – con-quỷ as an R-expression is most often accompanied by a modifier (?một con quỷ ‘a devil’ vs. một con quỷ dữ ‘an aggressive devil’), and người-đẹp sounds more questionable than its hyponyms (?một người-đẹp ‘a beautiful person’ vs. một cô gái đẹp ‘a beautiful woman’). Moreover, while con-quỷ and người-đẹp as APIs have been recycled from R-expressions, the recycling is clearly not done in a temporary, on-the-fly manner. To further illustrate Internet users’ creativity, we present two additional NCPs from Chinese: lúnjiā ‘other people; 1SG’ (deliberately cute) and běn-lū/lú/lǔ ‘this-loser; 1SG’ (self-disparaging). Specifically, lúnjiā is a distortion of rénjiā ‘other people; 3PL/1SG’ (an imposter), but alongside the distortion, its 3PL reading is lost. Běn-lū/lú/lǔ is a neologism combining the Mandarin deictic morpheme běn ‘this’ (which also occurs in běn-gōng) and the first syllable of loser (which may be put in the first, second, or third tone). See (17) for two Weibo examples. (17) a. Yīngyīngyīng,      wéisēnmò   yào    qǔguǎn        lúnjiā?  [Mandarin] CUTE CRYING SOUND why.CUTE    would   unfollow.CUTE 1SG.CUTE ‘Sob sob, why would you unfollow me. (deliberately cute)’ b. Xīwàng  běn-lú      néng    yìzhí  bǎochí   xiànzài zhè-zhǒng   jījíjìnqǔ hope    this-loser.1SG can    always keep      now   this-CL    positive

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Alternative pronominal items



de     xīntài. MOD   attitude ‘Hopefully ITHIS-LOSER can always keep this positive attitude. (self-disparaging)’

We see stylistic agreement here again. The speaker in (17a), apart from using lúnjiā, distorts two other words: wéisēnmò ( null, depending on the availability of these options in their language. As for the Romance languages, research on monolingual children has shown that clitic pronouns are late to appear (related to both lexical objects and other pronoun types) and seem to require an advanced syntactic development in all languages possessing this pronoun type (cf. Gavarró and Mosella 2009). We may thus expect the bilingual acquisition process of object clitics to be even more

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-16

Bilingual acquisition

complex since it includes an interaction of complex intra-linguistic morphosyntactic properties with specific issues of child bilingualism, namely the quantity and quality of input, language dominance, and potential cross-linguistic influence in the given language combination. This chapter seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the whole domain by comparing recent empirical results from bilingual development of object clitics in different bilingual populations and language pairs. More precisely, we provide some answers to several crucial questions, namely: (1) What constitutes the complexity of object clitics in typically developing bilingual children? and (2) What is the ultimate attainment of bilinguals in this domain? Although Romance languages are not the only languages possessing object clitics (cf. Varlokosta et al. 2016), their study is instructive since there is a large body of research on their inventories of both strong and clitic object pronouns and their acquisition in monolingual and bilingual constellations. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a survey of the most important morphological and syntactic properties of pronouns in Romance languages and key issues of the current debate on different types of early bilingual development. Section 3 systematically compares recent research results concerning object clitics in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish acquired as first/ heritage language together with German and other Germanic languages. Section 4 summarizes the key similarities of the development of clitics in simultaneous or sequential language acquisition. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of future directions.

2.  Summary of issues and topics 2.1  Object pronoun types in Germanic and Romance The complexity of the Romance systems of object pronouns becomes clearer if we first look at languages with only one series of object pronouns, for instance the Germanic ones, taking German as example. German object pronouns show ambiguous behaviour between weak and strong pronouns (except for weak es ‘it’; see Schmitz and Müller 2008). Pronominal elements occur in spoken German as shown in (1). (1) Ich hab’n (= ihn) / hab’se (= sie) gesehen. (Di Venanzio et al. 2016: 234) I have’m (= him) / have’r (= her) seen ‘I saw him/her’ The forms marked in italics are so-called slurred forms, which some linguists have considered as ‘clitics’ (but see the critical discussion in Di Venanzio et al. 2016: 234). Importantly, both the reduced and the full pronominal forms take the same syntactic position as a lexical object that can be both be animate/human (e.g., Peter/Marie) or inanimate objects (e.g., der Ball ‘the ball’/die Puppe ‘the doll’) in example (1). The slurred forms in German, thus, only involve a different phonological shape while the clitics of the Romance languages possess various properties distinguishing them from strong pronouns (cf. Cardinaletti and Starke 1999, Kuchenbrandt et al. 2005). These properties, which the language acquiring child must figure out, are syntactic (see 2), semantic (see 3–4) and phonological (see 5). At the syntactic level, as illustrated by the Spanish example in (2), the dependency of clitics on a verbal host is reflected by the requirement of immediate adjacency to the verb: (2) a. María ve un perro, ‘Mary sees a dog’ b. María lo ve. ‘Mary sees it’ b’. *María ve lo.

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The precise positions in each Romance language depend upon the available syntactic positions, verbal inflection, and individual constructions, among other features. These are not presented in detail here since the literature on mono- and bilingual acquisition of clitic positions reports a (near) inexistence of errors in monolingual children and rare errors in bilingual children (cf. Bernardini and van de Weijer 2017). At the semantic level, strong pronouns are restricted to referring to [+ human] referents () while clitics can refer also to [- human] referents () as the following Italian examples show. The strong female pronoun lei is only acceptable for Silvia but not for the house of Piero while this restriction does not hold for the object clitic lo in (3c, d): (3) a. *Ecco la casa di Piero. Gianni vede lei con piacere. Here is the house.FEM of Piero. Gianni sees her with pleasure ‘Here is the house of Piero. Gianni sees it with pleasure’ b. Ecco Silvia. Gianni vede lei con piacere Here is Silvia. Gianni sees her with pleasure ‘Here is Silvia. Gianni sees her with pleasure’ c. Gianni, lo vedrò domani. Gianni him.CLIT I-will see tomorrow ‘I will see Gianni tomorrow’ d. Non so se il vino, lo volete adesso o dopo not I-know if the winemask, him.CLIT you-want now or later ‘I don’t know if you want the wine now or later’ (Schmitz and Müller 2008: 34) A further semantic property relates to the argument status of clitics as Schmitz and Müller (2008: 34) show: object clitics are less restrictive than strong pronouns since the former may act as arguments and as predicates. If clitics represent predicates, the unmarked (masculine) form (French le, Italian lo) is used, as evidenced in (4): (4) a. Maria la/lo vede. Jeanne la/le voit. Mary her.CLIT/him.CLIT sees Jeanne her.CLIT/him.CLIT sees ‘Mary/Jeanne sees her/him’. (Déchaine and Wiltschko 2002: 428) b. Maria è un’avvocatessa e Silvia lo/*la sarà anche. Mary is an advocate and Silvia it.CLIT/*she.CLIT will-be too agreement ‘Mary is an advocate and Silvia will it be soon too’ b’. Marie est une avocate et Jeanne le/*la sera aussi. Mary is an advocate and Jeanne it.CLIT/*she.CLIT will-be too agreement ‘Mary is an advocate and Silvia will be it soon too’ (Schmitz and Müller 2008: 344) At the phonological level, French liaison represents another example for the deficiency of clitics since it is possible only with deficient pronouns (Schmitz and Müller 2008: 34). In French, the feminine third person strong pronoun and the feminine third person clitic are homophonous. The reading as a strong pronoun is enforced if the pronoun is prosodically prominent (indicated by capitalization in (5a)) or used in the syntactic construction of complex inversion (in (5b)): (5) a. Elle[z] ont dit la vérité. /ELLE*[z] ont dit la vérité they.FEM/CLIT have said the truth they.FEM/STR have said the truth ‘They have said the truth’

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b. Quand elle∗[z] ont-elles dit la vérité? when they.FEM/STR have-they.FEM/CLIT said the truth ‘When did they say the truth?’ Tables 13.1–13.3, based on Kuchenbrandt et al. (2005), summarise the inventories for strong and weak pronouns in the four Romance languages treated in this chapter (cf. Kuchenbrandt et al. 2005 for an emphasis of language-specific differences and phonological details). Starting with strong pronouns in Table 13.1, we observe that only nonreflexive third person forms are marked for grammatical gender. Turning to weak/clitic pronouns, Tables 13.2 and 13.3 separate the forms for first and second person and for third person, since the latter have a more complex inventory. The forms in Table 13.2 are used as direct, indirect, and reflexive objects. Table 13.3 shows the more complex inventory for third-person forms in terms of case, gender, and reflexivity. The notions ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’, used by Kuchenbrandt et al. (2005), refer to the grammatical functions as direct and/or indirect objects. For acquisition research, it must be established how these essential properties of the two fundamental pronoun classes and their inventories in various Romance languages relate to the acquisition of object pronouns and, particularly, to the observation that clitic pronouns are acquired later than strong pronouns. We can also question why phonologically reduced and semantically more flexible clitics are produced later than strong pronouns and why their specific syntactic placement does not pose problems.

Table 13.1 Strong object pronouns

1.sg. 2.sg. 3.sg. 1.pl. 2.pl. 3.pl. 3.refl. (sg. + pl.)

French Dat.+Acc.

Italian Dat.+Acc.

Portuguese Dat.+Acc.

Spanish Dat.+Acc.

moi te lui elle nous vous eux elles soi

me te lui lei noi voi loro; gli se stess(o/a/i/e)

mim ti ele ela nós vós; vocês eles elas si

mí ti ello ello ella nosotros nosotras vosotros vosotras ellos ellas si

(c.f. Kuchenbrandt et al. 2005: 3, Table 2)

Table 13.2 Clitic pronouns first and second person

1.sg. 2.sg. 1.pl. 2.pl.

French Dat.+Acc.

Italian Dat.+Acc.

Portuguese Dat.+Acc.

Spanish Dat.+Acc.

me te nous vous

mi ti ci vi

me te nos vos

me te nos vos

(c.f. Kuchenbrandt et al. 2005: 4, Table 3)

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1.sg. direct 1.pl. 3.sg. indirect 3.pl. direct 3.sg./pl. reflexive indirect

French masc./fem.

Italian masc./fem.

Portuguese masc./fem.

Spanish masc./fem.

le la les

lo la li le

oa os as

lo la los las

lui leur

gli le gli

lhe lhes

le les

se

si

se

se

(c.f. Kuchenbrandt et al. 2005: 5, Table 4)

Early classifications of pronoun types by Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) and Déchaine and Wiltschko (2002) attributed different syntactic categories (i.e., external syntactic information) to the pronoun classes in order to explain their acquisition. Since these models, despite their differences, treat subject and object clitics alike, both fail to correctly predict the appearance of different types of clitics at different points in time observed in French child language. The solution proposed by Gabriel and Müller (2005) provides a more fine-grained typology of pronouns than the previous classifications (cf. Schmitz and Müller 2008 for criticisms and Section 3 for empirical details). It combines the internal and external syntactic analysis of pronouns, assuming both an external and an internal deficiency of clitics. The proposal recognizes a homogeneous class of clitics, but only in terms of their external syntax, i.e., they share the same external syntactic category since they all encode the phi-feature person, some also number and/or gender. Gabriel and Müller (2005) propose that subject clitics (represented by IL) are pro-Ps with the most articulated structure, while non-reflexive object pronouns (LE/LO) are also pro-Ps but lacking an N-layer, and reflexive object clitics (SE/SI) are heads. The typology is illustrated in (6): (6) The typology of pronouns (cf. Schmitz and Müller 2008: 33) LUI DP

D

Φ

Φ

NP

N IL

LE/LO

ΦP

Φ

SE/SI

ΦP

NP

Φ

Φ

N

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For language acquisition, this proposal can correctly predict that (both monolingual and bilingual) children acquire first the pronoun types whose internal syntax includes a NP-layer, i.e., strong pronouns of the DP-type (LUI) and subject clitics (phi-P, IL).

2.2  Different types of bilingual language development (2L1 vs. HLA) In the last decades, intense research on heritage language acquisition (HLA) has led to the comparison of different bilingual populations regarding their input conditions, namely children acquiring both languages simultaneously from birth (2L1 acquisition) with children acquiring a heritage language (HL, their first language) and a majority language at pre-school age. Following Silva-Corvalán (1994), a heritage language is generally defined as a language that someone learns at home as a child, and which is not the dominant language of the surrounding society; heritage speakers (HSs) are children of immigrants who are born in the host country or who arrived in the host country in early childhood (= second or third generation). HSs are thus early bilinguals, exposed to their HL and the majority language since birth (simultaneous bilinguals) or in early childhood (sequential bilinguals). Recent studies investigating the acquisition of object clitics in Romance HL include adult and child HSs and enrich our understanding of the process and its outcome for which (in)complete acquisition and convergence of the two linguistic systems are still debated (see Guijarro-Fuentes and Schmitz 2015, Flores et al. 2019) . The role of object clitics concerning the occurrence of (temporal or long-term) cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual language development, is also widely discussed. Following Müller and Hulk (2001), CLI (considered as temporal and developmental phenomenon in 2L1 acquisition) can occur under two conditions: (1) the two languages overlap in surface structure, and there is structural ambiguity in one of the languages; and (2) the phenomena involve mapping to a pragmatic interface. Furthermore, the direction of CLI is predictable according to Müller et al. (2002), namely in terms of complexity of the given grammatical domain in a particular language pair, i.e., from the less to the more complex system. Relating these criteria to object omissions and (pronominal) realization, they predict that object omissions (or null (clitic) objects), which are linked to the syntax/pragmatics interface, are vulnerable to CLI, whereas no CLI is predicted for object clitics considered as syntactic categories. Several aspects of this approach have been disputed. First, the unidirectionality is doubted by Serratrice et al. (2011) and Bernardini and van de Weijer (2017). These authors propose the option of bidirectional CLI and emphasize the need to integrate more factors, for instance age, input, and the typological relatedness of the bilinguals’ two languages. Second, although there is no overlap between English and French regarding object clitics (no clitics and no object omission in English), Pirvulescu et al. (2014) observed that bilingual French-English children showed a high omission rate in their French. This observation led them to favour an alternative proposal, namely the Bilingual Effect Hypothesis, which postulates that delay (in 2L1 development) is induced by both ambiguous input within each language and reduced input across languages. Thus, it can apply also in the absence of an overlap of the languages in the given grammatical domain in a specific bilingual constellation. As for the interface criterion, recent studies by Pérez-Leroux et al. (2011) for Spanish-English bilinguals and Tomaz and Lobo (2021) for Portuguese/French bilinguals find evidence for CLI in clitic placement they associate with the syntax-lexicon interface. The following section covers the development of the different types of object pronouns in different populations of early bilinguals, paying particular attention to CLI. The section concludes with discussion about the possible impact of methodological issues skewing the data on bilingual acquisition.

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3.  Bilingual acquisition of object clitics 3.1  Object clitics in bilingual French Since French is a non-null subject language and has subject clitics, the order of appearance of subject and object clitics is one of the most investigated aspects in longitudinal studies of bilingual children, including the Dutch-French child Anouk (Hulk 2000); the Swedish-French children Mini, Jean, Anne, and Dany (Schlyter 2003, Granfeldt and Schlyter 2004); and the German-French children Caroline, Ivar, and Pascal (Meisel 1994, Kaiser 1994) as well as Céline (Müller 2004). Such research relies almost exclusively on data from 2L1 acquisition studies, most of them based on spontaneous production in longitudinal studies. In sum, the observed later appearance of object clitics in relation to the emergence of subject clitics in monolinguals does not hold for all Germanic-French bilinguals, since in some of them both clitic types appear at around the same time, namely Anouk acquired subject pronouns later than the other bilingual children (both types emerge around age 2;7), while Pascal produced both types much earlier (at around 2;4) and simultaneously. Prévost (2009: 184) states that, regardless of whether there is a delay between the first subject and object clitics, the incidence of subject clitics is much higher than that of object clitics. In terms of number and person, the longitudinal spontaneous data referred to by Prévost document a developmental trend that seems to be more firmly established in bilingual children: the first object clitics are third person singular, followed by first person me and second person te while plural clitics are acquired last. The reflexive se is reported to be produced relatively early, as in monolingual French children. Prévost (2009) did not indicate whether this order of appearance reflects the frequency of these clitics in the input and which amount of the input the children received exactly. Early approaches to the explanation of the complexity of object clitics underlying their delayed appearance related the acquisition of object clitics to the emergence of the CP layer as part of the syntax-pragmatics interface (cf. Müller and Hulk 2001 and the summary in Prévost 2009). This idea was questioned first by Paradis et al. (2003), who observed that English-French bilingual children omitted object pronouns in French (i.e., clitics) much more often than English pronouns and committed more errors with respect to number, person, and gender. The bilinguals were not found to differ from age-matched French monolingual with respect to object clitic use. Paradis et al. interpreted the fact that English/French bilinguals are reported to experience specific difficulties with object clitics and not with object pronouns in general as evidence for computational problems related to object clitics, which do not occur in canonical object position in French in contrast to English object pronouns. The account of object clitics in (monolingual and bilingual) language acquisition in Section 2.1 came from Schmitz and Müller (2008), and was based on spontaneous production data from both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies including monolingual French and Italian children and simultaneous bilingual German-French (including Céline) and German-Italian children. The investigation periods in the longitudinal studies were 1;7,18-2;7,15 for the monolingual children and 1;8,28-3;828 for the bilingual children; the cross-sectional French and Italian data cover the age span of 1;9,133;0,6. Schmitz and Müller (2008: 31) found, first in the bilingual children, that subject clitics are clearly acquired before reflexive object clitics. In contrast, the order of acquisition of non-reflexive and reflexive object clitics is less clear: both are acquired either at the same time or reflexive object clitics slightly later than non-reflexive object clitics or vice versa. In comparing the monolingual and the bilingual data, Schmitz and Müller determine the following developmental patterns that can be predicted based on the typology presented in Section 2.1: a) subject clitics appear before object clitics (given their different internal syntax); b) subject clitics appear at the same time as strong subject pronouns (given their similar internal syntax including a NP-layer). 188

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In elicited production of monolinguals and in longitudinal bilingual data, strong object pronouns appear at the same time as subject clitics and strong subject pronouns. In the longitudinal monolingual data, object pronouns appear generally later, i.e., independently of their status as clitic or strong pronoun. Reflexive clitics appear much later than subject clitics. The appearance of reflexive clitics in relation to non-reflexive clitics is random, i.e., they can appear simultaneously or one before the other. The general conclusion is that the order of appearance of clitic and strong pronouns shows no difference in monolingual and bilingual children. This absence of CLI can also be predicted since the Germanic and Romance systems do not overlap regarding clitics and, since pronouns are syntactic elements, the domain does not fit the interface criterion (cf. section 2.2). Since Schmitz and Müller (2008) only analysed direct objects, Schmitz (2012) furthered the analysis of bilingual clitic acquisition by considering the use of reflexive and non-reflexive clitics. Her analysis is based on elicited production data of two complex constructions that contain both direct objects and indirect objects or reflexives, namely constructions of inalienable possession, e.g., Marie se lave les dents ‘Mary brushes her teeth’ and double object constructions, typically expressing a transfer of an alienable entity, e.g., Marie donne un cadeau à sa mère ‘Mary gives her mother a gift’. The study uses a subset of the data from two elicitation tasks testing these constructions (among others) in 16 German-French bilingual children from Eichler (2008) (age 2;6-6;5) and 12 GermanFrench children from Schmitz (2006), all of them conducted with simultaneous (2L1) bilinguals in the age range 2;9-4;1. Schmitz (2012) observed that both monolingual and bilingual children prefer lexical direct and indirect objects to clitic pronouns – as found in other studies – and omit indirect objects more often and for a longer time than direct objects, and reflexive clitics are used throughout if possessors of body parts are produced. Since monolingual and bilingual children behaved alike, there was no cross-linguistic influence across the board. Unfortunately, there appears to be no comparable study on object clitics in French HS living in an environment with a German(ic) majority language for comparison regarding the role of (reduced) input. The situation is quite different when we turn to bilingual German(ic)-Italian speakers, where we find various language combinations, input situations, and age groups.

3.2  Object clitics in bilingual Italian Di Venanzio et al. (2016) investigated omissions and realizations of direct and indirect objects produced by Italian HSs raised in Germany. Their study can be directly compared to Schmitz and Müller (2008) since Di Venanzio et al. also investigate data from spontaneous speech in semi-structured interviews. They compared the production by adult HSs (n=10, mean age 23.2) with speech data from native speakers of Italian who immigrated to Germany as adults with German as L2 (n=10, mean age 46.4, residing in Germany for avg. 23 years), and from adult Italian monolinguals (n=10, mean age 23.2). All monolinguals speak the regional dialect of their province in addition to Standard Italian (mainly Sicilian and Neapolitan varieties). The analysis is based on the Italian spontaneous speech data that contain a total of 5,272 produced utterances with transitive verbs providing the context for the realization or omission of an object. The authors analysed the use of object clitics in relation to other object types (i.e., lexical as XP, clitic or strong pronoun, left or right dislocation, and clitic doubling). In left dislocated structures, lexical complements occur together with clitics in Italian and with strong/weak pronouns in German. Example (7) shows a left dislocation structure involving the obligatory presence of a resumptive clitic pronoun; the example directly compares Italian (using the clitic li) and German (using the facultative ambiguous pronoun die): (7) I    tavoli li   ho  riparati   la     mattina     Italian The tables them have repaired.PL the morning Die Tische, die habe ich heute morgen repariert.         German 189

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The tables, them have I this morning repaired ‘As for the tables, I repaired them this morning’       (Di Venanzio et al. 2016: 235) As for clitic doubling, Standard Italian has no obligatory contexts for such a reduplication, but it appears in colloquial speech and in Southern Italian varieties, as per example (8): (8) A me mi piace molto che qui in Germania sia tutto ordinato. To me, me pleases much that here in Germany be everything organized ‘I really like that everything is (so well) organized in Germany’ (LGF1211, HS, Southern Italian, cf. Di Venanzio et al. 2016: 235) Di Venanzio et al. (2016) note that speakers generally realized the direct object by a lexical XP, followed by clitics and strong pronouns. However, the bilinguals realized the required direct object more often by using left dislocations than did the monolinguals. As for the placement of direct object clitics, the data show an almost always grammatical clitic placement by the bilinguals (approx. 99% in both groups) and no ungrammatical clitic placement by monolinguals. Concerning indirect objects, the speakers of all groups used clitic pronouns to express them. Dislocated indirect objects occurred only rarely in the data, but the bilingual speakers realized the required indirect objects by clitic doubling, in strong contrast to the monolinguals (cf. example (8)). The placement of indirect object clitics is grammatical without exception. Summarizing all results, Di Venanzio et al. (2016) show that the HSs show native knowledge of both lexical options of object omissions and their pragmatic identification and object clitic use; in total, the Italian HSs differ in fewer investigated aspects from Italian monolinguals than L1/L2 speakers. The results by Di Venanzio et al. (2016) thus suggest an ultimate attainment of Italian HSs raised with German as majority language that differs in some aspects from that of monolinguals but is not deficient. Romano (2020) provides a further study from the adult ultimate attainment perspective investigating another Germanic-Romance bilingual constellation. He compares adult Swedish-Italian HSs (n=12, mean age = 32), Swedish second-language learners of Italian (n=12 , mean age = 44), and Italian native language speakers (n=18, mean age = 24), focusing on their syntactic and morphological knowledge of Italian accusative clitics in relation to age of exposure and syntactic complexity. Romano elicited data using both an oral structural priming task and a speeded grammaticality judgment task (GJT); the first served to assess the strength of priming effects of lexical, functional, and quasi-functional clitic structures, which is indicative of how robustly they are represented in an L2, HL, and L1 speaker’s competence, while the second elicited more explicit knowledge of clitic forms in relation to structure compared to the priming task (Romano 2020: 361). The overall result is that the abstract representation of clitic structures turned out to be qualitatively more similar between the HSs and more monolingual speakers (Romano 2020: 368). The results from the structural priming task supported the hypothesis that the syntactic complexity of clitic structures and early exposure conspire to explain divergent outcomes between L1 and HSs insofar as all three groups conformed to this pattern (Romano 2020: 370). This consistency, paired with the low levels of agreement errors in use of clitics by the bilingual groups, suggests that they have access to the relevant abstract structure and features necessary for cliticization in Italian (Romano 2020: 370). He also observes that the L1 and HSs who were exposed to native input from birth did not show a significant difference in priming effects for sentences in the lexical and quasi-functional verb conditions, indicating a qualitative similarity between these two groups and a ‘fairly monolingual-like’ quality on the part of the HS, contrasting with the results from the GJT, which did not show such an advantage. The three groups did not differ for the effects of syntactic complexity on their grammatical intuitions

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neither in the grammatical nor in the ungrammatical condition; instead, both bilingual groups performed significantly worse than the more monolingual group in the ungrammatical condition. A different picture arises when we look at other language pairs, at another age group, and at the interpretation of object clitics: Serratrice et al. (2011) investigated the role of typological relatedness, language of the community, and age in predicting similarities and differences between EnglishItalian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children and their monolingual child and adult counterparts in the acceptability of pre- and postverbal object pronouns in [±focus] contexts in Italian and in English. The crucial difference between the two languages under study concerns the availability of preverbal object clitics in Italian for [-focus] contexts (in contrast to postverbal strong pronouns in [+focus] contexts), whereas English lacks object clitics and uses strong object pronouns both for [-focus] and [+focus] contexts (e.g., contrastive focus), which also appear in the same postverbal position. The two conditions are illustrated in examples (9) and (10). (9)

[−focus] condition Voice over: Che cosa ha fatto Minnie a Paperina? ‘What has Minnie done to Daisy?’ Donald: L’ha abbracciata. Pragmatically appropriate ‘(She) her has hugged.’ Scrooge: Ha abbracciato lei. Pragmatically inappropriate‘ (She) has hugged her.’ (10) [+focus] condition Voice over: Che cosa ha fatto Topolino? Ha abbracciato Minnie o Paperino? ‘What has Mickey done? Has (he) hugged Minnie or Donald?’ Donald: Ha abbracciato lei. Pragmatically appropriate ‘(He) has hugged her’. Scrooge: L’ha abbracciata. Pragmatically inappropriate ‘(He) her has hugged’. (Serratrice et al. 2011: 12) For Italian, Serratrice et al. (2011: 10) expect the response accuracy to be significantly higher depending on age (adults > older children > younger children) and a higher accuracy in [-focus] contexts as main effect of the task. Furthermore, they expect an interaction between task and group in these contexts where monolinguals and Spanish-Italian bilinguals give more accurate responses than EnglishItalian bilinguals. The authors tested 167 children between the ages of 6;2 and 10;10 as well as 30 monolingual English-speaking adults and 30 monolingual Italian adults. The children were divided in two groups of English-Italian bilinguals, one living in the United Kingdom (UK, n=39, mean age 8;0) and the other in Italy (n=20, mean age 8;2) as well as a Spanish-Italian group (n=31, mean age 8;1); furthermore, a group of Italian monolingual children (n=38, mean age 8;2) and English monolingual children (n=39; mean age 8;2) participated in the offline experiment. All participants in the Italian test had to judge whether the two characters in a dialogue with either [+focus] or [-focus] contexts in the question and the responses by the characters that one spoke ‘better Italian’, i.e., which one chose the pragmatically adequate pronoun type. The results for the Italian experiment showed that adults were equally accurate in both conditions showing that they could select different pronoun types and word orders as required by the discourse pragmatics of the context (Serratrice et al. 2011: 19). As for the children, there was no significant overall differences between the contexts, although they were generally more accurate in [-focus] contexts. The three-way interaction between focus context, age, and group revealed that in the [-focus] context, all children (monolinguals and bilinguals) got marginally better at choosing preverbal clitics as they got older. Most interestingly in terms of potential CLI, the authors found that, despite of the

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lack of significant group differences, bilingual children in the United Kingdom chose a pragmatically inappropriate postverbal pronoun twice as often as their monolingual peers and the other bilingual children; this observation is taken as indication that routinely processing postverbal pronouns in English affected their sensitivity to the pragmatically appropriate distribution of this pronominal form. In the [+focus] context, the significant interaction between age and group revealed that only the Italian monolinguals became more accurate in their choice of a postverbal pronoun as they got older, indicating that the matching of a less frequent form and word order is likely to require more exposure to the language. Finally, Serratrice et al. (2011: 20ss) emphasize the role of typological differences for the processing demands in bilinguals leading to less accuracy and less speed in bilinguals, as well as generally the need to consider multiple factors in accounting for similarities and differences between monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ linguistic behaviour.

3.3  Object clitics in bilingual (European) Portuguese For the language combination German-(European) Portuguese (EP), we find research dealing with German-Portuguese HSs, comparing different age groups and using different types of data with respect to the question of the role of CLI. Rinke and Flores (2014) investigated the morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics in the HL of adult and adolescent HS of EP that they acquired at home in early childhood in the context of German as the majority language. They used an offline GJT test covering grammatical and ungrammatical null objects, clitic position, dative and accusative objects, and allomorphic forms of accusative clitics. The participants include 18 monolingually raised native speakers of EP (mean age 27.67, range 15-49 years) and 18 HS of EP raised in Germany (mean age 27.17, range 14-43 years). The authors departed from a null hypothesis positing that if age of onset of acquisition is the decisive factor determining the acquisition of clitic pronouns in Portuguese, no qualitative differences between native monolingual and heritage bilinguals is expected (Rinke and Flores 2014: 685). Against this null hypothesis (I), the authors checked the effect and significance of various factors related to research questions, namely whether possible deviations from native monolinguals may be traced back to (a) lack of contact with the formal register; (b) reduced input after preschool age; and (c) cross-linguistic influence. The null hypothesis is clearly disconfirmed since the authors find qualitative differences between the groups in almost all conditions. The overall mean level of accuracy is about 91.96% in the control group and only about 67.02% in the group of HSs, which leads the authors to conclude that the age of onset of acquisition is not the only decisive factor determining the speakers’ knowledge of clitics. Rinke and Flores (2014: 697) consider CLI not to be a relevant factor in explaining the performance differences between the native monolinguals and the heritage bilinguals since: 1) HSs do not show a tendency to use the German placement option in contexts of optionality; 2) HSs did not show noticeable difficulties in accepting clitic left dislocation structures with or without resumptives; and 3) not all the HSs generally over-accepted sentences with strong pronouns. Rinke and Flores (2014: 697) attribute this asymmetry to universal linguistic tendencies and conclude that although CLI may strengthen certain tendencies, it is not the decisive factor that causes them. They further add that the structures where the HS showed weaker performance are exactly those in which the monolingual native speakers scored less than 100% accuracy, indicating that HSs perform less accurately in domains that also seem to be the locus of some variation in current EP (e.g., the use of strong dative pronouns instead of clitics). This variation, however, cannot be explained by different regional varieties since all participants came from northern Portugal (cf. Rinke and Flores 2014: 687). The weaker performance of the HSs in these domains may be the result of exposure to less 192

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consistent input. Overall, Rinke and Flores (2014) consider the linguistic knowledge of the heritage bilinguals as not ‘deficient’ but ‘different’ and ‘innovative’ because it is primarily based on the spoken variety of the language and because it promotes linguistic changes that are inherent in the speech of native monolinguals. Flores, Rinke, and Azevedo (2017) investigated the same constructions, now based on spontaneous speech data from different groups of Portuguese migrants and monolingual age- and educationmatched monolingual groups. They analysed object realizations in the data of four different groups of 8 speakers. The two migrant groups, living in Hamburg/Germany, included young second-generation migrants (= HS, mean age 27.38) and first-generation migrants (mean age 59.88) who immigrated to Germany in the 1960/70s; first- and-second generation speakers are not directly related but they belong to the same Portuguese migrant community living in the city of Hamburg. The younger monolingual group (mean age 25.25) had higher education grades (like the HS group), while the older monolingual group (mean age 64.25) had only basic school degrees, like the first-generation migrant group. The monolingual speakers lived in northern Portugal and had never lived abroad. Flores et al. (2017: 200ss) found that all options of object realization, including thus object clitics, are systematically present in the speech of all speaker groups and no obvious signs of pragmatically inadequate overuse of one of the options could be detected in the corpus of the bilingual speakers. Overall, the performance of the HSs clearly favours the idea that these bilinguals avoid the use of clitic pronouns whenever they can resort to demonstratives and null object constructions. Like Rinke and Flores (2014), Flores et al. (2017: 200) argue against an explanation in terms of CLI. Concerning the production of clitic forms, the HSs do not perform in a significantly distinct manner from the monolingual groups since they neither produce case errors (only the monolinguals produce a few) nor construct more non-standard allomorphic forms than the monolingual groups. Overall, Flores et al. (2017) show that the HSs do not differ from the other groups in these domains and that there are no obvious signs of transfer from German. The third study on Portuguese HSs in Germany, by Rinke, Flores, and Zopata (2019), compares Portuguese-German and Polish-German HSs in their HL, namely Polish and EP focusing bilingual school-aged children. The focused age group is particularly important, especially for child HSs and with respect to complex phenomena that are generally acquired late – because a dominance shift from the HL to the environmental language, typically the school language, takes place at this age (Flores 2015). The authors investigate whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The study thus focuses on HSs’ production of referential expressions and their realization through different types of direct objects that requires the acquisition of the knowledge of the inventory of referential forms in the target language and of semantic-pragmatic knowledge concerning the properties that constrain the distribution of these forms. The HLs under investigation display an identical inventory of direct object forms (null objects, clitic pronouns, and full NPs), are modulated by similar pragmatic and semantic constraints (accessibility and animacy), and are in contact with the same majority language. The authors tested the described competence using an experimental designed to elicit answers to a series of questions, in which the participants must use direct objects. The experiment comprises three test conditions that differ with respect to the accessibility and the animacy of the target object’s referent. Two groups of bilingual children participated in this study: the first includes 27 children from Portuguese families who grew up with German as their environmental language and EP as their heritage language (mean age = 8.3; DP = 1.33), while the second comprised 22 children from Polish families living in Germany who are HSs of Polish (mean age = 7.8; DP = 1.27). Rinke et al. (2019: 11ss) found that the relevant predictor for participants’ object choice is the test condition: Both HS groups distinguish between immediately and not immediately accessible referents. When the referent is mentioned in the discursive context but is not the target of the immediately preceding question, Portuguese and Polish heritage children predominantly choose a full NP to men193

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tion the object referent. This contrasts with immediately accessible referents, mentioned in the question. In these contexts, children use fewer NPs and show a preference for a pronominal structure (null or clitic object), showing that bilingual children are sensitive to accessibility in terms of familiarity of the referent. Additionally, both bilingual groups have acquired the pragmatic constraints regulating the choice between NPs and pronouns, and bilingual children are clearly not only sensitive to accessibility but also to the animacy of the referent. Finally, Rinke et al. (2019: 12) argue against CLI in these children, at least in terms of a direct impact of the grammar of the contact language German (lacking systematic null objects) on the grammar of the HLs. Instead, there is a difference in the rate of acquisition. The two groups of bilingual children appear to show a delay compared to monolingual children.

3.4  Object clitics in bilingual Spanish For the bilingual constellation German-Spanish, there appears to be only one study analysing object omission and realization in spontaneous data from adult Spanish HSs raised in Germany and none involving child HSs. Di Venanzio et al. (2012) investigated object realization types (and their omission) for both direct and indirect objects with regard to the nature of the observed effects of influence from the majority language German on the HL Spanish. Their analysis is based on spontaneous speech data in semi-structured interviews with (young) adult participants from the first and second migrant generations (n=8 in both groups; mean age first generation: 36.6; mean age second generation/HS: 17.6) in Germany as compared to a control group of Spaniards (n=7; mean age 23.4). Importantly, all speakers resided/had their family background in Spain. The authors analysed 4,781 utterances and object realizations were classified as lexical (NP/DP), strong pronouns (e.g., algo ‘something’, nada ‘nothing’) and clitic pronouns (lo, la, los, las, le, les) as well as clitic doubling (which in some contexts is obligatory in the European Spanish varieties). The analysis of (particularly clitic) object realizations shows that language attrition and incomplete acquisition can be excluded for the groups investigated. None of the analysed aspects revealed statistically significant differences between the different groups, although the bilingual groups showed higher intragroup variation than the monolinguals, indicating the absence of (long-term effects of) CLI in the ultimate attainment of the Spanish-German HSs. Again, we find a different picture when we look at other language pairs and at another age group. Castilla-Earls et al. (2020: 828) investigated the vulnerability of clitics and articles to bilingual effects in typically English-Spanish bilingual children; they explore how differences in English proficiency (majority language) impacts the developmental patterns of these two basic grammatical categories in Spanish (minority language/HL). Using an experimental design, the authors compare patterns of production in two groups of Spanish child HSs living in the United States, namely asymmetric bilingual children with low English proficiency (LEP; n=36) vs. symmetrical bilingual children with high English proficiency (HEP, n=36). Both were compared with a group of Spanish-speaking monolingual children living in Mexico (n=30); whether the bilingual children in the study also have a Mexican or generally Latin American background, remains open. All children completed an elicitation task evaluating the productive use of direct object pronouns and articles. The interpretation of the results has to take into account two observations noted by CastillaEarls et al. (2020: 831). First, since the authors selected only bilingual children with good Spanish maintenance from a larger pool of bilingual participants with variable skills, the overall results show a development that can be considered as a best-case scenario in terms of the retention of Spanish. Second, the monolingual and bilingual children with LEP were 6 years old on average while the bilingual children with HEP were older (mean age 7 years). This difference in age between children with LEP and HEP reflects the longer time spent in English-only education for the HEP children. Turning to the results, Castilla-Earls et al. (2020: 831 s.) report a high overall performance on articles 194

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for all children; furthermore, there is a (small) advantage for articles over clitics with all groups combined. While article accuracy of all groups was above 90%, clitic performance was lower, with an accuracy of 98% in monolingual children and 81% in LEP vs. 88% in HEP. There was no statistically significant interaction of grammatical structures and group, suggesting that the group differences between monolinguals and bilinguals with LEP and HEP was equal for articles and clitics; this lack of interaction is interpreted as an indication that both grammatical structures are vulnerable to bilingual effects in similar ways in terms of accuracy (Castilla-Earls et al. 2020: 832). The error analyses revealed that both articles and clitics show omissions and morphological errors where categorical omission and gender and number substitution error are more prevalent for clitics than for articles in bilinguals. Overall, bilinguals differed from monolinguals quantitatively and qualitatively. There were no differences between the bilingual groups separated by English proficiency: both groups were comparable in their accuracy rates for clitics and articles and in their patterns of errors. Importantly, bilingual children seem to exhibit error patterns that are no longer present in monolingual children in early school age (Castilla-Earls et al. 2020: 834). This patterns with the delay observed for the bilingual children in Rinke et al. (2019).

4.  Comparison and discussion This section compares the results noted above with respect to the question of what constitutes the complexity of object clitics realization in typically developing bilingual children and the ultimate attainment of adult bilinguals. There are several important points with respect to temporal CLI in children or long-term effects (also called convergence) in adult HS. Interestingly, none of the studies argue in favour of direct CLI from the less complex to the more complex system (in most of the studied language pairs, the former is a Germanic and the latter a Romance language). Instead, other factors have either been directly discussed or need to be integrated, namely the language combination, age, input situation, and the typological similarity of the involved languages regarding the inventory of object pronouns as proposed by Serratrice et al. (2011). Their own findings are based on the comparison of two language pairs – English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children sharing Italian as target language and, at least partially, the same majority language – and reveal a need for more native input of the English-Italian group living in the United Kingdom. The need for early exposure to native input is also expressed by Romano (2020) for the adult Italian-Swedish HS. The role of the competence in the majority language for the outcome of clitic acquisition in the HL is, however, not decisive, as Castilla-Earls et al. (2020) show: their investigation, based on an elicitation task, did not yield significant differences between HEP and LEP children in terms of accuracy in article and clitic production. Both bilingual groups were equally delayed in comparison to monolingual children. The comparison of different language pairs sharing the HL or the majority language is an important source of further knowledge on the impact of both intra- and extra-linguistic factors. Apart from Serratrice et al. (2011), we find – for object clitics – such a comparison only in Rinke et al. (2019), who compared EP-German and Polish-German child HSs. Their elicited production reveals, like the English-Spanish child HS in Castilla-Earls (2020), a delay in the development compared to monolingual children. This delay is taken to be an indirect effect of CLI since direct CLI effects from German on the choice of clitics and their placement could not be detected. The outcomes of studies using processing tasks clearly speak in favour of what Pérez-Leroux et al. (2014) and Castilla-Earls et al. (2020) call bilingual effect. However, they measure effects that had not been studied in (earlier) 2L1 studies: 2L1 research studied the development of the system concerning the inventory, the target-like choice, and the realization of object clitics, which, in adults, clearly is in place as the studies on adult HSs in the various language combinations in this chapter show. The (ongoing or completed) development of the clitic system and its use in processing tasks are different aspects of bilingual competence. Different outcomes for HS and monolinguals in both 195

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domains should, however, not lead one to decline ‘nativeness’ to the bilingual representations and processing, as Wiese et al. (2022) convincingly argue.

5.  Future directions The research above includes 2L1 longitudinal and cross-sectional data, whereas longitudinal studies are not available for HLA, where we find both spontaneous and elicited cross-sectional data. More recent studies, e.g. Romano (2020), also include a priming experiment. The chosen methodology is necessarily adapted to the targeted groups, impeding direct comparisons. Nevertheless, we find a striking difference between studies using spontaneous (child or adult) speech data and those using elicited production, particularly if the experiments yield speeded production that have a direct effect on processing capacities, affecting especially bilingual processing. Bilinguals seem to fare better in spontaneous production than in specific experiments. Grammatical judgment tasks often reveal uncertainty in the HSs’ metalinguistic judgment capacities, mostly interpreted as a gap in the representation of the system (Rinke and Flores 2014, Romano 2020). However, another interpretation is possible, namely as a result of linguistic insecurity impeding HSs to fully employ their linguistic skills. This issue, much discussed in sociolinguistics, has not yet been sufficiently investigated in HL research. The same holds for research designs: more investigation opposing priming and other experimental methodologies are needed to learn more about different task effects. Finally, there should be more studies comparing several language pairings with the same methodological tools. Future research should also include more work on the representation of clitic object realizations in further language combinations. Finally, there should be a clarification of the notions ‘indirect influence’ and ‘bilingual effect’ – do they really denote the same or rather different aspects? A tentative answer has to deal with the relationships among the concepts: if ‘direct influence’ is associated with a transfer from the majority and/or less complex language to the HL while ‘indirect influence’ relates to delay (cf. Rinke et al. 2019, Castilla-Earls et al. 2020), both manifestations of CLI could be consequences of a ‘bilingual effect’.

References Bernardini, P. and van de Weijer, J. (2017). On the direction of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of object clitics in French and Italian. LIA (Language, Interaction and Acquisition) 8(2): 204–233. Cardinaletti, A. and Starke, M. (1999). The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk (ed.) Clitics in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 145–233. Castilla-Earls, A., Pérez-Leroux, A.T., Martinez-Nieto, L., Restrepo, M.A. and Barr, C. (2020). Vulnerability of clitics and articles to bilingual effects in typically developing Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23: 825–835. Déchaîne, R.-M. and Wiltschko, M. (2002). Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33(3): 409–442. Di Venanzio, L., Schmitz, K. and Rumpf, A.-L. (2012). Objektrealisierungen und -auslassungen bei transitiven Verben im Spanischen von Herkunftssprechern in Deutschland. Linguistische Berichte 232: 437–461. Di Venanzio, L., Schmitz, K. and Scherger, A.-L. (2016). Objects of transitive verbs in Italian heritage language in contact with German. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6(3): 227–261. Eichler, N. (2008). Frühkindliche Zweisprachigkeit: Argumentauslassungen bei bilingual deutsch-französisch aufwachsenden Kindern. Unpublished Master Thesis, University of Wuppertal. Flores, C. (2015). Understanding heritage language acquisition. Some contributions from the research on heritage speakers of European Portuguese. Lingua 164: 251–265. Flores, C., Rinke, E. and Azevedo, C. (2017). Object realizations across generations. A closer look on the spontaneous speech of Portuguese first and second generation migrants. In E. Domenico (ed.) Complexity in Acquisition. Cambridge Scholars, pp. 178–205. Flores, C., Kupisch, T. and Rinke, E. (2019). Linguistic Foundations of Heritage Language Development from the Perspective of Romance Languages in Germany. Amsterdam: Springer.

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Bilingual acquisition Gabriel, C. and Müller, N. (2005). Zu den romanischen Pronominalklitika: Kategorialer Status und syntaktische derivation. In G. Kaiser (ed.) Deutsche Romanistik – Generativ. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 161–180. Gavarró, A. and Mosella, M. (2009). Testing syntactic and pragmatic accounts of clitic omission. In J. Crawford, K. Otaki and M. Takahashi (eds) Proceedings of the Third Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2008). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 25–35. Granfeldt, J. and Schlyter, S. (2004). Cliticisation in the acquisition of French as L1 and L2. In P. Prévost and J. Paradis (eds) The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts: Focus on Functional Categories. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 333–370. Guijarro-Fuentes, P. and Schmitz, K. (2015). The nature and nurture of heritage language acquisition. In P. Guijarro-Fuentes and K. Schmitz (eds) Fundamentally (in)Complete Grammars? Emergence, Acquisition and Diffusion of New Varieties. Lingua 164B: pp. 139–150. Hulk, A. (2000). L’acquisition des pronoms clitiques français par un enfant bilingue français-néerlandais. Revue Canadienne de Linguistique 45: 97–117. Kaiser, G. (1994). More about INFL-ection and Agreement: The acquisition of clitic pronouns in French. In J.M. Meisel (ed.) Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German Grammatical Development. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 131–159. Kuchenbrandt, I., Kupisch, T. and Rinke, E. (2005). Pronominal objects in romance: Comparing French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Working Papers in Multilingualism No. 67. University of Hamburg: Research Center on Multilingualism. doi: 10.13140/RG.2.1.5046.6169. Meisel, J.M. (1994). Getting FAT: Finiteness, agreement and tense in early grammar. In J.M. Meisel (ed.) Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German Grammatical Development. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 89–130. Müller, N. (2004). Null-arguments in bilingual children: French topics. In J. Paradis and P. Prévost (eds) The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts: Focus on Functional Categories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 275–304. Müller, N. and Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(1): 1–21. Müller, N., Cantone, K., Kupisch, T. and Schmitz, K. (2002). Zum Spracheneinfluss im bilingualen Erstspracherwerb: Italienisch – Deutsch. Linguistische Berichte 190: 157–206. Paradis, J., Crago, M. and Genesee, F. (2003). Object clitics as a clinical marker of SLI in French: Evidence from French–English bilingual children. In B. Beachley, A. Brown and F. Conlin (eds) Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press (vol. 2), pp. 638–649. Pérez-Leroux, A.T., Cuza, A. and Thomas, D. (2011). Clitic placement in Spanish-English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14(2): 221–232. Pirvulescu, M., Pérez-Leroux, A.-T., Roberge, Y., Strik, N. and Thomas, D. (2014). Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17(3): 495–510. Prévost, P. (2009). The Acquisition of French. The Development of Inflectional Morphology and Syntax in L1 Acquisition, Bilingualism, and L2 Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rinke, E. and Flores, C. (2014). Heritage Portuguese bilinguals’ morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17(4): 681–699. Rinke, E., Flores, C. and Zopata, A. (2019). Heritage Portuguese and heritage Polish in contact with German: More evidence on the production of objects. Languages 4: 53. Romano, F. (2020). Ultimate attainment in heritage language speakers: Syntactic and morphological knowledge of Italian accusative clitics. Applied Psycholinguistics 41: 347–380. Schlyter, S. (2003). Development of verb morphology and finiteness in children and adults acquiring French. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and Dynamics of Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 15–44. Schmitz, K. (2006). Zweisprachigkeit im Fokus. Der Erwerb der Verben mit zwei Objekten durch bilingual deutsch-französisch und deutsch-italienisch aufwachsende Kinder. Tübingen: Narr. Schmitz, K. (2012). The omission and realization of Dative and Reflexive clitics in the monolingual and bilingual acquisition of constructions of inalienable possession in French. In P. Larrañaga and P. Guijarro-Fuentes (eds) Pronouns and Clitics in Early Acquisition. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 175–208. Schmitz, K. and Müller, N. (2008). Strong and clitic pronouns in monolingual and bilingual language acquisition: Comparing French and Italian. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11(1): 19–41. Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F. and Baldo, M. (2011). Pronominal objects in English-Italian and SpanishItalian bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics: 1–27. doi: 101017/So142716411000543.

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Katrin Schmitz Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. (Oxford Studies in Language Contact). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tomaz, M. and Lobo, M. (2021). Clitic climbing in Portuguese-French bilingual children. Words 3(1): 10–11. Varlokosta, S., Belletti, A., Costa, J., Friedmann, N., Gavarro, A., Grohmann, K., Guasti, M.T., Tuller, L., Lobo, M., Andjelkovic, D., Argemi, N., Avram, L., Berends, S., Brunetto, V., Delage, H., Ezeizabarrena Segurola, M.-J., Fattal, I., Haman, E., van Hout, A., Jensen de Lopez, K.M., Katsos, N., Kologranic, L., Krstić, N., Kuvac Kraljevic, J., Miękisz, A., Nerantzini, M., Queralto, C., Radic, Z., Ruiz, S., Sauerland, U., Sevcenco, A., Smoczyńska, M., Theodorou, E., van der Lely, H., Veenstra, A., Weston, J., Yachini, M. and Yatsushiro, K. (2016). A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production. Language Acquisition 23(1): 1–26. Wiese, H., Alexiadou, A., Allen, S., Bunk, O., Gagarina, N., Iefremenko, K., Martynova, M., Pashkova, T., Rizou, V., Schroeder, C., Shadrova, A., Szucsich, L., Tracy, R., Tsehaye, W., Zerbian, S. and Zuban, Y. (2022). Heritage speakers as part of the native language continuum. Frontiers in Psychology 12: Article 717973.

Further reading Fischer, S. and Goldbach, M. (2016). Object clitics. In S. Fischer and C. Gabriel (eds) Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 363–390. Flores, C., Rinke, E. and Azevedo, C. (2017). Object realizations across generations. A closer look on the spontaneous speech of Portuguese first and second generation migrants. In E. Domenico (ed.) Complexity in Acquisition. Cambridge Scholars, pp. 178–205. Montrul, S. (2016). The Acquisition of Heritage Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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14 DEIXIS IN THE MANUAL MODALITY: INSIGHTS FROM DIVERSE SIGNING COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS Jenny C. Lu and Diane Lillo-Martin 1. Introduction The manual modality is eminently suited for deixis. Literally pointing to people, objects, or locations in the world can reference them, and the space around a person can be used to stand for other people and locations, or abstract concepts such as contrasting opinions, time periods, and situations. For people using a spoken language, such pointing is produced alongside spoken words, including pronouns, demonstratives, and locatives. In sign languages, such points carry the full linguistic load, serving similar grammatical functions found in spoken pronominal systems, which encompasses pointing in both speech and gesture. This contrast makes pointing in sign languages a matter of great interest for linguists and psycholinguists. For overviews from various perspectives, see Cormier (2012), Fenlon et al. (2019), Meier and Lillo-Martin (2010) and Schlenker (2017). In this chapter, we describe how pointing is used in the moment, over development, and over historical time with a special attention to pointing in various types of signing communication systems from homesign to emerging signed languages and older signed languages like ASL. These studies address a few important theoretical questions. The first question is a decades-old classic one: do signers apply the same linguistic functions to points as speakers do with their pronouns? As mentioned, this is a question that intrigues many sign linguists. It has also been claimed that sign languages ‘lack pronouns’ and use pointing instead (Evans and Levinson 2009), but this claim is not uniformly adopted. We address some of these issues using studies on language development in ASL and language emergence in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language; these studies are crucial to the understanding of whether pointing functions like gesture. Other theoretical questions include what kinds of functions of pointing appear when a child does not share a conventional language with their parents, such as in the case of homesign? Furthermore, pointing is just one part of a rich semiotic system in signed languages – what are the alternative linguistic referential strategies and mechanisms that are used in addition to pointing? For readers unfamiliar with signed languages, we adopt the following conventions: signs are typically glossed using upper-case English words that are near translation equivalents. We also use the notation IX for ‘index’ to represent pointing signs, along with a sub-notation with the IX (e.g., IXname or IXa) to indicate the spatial locus to which the index finger is pointing (e.g., the subject referenced in the sentence or location a or b). Finally, there are well over 200 different sign

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-17

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languages around the world (Hammarström et al. 2021). We stress that there is large cross-cultural variability in pointing, but this chapter pertains to research focusing on American and European signed languages, which have been well documented relative to other signed languages. Some of these research findings may not extend to other culturally specific linguistic or pragmatic uses of points.

2.  Reference mechanisms in adult signing and the nature of pronominal systems In ASL, exophoric reference can be made by using overt pointing – pointing to objects or people in the here and now or literally in the room. Self-reference can be made by a signer pointing to themself (see Figure 14.1a). Reference to an addressee or to a physically present third person is made by pointing to that person (Figure 14.1b, c). Inanimate objects and locations are also referenced by using overt points. These points are generally made with the index finger extended, tip toward the reference point; the angle of the finger, hand, and arm or orientation of the palm is generally determined by the location of the person/object/location pointed at. To reference an entity not physically present, a signer may establish an association between the referent and a location in space, known in the sign linguistics literature as a Referential Locus or R-locus (Lillo-Martin and Klima 1990). Typically, these spatial loci are distributed to the right and left of a signer in a neutral (mid-chest level) plane of space, but, like real-world referents, other locations can be used when motivated. Once an association between a referent and a locus is established, the signer can point to the locus for endophoric reference (Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.1  From left to right, the images depict (a) reference to self, (b) addressee, (c) physically present third person or inanimate objects/locations

Addressee Non-addressed person / object / loca on

Signer

Figure 14.2  Reference to non-present referents through a Referential Locus

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Points to present or non-present referents can be used as arguments within a sentence, and anaphoric reference to previously mentioned referents can also use pointing signs. However, in numerous contexts other devices can also be used for reference; these include null arguments (Lillo-Martin 1986) and signs known as depicting signs or classifiers (Zwitserlood 2012), some of which can be analyzed as incorporating or agreeing with arguments that may otherwise be unexpressed within a sentence. The makeup of the system just described has given rise to a number of issues and questions. A major research topic has been to explicate the nature of the pronominal system in sign languages. Are the pointing signs just described equivalent to spoken language pronouns, at semantic, morphological, and syntactic levels, or are they simply pointing gestures? On the one hand, these signs are very similar to pronouns in that they pick out referents, serve as arguments, and are even constrained in their distribution like spoken language pronouns are (cf. Schlenker 2017). For example, pronominal signs serve as verbal arguments and can substitute for noun phrases (e.g., IXa NOT LIKE IXb – ‘She/ hea doesn’t like him/herb’; Cormier et al. 2013). Furthermore, pronouns cannot be bound by antecedents that are too close; in the example just given, the second IX must refer to someone other than the subject. However, the differences between pointing signs and pronouns in spoken languages are also striking. In sign, by pointing to a referent, or a location that stands for a referent, signed pronouns are typically unambiguous and transparent, uniquely identifying the referent through a contiguous spatial relation between the index finger and its referent (although they are often ambiguous between a referent and the location of that referent, as when pointing toward the kitchen might be interpreted as referring to a person standing in the kitchen or to the kitchen itself). Moreover, it is not possible to lexically list all the various pronoun forms with full phonological information since a point can be directed at any location and the form of the point depends in part on the location toward which it is directed. There is a potentially infinite number of pointing forms, and this gradience is not found in spoken pronouns; in English, words like I, you, he, she, and it are linguistically categorical. These concerns have led various researchers (Cormier 2012, Johnston 2013, Fenlon et al. 2019) to propose that signed points are not fully equivalent to spoken language pronouns, but they must receive a different analysis, such that they are analogous to co-speech gesture. As one example, Johnston (2013) explicitly argued against considering pointing signs as pronouns at all, claiming that pointing signs are gestural, just like pointing gestures that tend to be produced along with speech. Others have supported an analysis that does consider them to be pronouns, but not entirely parallel to spoken language pronouns (Cormier 2012, Fenlon et al. 2019). Just how to resolve this issue is a matter of continuing debate. Pointing signs are not the only reference mechanisms in sign languages, and so a number of studies have compared the use of pointing signs with other referential mechanisms. In ASL, arguments can be null, so reference tracking studies often compare overt pronouns, null arguments, and renaming of referents (see the section ‘Pointing and other referential mechanisms in narrative’ below). Furthermore, ASL (and many other sign languages) makes use of the loci toward which pointing signs are directed in additional ways. For example, some verbs, particularly verbs of transfer, can be signed with reference to these loci in a system that is often analyzed as showing verb agreement (Mathur and Rathmann 2012, see a specific example for the ASL verb ASK in Figure 14.3). Using this system, a class of verbs is signed so that their starting location corresponds to the locus of their subject, and their ending location corresponds to the locus of their direct object. Other verbs, such as verbs of motion, make use of loci to indicate source and goal locations of movement. An example would be the sign GO-TO, which can be produced with its initial location corresponding to the locus of a source location and its final location corresponding to the locus of a goal location. Another grammatical system of the language uses signs that are known as classifiers or depicting signs to show physical movement or arrangement of referents (Emmorey 2003). Each of these sys201

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Figure 14.3  An example of a directional verb, ASK, that shows verb agreement through spatial modulation; the movement represents the directionality of the action, going from the subject to the patient

tems provides additional mechanisms for making reference. The studies of L1 and L2 acquisition that we will summarize touch on these reference systems as well as overt pointing signs for a broader understanding of the development of reference.

3.  Pointing in sign language development Studying how signing children use pointing informs us whether pointing signs are like co-speech pointing gestures or resemble signs with many possible linguistic functions. In one of the earliest studies on pointing, Petitto (1987) argued that signing children apply a formal analysis to pointing signs by transitioning from more gestural to linguistic pointing. Two native signing children were studied longitudinally; from 10 to 12 months, they pointed at all types of references, including persons and objects. But then, between 12 and 18 months, they dropped a particular pointing function, points to persons. Instead, name signs or nouns were used. Previous studies on spoken language acquisition have demonstrated a similar phenomenon, where difficult phonological constructions are avoided during a certain period of development (Ferguson and Farwell 1975). Pointing tends to be indexical and transparent when it is used to reference things in the here and now, but these deaf children also surprisingly made reversal errors by pointing toward an addressee to refer to themselves (instead of pointing to themselves), but then, by 27 months, all of the points were produced correctly (Petitto 1987). These reversal errors also have been found in hearing children acquiring spoken language pronouns (Clark 1987). Petitto (1987) makes the case that the disappearance of points to people was evidence of discontinuity between non-linguistic pointing and linguistic ‘pronouns’ – during this avoidance period, children were working out the multiple semantic and grammatical 202

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properties of personal pronouns and re-organizing and re-analyzing gestural points as linguistic points. They also produced pointing reversal errors, treating points as equivalent to names, such as IXyou representing the child’s name. Such errors might be evidence that children may be analyzing points as symbolic and non-transparent, specifically, seeing the indexical relationship between the point and its vector to a referent (for a similar phenomenon in spoken languages, see Clark 1978). Adding to Pettito’s work, more recent studies on pointing in sign language development have demonstrated that young signers may be treating points as linguistically discrete categories, especially with respect to referent types (points to self, others, and objects). Hatzopoulou’s (2008) work on Greek Sign Language found that one deaf child showed a slight decrease in frequency of points to persons and self between 16 and 20 months. At the beginning of this age range, he produced points to persons at 11% out of all possible pointing types by the end of 14 months, and then dropped his points to persons to 1% between 16 to 20 months, and then produced more points to persons, at 10% in the later stages of this age range. Like Pettito (1987), she concludes that children gradually discover different functions of pointing as they develop. Finally, Morgenstern, Caët, and Limousin (2016) observed a deaf child’s pointing and a hearing child’s deictic references in both speech and gesture. From 1,7 to 2,7 years, the deaf child, Charlotte, produced significantly more points per minute compared to the hearing child, Madeline. Charlotte produced a significant number of points to non-first persons and the self, compared to Madeline, but Madeline used verbal resources to refer to herself and others (such as names or pronouns in speech). Morgenstern et al. (2016) also found for the deaf child, pointing to self was completely absent between 11 months and 27 months, reinforcing the hypothesis from other studies that they may be going through a period of re-analysis of and categorization of the points during this time. Since points to objects and locations are clearly in place before the period of re-analysis, these findings also indicate a sequential process of acquiring pronominal reference to different persons. These developmental case studies demonstrate that young signers may realize that pointing has several pronominal functions (e.g., distinguishing references to self, addressee, and non-addressee), which may be a similar process to the one that speaking children go through with acquiring a pronominal system in spoken language (such as acquiring first person pronouns before second and third person pronouns; Clark 1987). An outstanding question is whether speaking children also develop the same distinctions in their pointing gestures that signers do. A direct comparison between these two systems (pointing signs vs. spoken pronouns + points) would be informative. If speaking children do not develop these distinctions in pointing gestures, but signers do, then that means pointing signs are analyzed differently in signed languages even early in ontogeny. Ongoing work is investigating the sequential acquisition of these functions in native signing children, and comparing that with hearing children’s co-speech gestures + spoken pronouns over development (Lillo-Martin and Chen Pichler 2021, Lu 2021).

4.  Pointing in homesign systems and emerging sign languages Thus far, we have focused on how pointing develops in cases of deaf children acquiring signed languages natively, but not all deaf children have native signing input. This leads us to the next question – what emerges naturally when there is no shared conventional system, and how and to what extent does pointing play a role in this kind of interaction? Do all of the functions of deixis, which have been documented in signed languages, develop when the child receives no or minimal linguistic input? There are deaf children born to hearing parents who do not share a conventional sign language with their parents; rather, they use homemade gestures, called homesigns. Even without input from a sign language, they develop gestural systems that have many properties of natural language (GoldinMeadow and Feldman 1977, Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, and Gleitman 1978, Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1983, Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1990). 203

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Homesigners can communicate with points to refer to the here and now as well as displaced references. In a longitudinal naturalistic study with a homesigner, David, the experimenters filmed him playing with toys, books, and puzzles from 2,10 to 5,2 years old. David began to consistently use pointing gestures to refer to absent objects at 3,3 years old (Butcher, Mylander, and Goldin-Meadow 1991). For example, he produced a ‘fly’ characterizing gesture (e.g., using B handshapes and moving them with a flapping motion) and then pointed at the empty space on a puzzle board intended for the bird piece in order to request that piece from the experimenter. At age 3,5, David began to refer to absent objects by pointing at objects that were perceptually similar to the target referent he had in mind. For example, he pointed at his buttocks and produced an action sign ‘move over’ to ask the experimenter to move her buttocks away from the toy area where she was sitting so that David could play in that area. At age 3,11, David referred to absent objects by pointing at a space or object he had previously established as a placeholder for the target object. Homesigners also use points for a variety of different functions, such as using points in isolation to refer to entities or combining points with other related iconic gestures that refer to the same entity. Hunsicker and Goldin-Meadow (2012) argue that the same homesigner mentioned in the previous study, David, used pointing gestures (1) that function as a noun (e.g., point at penny in the room to refer to another penny) or demonstrative (that); (2) that integrate into nominal constituents (e.g., a demonstrative point at a particular bird, followed by a noun iconic gesture identifying a bird, followed by a verb: e.g., [that bird] PEDALS); and (3) that integrate into predicate nominals (e.g., a demonstrative point followed by a noun iconic gesture to identify a bird, that’s a bird). David also ordered his gestures within a nominal constituent (that drum) differently from when he produced predicate nominals (that’s a drum), where the order is more constrained and predictable for predicate nominals (the point tends to come before the predicate nominal gesture). Thus, homesigners are not only able to reference things in their immediate environments, but also their pointing has displacement and hierarchical constituent structure. In the absence of a signing model, it is possible for a child to go beyond just pointing at objects literally in the environment by generating a system with multiple functions. However, these functions have been documented in detail with one child homesigner, rather than a larger sample of homesigners, and it is difficult to draw conclusions about the differences between homesigners and ASL signers when distinct functions of pointing are being analyzed. A systematic analysis on a larger sample of homesigners in comparison with native ASL signers on the same level of analysis is now being investigated in Lu’s (2021) work on deixis.

5.  How pointing becomes expanded and more languagelike: The case of an emerging sign language Thus far, we have reviewed how pointing evolves ontogenetically in situations of sign language development and homesign. The evolution of pointing on a historical timespan in the case of emergence of new languages also gives us insight into how this gesture has become grammaticalized over time. One research area has focused on pointing in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). NSL was developed spontaneously by a group of deaf children in Nicaragua when the first deaf school was founded in the 1980s, and is a stunning naturalistic study of the origins of a new language. Grammaticalization of many forms within signed languages may trace back to the gestures used by the surrounding speech community, especially the pointing gesture (Janzen and Shaffer 2002, Pfau and Steinbach 2006). According to one theory, pointing signs may have become grammaticalized from 204

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pointing gestures over time, such that pointing gestures become locative signs, then demonstrative pronominal signs, and finally personal pronominal signs (Pfau and Steinbach 2006). This hypothesis – that points have developed different functions over time – has been explored in NSL. Coppola and Senghas (2010) divided participating signers into groups according to when they were exposed to NSL during different stages of language emergence. Cohort 1 involves homesigners who were previously isolated, and then came together during the initial contact stage, and Cohort 2 and beyond involve younger generations of signers who were exposed to the language that was shaped by the previous cohorts. Nicaraguan adult homesigners, and signers from cohorts 1 2, and 3 of NSL watched cartoon scenes and were asked to retell the story. Then, all points to the signing space – the space in front of the signer’s body that represents real space – were analyzed. These points were categorized according to different functions, such as whether they referenced locations (‘locative’ points) or characters (‘nominal’ points). Locative pointing signs appear more frequently in homesigners’ and earlier cohorts’ signing compared to nominal points, but only the later cohorts produced more nominal pointing signs. Pronominal points also appear to be more reduced in form compared to locative points – points that are articulated quickly and with small movements may indicate that they have become more grammaticalized (Coppola and Senghas 2010). Taking the studies on homesign and emerging sign languages together, some functions of deixis emerge in all types of environments. These aspects involve displacement and using points with different linguistic roles in long utterances. Other aspects, such as nominal points, may require learning from a language model and intergenerational transmission, which has been demonstrated with subsequent cohorts of NSL signers.

6.  Pointing and other referential mechanisms in narratives Pointing signs are not the only referential mechanisms, but null arguments and different types of verbs are also frequently used in place of pointing signs, especially in narratives. Studies of the development of referential mechanisms have included deaf children acquiring a sign language natively, hearing children of deaf parents who are acquiring both a sign and spoken language, and adult learners of a sign language as an L2. As already described, pointing signs emerge very early in development and are used for exophoric reference productively. However, the development of pointing and verb agreement to refer to nonpresent referents is much slower. In early studies by Hoffmeister (1978, 1987) and Loew (1984), pointing and verb agreement with present referents appear and are used consistently about a year and a half before these systems are employed with displaced, non-present referents. In the interim, children use a present referent as a placeholder for a non-present referent (for discussion, see Newport and Meier 1985). To explore this further, Bellugi et al. (1993) checked to see how early children understand the abstract association between loci and referents using a Nominal Establishment test. An experimenter presented a sequence of two or three associations such as ‘BOY IXa, DOLL IXb, GIRL IXc’. Then the child was asked ‘WHERE DOLL’ or ‘WHAT IXa’. When tested on two items using a WHERE question, threeyear-olds could perform at relatively high levels of accuracy. However, two-year-olds failed to grasp the point of the task. It seems that three-year-olds at least can understand the concept of abstract loci. Although three-year-olds may understand abstract loci, they don’t produce them in naturalistic or elicited production. Lillo-Martin (1991) reports a study of elicited production using short wordless picture books. She found that children less than 5 years old used overt pronouns and names, and null arguments, to refer to characters in their storytellings, but they did not use loci for abstract referents. Five-year-olds began to use abstract loci and agreement, but frequently made errors resulting in inconsistencies in the use of loci. Children are more consistent and proficient with the use of abstract loci by around age 6 (see also Bellugi et al. 1993). 205

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Morgan (2006) expands on this issue by investigating children’s use of British Sign Language (BSL) reference strategies in three narrative contexts: introduction, reintroduction, and maintenance. He found that children ages 4–13 gradually approached the adult pattern where overt noun phrases are used for nearly all introductions, half of the reintroductions, and almost no cases of maintenance. Even the oldest children, however, used many more overt noun phrases for reintroduction than the adults did. This pattern of reference cohesion follows observations made for a number of languages. The rate of zero anaphora can be expected to vary across languages, since some languages productively allow null arguments (including ASL and BSL), while others (such as English) are more restrictive. In addition, sign languages have the option of marking reference through verbal characteristics, such as agreement, classifiers/depicting signs, and role shift. Reynolds (2016, 2018) raised the question whether these differences between ASL and English would show up in the reference marking development of hearing children who are raised in deafparented families, and who are thus growing up as bimodal bilinguals. These children, often known as codas (for ‘child of deaf adults’), are learning how to use referential mechanisms in two languages, and they might be expected to show a different pattern in comparison to deaf children, due to their status as heritage language learners. Reynolds examined narratives produced by deaf and bimodal bilingual children, ages 5–8. Among many other aspects of their narratives studied, she looked at the use of overt pronouns and noun phrases versus covert forms used to introduce, reintroduce, and maintain referents. The deaf native signers performed very similarly to the adults in Morgan’s study: they used overt forms almost 100% of the time for introduction, 50% of the time for reintroduction, and very infrequently for maintenance. The bimodal bilinguals similarly used overt forms for introduction, but they used a much higher percentage of overt forms for reintroduction and maintenance than the deaf children did. The results reported by Reynolds are similar to results of studies with other bilingual groups, such as early bilingual children acquiring two spoken languages (Serratrice 2007). Such studies frequently report overuse of overt forms in comparison to monolinguals, for children acquiring a null subject language along with an overt subject language, and even for children acquiring two null subject languages (Sorace and Serratrice 2009). A somewhat different pattern was found in a study of adult L2 learners of ASL (Frederiksen and Mayberry 2019). This study found that novice to low-intermediate L2 signers produced only moderately more overt referential markers for reintroduction and maintenance than native signers did. The authors interpret this result as showing that over-explicitness is limited in L2 acquisition of a language in a new modality (also known as M2L2 acquisition). Focusing on a different contrast, Perniss and Özyürek (2015) looked at the use of different types of overt marking of referents (excluding covert cases) in reintroduction and maintenance contexts (excluding initial introduction contexts), and they compared signers of German Sign Language (DGS) with hearing non-signers producing spoken German and co-speech gesture. As would be expected, the participants produced more nominal expressions for reintroduction and more pronominal expressions for maintenance. However, Perniss and Özyürek report in detail about how spatial modification is used as a modality-specific strategy (e.g., Figure 14.2, which depicts an example of spatial modification in the verb, ASK) in both DGS and co-speech gesture; while differences are also found among the visual markers depending on whether they are used with speech as opposed to DGS. These studies expand our understanding of the development of reference mechanisms in sign languages. While pointing at present referents is integrated into children’s linguistic systems early, much more time passes before they demonstrate facility with abstract referents and linguistic mechanisms, including null arguments, and verbs that indicate their referents in different ways. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of emergence is generally parallel to that found with hearing children producing referential mechanisms and co-speech gestures, with particular patterns for the use of spatial devices in sign languages. 206

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7.  Future directions Pointing is not always a simple reference to the here and now, but takes on many distinct functions and works in tandem with other referential mechanisms, as illuminated in the cases of homesign, young sign languages, or older sign languages. This body of work is far from complete. One ongoing project examines the development of pointing signs to address questions about the linguistic features represented by such signs (Lillo-Martin and Chen Pichler 2021). In this work, the order of acquisition of different pronominal forms by four deaf children acquiring ASL is examined. Another project examines whether pointing in sign language develops similar forms and functions as pronouns + gesture in spoken language by comparing signing and speaking children in a longitudinal study (Lu 2021). Finally, another study focuses on bimodal bilingual children who are acquiring both a sign language and a spoken language (Gökgöz et al. under revision); the distribution of points to subjects versus objects is interpreted with respect to linguistic constraints on code-blending. While we know a lot more about pointing and its linguistic functions in signed languages from these studies, more comparative studies on pointing gestures and sign, as well as pointing signs with a spoken pronominal system, are needed to better understand the interface of sign and gesture, and how they work together to constitute a deictic system.

References Bellugi, U., van Hoek, K., Lillo-Martin, D. and O’Grady, L. (1993). The acquisition of syntax and space in young deaf signers. In D. Bishop and K. Mogford (eds) Language Development in Exceptional Circumstances. Churchill Livingstone, pp. 132–149. Butcher, C., Mylander, C. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (1991). Displaced communication in a self-styled gesture system: Pointing at the nonpresent. Cognitive Development 6(3): 315–342. doi: 10.1016/0885-2014(91)90042-C. Clark, E.V. (1978). From gestures to word: On the natural history of deixis in language acquisition. In J.S. Bruner and A. Garton (eds) Human Growth and Development: Wolfson College Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coppola, M. and Senghas, A. (2010). Deixis in an emerging sign language. In D. Brentari (ed.) Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 543–569. Cormier, K. (2012). Pronouns. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach and B. Woll (eds) Sign Language: An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 227–244. Cormier, K., Schembri, A. and Woll, B. (2013). Pronouns and pointing signs in languages. Lingua 137: 230–247. Emmorey, K. (ed.) (2003). Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages. Psychology Press. Evans, N.J. and Levinson, S.C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429–492. Feldman, H., Goldin-Meadow, S. and Gleitman, L. (1978). Beyond Herodotus: The creation of language by linguistically deprived deaf children. In A. Lock (ed.) Action, Symbol, and Gesture: The Emergence of Language. New York: Academic Press, pp. 351–414. Fenlon, J., Cooperrider, K., Keane, J., Brentari, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (2019). Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): Article 1. doi: 10.5334/gjgl.499. Ferguson, C. and Farwell, C. (1975). Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language 51(2): 419–439. Frederiksen, A.T. and Mayberry, R.I. (2019). Reference tracking in early stages of different modality L2 acquisition: Limited over-explicitness in novice ASL signers’ referring expressions. Second Language Research 35(2): 253–283. doi: 10.1177/0267658317750220. Gökgöz, K., Quadros, R.M. de, Chen Pichler, D. and Lillo-Martin, D. (under revision). Syntactic constraints on code-blending: Evidence from distributions of subject points and object points. Gökgöz, K., Müller de Quadros, R., Lillo-Martin, D., and Chen Pichler, D. (2017). Constraints on code-blending: Distributions of pointing subjects and objects in bimodal bilingual vhildren. Paper presented at 13th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 13), 7–9 September, Palma de Mallorca. Goldin-Meadow, S. and Feldman, H. (1977). The development of language-like communication without a language model. Science 197: 22–24. Goldin-Meadow, S. and Mylander, C. (1983). Gestural communication in deaf children: Noneffect of parental input on language development. Science 221: 372–374. Goldin-Meadow, S. and Mylander, C. (1990). The role of parental input in the development of a morphological system. Journal of Child Language 17: 527–563.

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Jenny C. Lu and Diane Lillo-Martin Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., Haspelmath, M. and Bank, S. (2021). Glottolog 4.5. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.5772642. Hatzopoulou, M. (2008). Acquisition of reference to self and others in Greek sign language: From pointing gesture to pronominal pointing signs. Stockholm University, Stockholm. Hoffmeister, R.J. (1978). The Development of Demonstrative Pronouns, Locatives, and Personal Pronouns in the Acquisition of American Sign Language by Deaf Children of Deaf Parents [Ph.D. Dissertation]. University of Minnesota. Hoffmeister, R.J. (1987). The acquisition of pronominal anaphora in ASL by deaf children. In B. Lust (ed.) Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora. Volume II: Applying the Constraints. D. Reidel, pp. 171–187. Hunsicker, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (2012). Hierarchical structure in a self-created communication system: Building nominal constituents in homesign. Language 88(4): 732–763. doi: 10.1353/lan.2012.0092. Janzen, T. and Shaffer, B. (2002). Gesture as the substrate in the process of ASL grammaticization. In R.P. Meier, K. Cormier and D. Quinto-Pozos (eds) Modality and Structure in Signed and Spoken Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 199–223. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511486777.01. Johnston, T. (2013). Formational and functional characteristics of pointing signs in a corpus of Auslan (Australian sign language): Are the data sufficient to posit a grammatical class of ‘pronouns’ in Auslan? Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 9(1). doi: 10.1515/cllt-2013-0012. Lillo-Martin, D. (1986). Two kinds of null arguments in American Sign Language. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4(4): 415–444. doi: 10.1007/BF00134469. Lillo-Martin, D. (1991). Universal Grammar and American Sign Language: Setting the Null Argument Parameters. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lillo-Martin, D. and Meier, R. (2011). On the linguistic status of ‘agreement’ in sign languages. Theor Linguist 37(3–4): 95–142. Lillo-Martin, D. and Chen Pichler, D. (2021). ASL Pronoun Acquisition: Implications for Pronominal Theory. Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America (GALANA). Lillo-Martin, D. and Klima, E.S. (1990). Pointing out differences: ASL pronouns in syntactic theory. In S.D. Fischer and P. Siple (eds) Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Volume 1: Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 191–210. Loew, R. (1984). Roles and Reference in American Sign Language: A Developmental Perspective [Ph.D. Dissertation]. University of Minnesota. Lu, J. (2021). Emerging Deictic Systems Shaped by Language, Modality, and Social Interaction [Ph.D. Dissertation]. University of Chicago. Mathur, G. and Rathmann, C. (2012). Verb agreement. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach and B. Woll (eds) Sign Language: An International Handbook. de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 136–157. Meier, R.P. and Lillo-Martin, D. (2010). Does spatial make it special? On the grammar of pointing signs in American Sign Language. In D.B. Gerdts, J.C. Moore and M. Polinsky (eds) Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor of David M. Perlmutter. MIT Press, pp. 345–360. Morgan, G. (2006). The development of narrative skills in British Sign Language. In B. Schick, M. Marschark and P.E. Spencer (eds) Advances in Sign Language Development in Deaf Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 314–343. Morgenstern, A., Caët, S. and Limousin, F. (2016). Pointing and self-reference in French and French Sign Language. Open Linguistics 2: 47–66. Newport, E.L. and Meier, R.P. (1985). The acquisition of American Sign Language. In D.I. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition (Vol. 1). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 881–938. Petitto, L.A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American Sign Language. Cognition 27(1): 1–52. Perniss, P. and Özyürek, A. (2015). Visible cohesion: A comparison of reference tracking in sign, speech, and co-speech gesture. Topics in Cognitive Science 7(1): 36–60. doi: 10.1111/tops.12122. Pfau, R. and Steinbach, M. (2006). Modality-independent and modality-specific aspects of grammaticalization in sign languages. Linguistics in Potsdam 24: 1–98. Reynolds, W. (2016). Early Bimodal Bilingual Development of ASL Narrative Referent Cohesion: Using a Heritage Language Framework [Gallaudet University Ph.D. Dissertation]. Reynolds, W. (2018). Young bimodal bilingual development of referent tracking in signed narratives: Further justification of heritage signer status. Sign Language Studies 18(3): 328–354. doi: 10.1353/sls.2018.0006. Schlenker, P. (2017). Sign language and the foundations of Anaphora. Annual Review of Linguistics 3(1): 149– 177. doi: 10.11​46/an​nurev​-ling​uisti​cs-01​1415-​04071​5. Serratrice, L. (2007). Referential cohesion in the narratives of bilingual English-Italian children and monolingual peers. Journal of Pragmatics 39(6): 1058–1087. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2006.10.001.

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Deixis in the manual modality Sorace, A. and Serratrice, L. (2009). Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism 13: 195–210. Zwitserlood, I. (2012). Classifiers. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach and B. Woll (eds) Sign Language – An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter, pp. 158–186.

Further reading Cormier, K. (2012). Pronouns. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach and B. Woll (eds) Sign Language: An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 227–244. Coppola, M. and Senghas, A. (2010). Deixis in an emerging sign language. In D. Brentari (ed.) Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 543–569. Fenlon, J., Cooperrider, K., Keane, J., Brentari, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (2019). Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): Article 1. doi: 10.5334/ gjgl.499. Frederiksen, A.T. and Mayberry, R.I. (2019). Reference tracking in early stages of different modality L2 acquisition: Limited over-explicitness in novice ASL signers’ referring expressions. Second Language Research 35(2): 253–283. doi: 10.1177/0267658317750220. Reynolds, W. (2018). Young bimodal bilingual development of referent tracking in signed narratives: Further justification of heritage signer status. Sign Language Studies 18(3): 328–354. doi: 10.1353/sls.2018.0006.

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15 ACQUISITION OF PRONOUNS IN CREOLE LANGUAGES Dany Adone and Tamirand De Lisser

1. Introduction This chapter examines a relatively understudied area of acquisition: the acquisition of pronouns in Creole languages. Situated within wider debates about the role of nature and nurture in language acquisition, and, more specifically, the role of direct input, it will discuss how the development of pronouns in the grammar of Creole-acquiring children may inform theory on the default functioning of the innate universal grammar (UG), providing insights on the issue of input. Bickerton (1981, 1999) claimed that a wide range of Creole languages share some strikingly similar features, which could be regarded as default universal features, as posited in his Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, a biological program for language. The Bioprogram details what features are innate in language, and what must be learnt. These innate features are generally produced effortlessly by Creole-speaking children, and they are usually target consistent. For example, serial verb constructions are believed to follow from the innate algorithms – though widely regarded as substrate influence, these constructions are found in languages that have no serializing substrates (Bickerton 2014). Strikingly, these features are also produced effortlessly but, to some extent, target inconsistently by some non-Creole-speaking children – for example, English-speaking children – which demonstrates that input alone cannot account for this development. The early, rapid, and errorless production of these features (De Lisser 2015), though they are not characteristic of solely Creole languages (but only in Creoles do the relevant features appear simultaneously in large numbers), can provide insights into the default UG. This chapter will focus on one such feature, the L1 acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Creole languages. For the current work, we will be examining data from Jamaican (also referred to as Jamaican Creole, Jamaican Patois, and Patwa), an English-based Creole spoken in Jamaica, and Morisyen (also referred to as Mauritian Creole) and Seselwa (also referred to as Seychellois Creole), two Frenchbased Creole languages spoken in Mauritius and the Seychelles, respectively. The Jamaican data is based on De Lisser’s (2015) longitudinal study and newly collected experimental data. The Morisyen data is based on Adone’s (1994) and (2012) works, with the Seselwa data also based on Adone (2012). Morisyen and Seselwa are similar as they share the same lexifier and history before they diverged in the mid-1830s (Guillemin 2011). According to Guillemin (2011), the greater presence of the French in Mauritius and the influx of Bantu-speaking slaves in the Seychelles may have caused the two languages to have notable differences. For example the use of the specificity marker la in

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Morisyen and i in Seselwa, or the use of the zero equative copula in Morisyen constructions while Seselwa employs i, are evidence of divergence between the two languages. It is therefore interesting to examine these two French-lexified languages in comparison with an English-lexified language. The chapter begins with a critical summary of the issues and topics, including brief discussions of the languages in focus, pronouns in Creole languages, theories accounting for language acquisition, and the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives. Section 3 zooms in on the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Morisyen and Seselwa. Following this, Section 4 moves on to consider pronoun acquisition in Jamaican. We analyze and discuss the overall findings in Section 5 and end the chapter with discussion and conclusions and a brief indication of future directions. To aid readers, the abbreviations used for grammatical features throughout this chapter are as follows: 1sg/2sg/3sg = first/ second/third person singular pronoun, 1pl/2pl/3pl = first/second/third person plural pronoun, DET = determiner, MOD = modal, PREP = preposition, PROG = progressive, PROS = prospective, REF = reflexive, TNS = past tense, Ø = null/missing element.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics There are competing and controversial theories put forward to account for the emergence of Creole languages. However, no theory will provide a single explanation for all languages that have been described as Creoles (Bickerton 2014). Jamaican, Morisyen, and Seselwa are described as being plantation Creoles. The plantation situation allowed for a large number of people, with different languages and diverse linguistic backgrounds to be grouped together in a relatively small space. Based on Bickerton’s plantation account, children born in this situation were therefore confronted with several competing structures, as the adults communicated using some sort of a rudimentary pidgin. Additionally, after childbirth, parents were brought back to the field as quickly as possible, leaving other women working in the plantation nursery to look after their children. The children’s main interaction would, therefore, be with children from different ethnic groups and languages, and, as such, a relatively structureless pidgin would be their only means of communication. Therefore, this led to children relying on their innate grammar to process and produce language. These Creole languages, as spoken today, are purported to reflect the core features of the innate biological endowment for language, for which Bickerton (2014: 215) made the following four predictions: Children acquiring a creole language should make fewer errors than children acquiring a noncreole language. Children acquiring a noncreole language make ‘mistakes’ that resemble structures typical of creole languages, but children acquiring creole languages should seldom if ever make ‘mistakes’ that resemble structures not found in creole languages but found in noncreole languages. Such errors that do arise should affect those areas where the creole in question deviates most markedly from the innate instructions for language building. Children acquiring a creole language should reach a final state, corresponding to adult competence, at (on average) a substantially earlier age than children acquiring a noncreole language. Bickerton’s (1981) claims have been challenged frequently, but seldom tested on modern-day Creole languages. Whether his predictions will be borne out may be determined in the current study on the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Creole languages.

2.1  Pronouns and reflexives in Creole languages In most Creole languages pronouns do not mark a difference between nominative and accusative/ dative case. This is true for Jamaican as demonstrated in examples 1–4, and to some extent for Morisyen and Seselwa (5): 211

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(1) Im did  a  biit  im. 3sg TNS ASP beat 3sg ‘S/he was beating her/him’. (2) Im   did   a   biit  mi/yu. 3sg TNS ASP beat 1sg/2sg ‘S/he was beating me/you’. (3) Mi did  a  biit im. 1sg TNS ASP beat 3sg ‘I was beating him/her.’ (4) Yu  did  a   biit  im. 2sg  TNS ASP beat 3sg‘You were beating him/her’. (5) Li ti  pe bat li. 3sg TNS ASP beat 3sg ‘S/he was beating her/him’. Like (5), examples (6–8) apply to both Morisyen and Seselwa. These examples show a distinction between nominative and accusative/dative (non-nominative) cases in the first person and second person singular, but not in the third person singular: (6) Li  ti  pe  bat mwa/twa. 3sg  TNS ASP beat 1sg/2sg ‘S/he was beating me/you’. (7) Mo ti  pe  bat li. 1sg  TNS ASP beat 3sg ‘I was beating him/her’. (8) To ti   pe bat li. 2sg  TNS ASP beat 3sg ‘You were beating him/her’. For Morisyen and Seselwa (c. 1980–2000), data shows that, in the adult grammar, the bare pronoun li was used as a personal pronoun and reflexive pronoun (Carden and Stewart 1988, 1989, Heine 2005). Example (5) could therefore also be interpreted as ‘S/he was beating herself/himself’, with this ambiguity being clarified based on the context of utterance. Heine (2005) purported that reflexive marking in Creoles is quite complex as reflexivity may be expressed in several ways. Data collection based both on spontaneous speech and on experimental data (Carden and Stewart 1988, 1989, Heine 2005, among others) shows that bare third person singular pronouns in Morisyen and Seselwa were used to express reflexivity. Additionally, so lekor ‘his/her body’ is also used to express reflexivity as witnessed in early Morisyen and Seselwa. However, based on our own observation, this construction is less common in Morisyen as compared to Seselwa. It is also clear that the massive influence of French in both countries has led to Morisyen and Seselwa today showing a distinction between the bare pronoun and the reflexive pronoun. The pronoun+mem ‘self’ model is used in both Creole languages to indicate reflexivity, as exemplified in 9: (9) li  pe  koz ar  limem 3sg ASP speak PREP 3sg+self ‘S/he is talking to herself/himself’.

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Similar to Morisyen and Seselwa, reflexive pronouns in Jamaican are also distinctly marked with the morpheme self postposed to the personal pronoun: (10) Im  a  taak tu  imself 3sg ASP speak PREP 3sg+self ‘S/he is talking to her/himself’. There is also evidence of reflexives being used instead of pronouns in Jamaican, though this is believed to be extremely rare (Patrick 2020). Nevertheless, data from Morisyen and Seselwa (c.f. Carden and Stewart 1988, 1989, Heine 2005, etc.) shows clearly that the bare pronoun instead of the reflexive was attested in the creolization of Morisyen (and presumably Seselwa) occurring as a feature of the Morisyen and Seselwa of the 1980s onward. Adone (1994b) argued that early Morisyen texts, as mentioned in Carden and Stewart (1988, 1989), show evidence for the use of the bare pronoun li to mark reflexivity. The work done on pronouns and reflexives in Creole languages (Corne 1988, Carden and Stewart 1989, Adamson 1993, Muysken and Smith 1994) shows some variability among Creole languages and has led scholars to formulate different hypotheses on the development of reflexive pronouns in creolization. Carden and Stewart (1989) claimed that the development of reflexive pronouns in Haitian Creole supported the gradual creolization hypothesis (see Arends 1993 for a discussion of this hypothesis). This directly opposes Bickerton’s ideas of creolization being abrupt, taking place within one generation. Bickerton (1986: 228–230) argued that if the formation of Creole languages were to be understood as a process of three concepts such as retention, loss, and reconstitution ‘reflexive forms were, in general, retained in English Creoles, but lost in French Creoles’. As previously indicated, the use of the pronoun+mem ‘self’ is a modern development due to the massive influence of French. In the case of Morisyen and possibly Seselwa, Corne (1988), analyzing early Morisyen texts, argues that reflexivity in the 19th-century Morisyen texts was only expressed by so lekor ‘his body’. This is interesting in the light of the discussion on universals and language acquisition, to which we return later in this chapter. Examples (1–10) show that Jamaican, Morisyen, and Seselwa have what may be described as ‘typical’ Creole features associated with radical Creoles (i.e., Creoles which have the least European influence). Therefore, these languages are ideal to weigh in on the debate on the innate systems of language and how these are acquired.

2.2  Theories of language acquisition In the Generative Framework of language acquisition, there are two main accounts: continuity and maturation. Proponents of the maturation model assume that grammatical categories and principles are initially absent from a child’s system and only develop over time (Radford 1990, Vainikka 1993/4, Wexler 1998). Although UG is available at birth, only the basic aspects are readily available, which mature over time. On the other hand, proponents of the continuity model put forward that all grammatical principles are available from birth and do not change – early grammar has the same properties as adult language (see Pinker 1984, Borer and Wexler 1987, Lust 1999). The difference in the child system when compared to the adult system lies not in the growth of grammatical domains, but rather in lexicon, pragmatic competence, and processing abilities. A radical version of the continuity hypothesis is the Full Competence approach to language acquisition (see Rasetti 2003). This approach assumes there is no divergence of the child grammar from the adult target. However, some proponents of the Full Competency hypothesis assume maturational processes that may impact language development. For instance, Rizzi (1992, 2000) assumes that children have the option of producing grammatically governed truncated structures, without all

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the overt functional projections, because the constraint requiring all sentences to be full CPs only matures later. There are other extra-grammatical accounts of language development, such as the Functional Approach (Ritchie and Bhatia 1999), Classical Processing Approach (Bloom, Miller, and Hood 1975, Bloom 1990) and the Usage-based Theory of child language acquisition (Tomasello 2000, 2003). However, Bickerton (2014) noted that current theories of acquisition have no satisfying explanation in line with the observation that the pace of acquisition for children acquiring English, for example, is slower than that of children acquiring Creole languages. Therefore, for the present work, rather than imposing a theoretical model, we will opt for a more unified view, allowing the data to speak for itself and, as isolating languages, Creoles are particularly suited to this end.

3.  Acquisition in Morisyen and Seselwa First language acquisition research on pronouns in the Generative Framework centres on Binding Theory. The widespread view is that children, by the age of three, have a good understanding of Binding Principle A: reflexive pronouns must be locally bound; that is, they must have a local antecedent (i.e., the antecedent and the anaphor must be in the same clause, and the antecedent must c-command the anaphor). However, children’s knowledge of Principle B (personal pronouns are locally free) remains, in some languages, unlike that of adults until around six years of age (see Lust 1986, Chien and Wexler 1990, Guasti 2017, among others). Guasti (2017) put forward that children’s errors are not due to the unavailability of the binding principles, but rather to the procedure used for interpreting non-reflexive pronouns. The interpretation of non-reflexive pronouns is determined to a large extent by pragmatic factors. This section demonstrates how an experimental approach has been used to examine this phenomenon in Morisyen and Seselwa.

3.1  The acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Morisyen Adone (2012) detailed a series of experiments with 10 children between four and five years of age, based on the methods developed by Crain and McKee (1985, see also Kaufman 1984, Chien and Wexler 1988, McDaniel et al. 1990, Grimshaw and Rosen 1990). The experiments focused on the truth value judgements of sentences with Principle B violation and identical sentences without violation, as exemplified in 11–12. The experiments were done with a hand puppet called Krapo ‘Froggie’ and the pronouns tested were li ‘him’, limem ‘himself’, and so lekor ‘his body’. (11) Scenario 1 - grammatical: shows that the monkey is scratching the bear. Krapo says: Mo  fin  truv  Ti  Zako  pe   fer kitsoz    ek  Lurs. Ti   Zako   fin  grat 1sg ASP see little monkey PROG do something with bear little monkey ASP scratch li. 3sg ‘I saw the monkey doing something to the bear. The monkey scratched him’. (12) Scenario 2 - ungrammatical: shows that the monkey is scratching himself. Krapo says: Mo  fin  truv  Ti   Zako   pe   dibut  kot  Lurs.  Ti  Zako  fin  grat   li. 1sg ASP see little monkey PROG stand next bear little monkey ASP scratch 3sg ‘I saw the monkey standing next to the bear. The monkey scratched him’. The verbs grate ‘scratch’, benye ‘wash’, and penye ‘comb’ were used, creating a total of 18 sentences. The results showed that children respond correctly to the grammatical sentences but performed at 214

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chance on the ungrammatical sentences. Furthermore, spontaneous data from the children studied showed that they used li and limem, with limem being produced less frequently and lekor not attested in the spontaneous data at all.

3.2  The acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Seselwa Adone (2012), based on Chien and Wexler (1990), conducted four experiments to test children’s knowledge of reflexives and pronouns in Seselwa. Experiment 1 used an adaptation of the SimonSays game, in which each child was asked to carry out an action, exemplified in (13–14): (13) Danielle dir Anielle pu   bizen montre  li -mem. Danielle say Anielle MOD need show   3sg-REF ‘Danielle says that Anielle should point to herself’. (14) Daniel dir Raphael  pu   bizen montre li -mem. Daniel say Raphael MOD need  show  3sg–REF ‘Daniel says that Raphael should point to himself’. The experiments were repeated using pronouns li instead of li-mem. Four different verbs were used (tuse ‘touch’, montre ‘point to’, grate ‘scratch’, and tiktike ‘tickle’). Experiment 2 was similar to experiment 1, however the verb ‘say’ was replaced by the verb ‘want’, as in (15). This experiment was designed to test infinitival and gender control for reflexives and pronouns. Though Seselwa does not have a gender distinction for pronouns and reflexives, the experiment was repeated with both feminine and masculine genders to determine whether the gender of the matrix subject influenced the children’s responses. Four different action verbs were used (tuse ‘touch’, montre ‘point to’, grate ‘scratch’, and tiktike ‘tickle’). There were two items for each verb (li and limem), yielding 10 sentences for each sentence type. (15) Mari ule Annie montre li -mem ek so ledwa. Mari  want Annie  show   3sg –REF with 3POS finger ‘Mari wants Annie to show herself with her finger’. Experiment 3 was designed to test whether children believed that both pronouns and reflexives needed non-local antecedents. In this experiment, the children were required to give a toy to themselves or to a puppet, depending on the sentence they heard. The test construction is exemplified in (16): (16) Mari dir  Anissa pu   bizen don  li  -mem  en loto. Mari say Anissa MOD need give 3sg –REF a car ‘Mari says Anissa should give herself a car’. The experiment was repeated using pronouns li instead of li-mem, and also the masculine gender instead of the feminine. For experiment 4, a yes/no judgement task was used to ascertain children’s acceptance of pronouns as coreferential with local antecedents versus pronouns as bound variables when they had a local antecedent. Each child was presented with a cartoon picture, an introductory sentence and a question related to the picture, to which the child should answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Mis-match cases were also presented where the sentences did not match the pictures. Four types of questions were included: sentences with proper nouns as their subject and those with quantifier NPs, paired with both reflexives and pronouns (17–18). The experiments were repeated using pronouns li instead of li-mem.

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(17) Name-reflexive: Sa Mari; sa Mama Tediber. Eski Mama Tediber pe tus limem? ‘This is Mary; this is Mama Bear. Is Mama Bear touching herself?’? (18) Quantifer-reflexive: Sa Mari; sa ban tediber. Eski sak tediber pe tus limem? ‘This is Mary; these are the bears. Is every bear touching herself?’ The results from Experiment 1 show that children’s performance on the locality property of reflexives increased with age, and that by age 5;0 to 5;5 (60 to 65 months) most children (60%) have knowledge of the main property of reflexives – that the antecedent must be local. They children did not, however, always obey the Principle B constraint that a pronoun may not have a local c-commanding antecedent. These results were generally replicated for Experiments 2, 3, and 4. Thus, although children show knowledge of both Principle A and Principle B, there is a difference in children’s development of these Principles. As for Morisyen, spontaneous data from Seselwa showed that all nine children studied used li and limem, with limem being produced less frequently, and so lekor being used occasionally.

4.  Acquisition in Jamaican The research presented in the rest of the chapter relies on both longitudinal and experimental data and acts as one exemplar of how to conduct research on the acquisition of Creole languages. The longitudinal data, based on De Lisser’s (2015) work, was collected from six monolingual Jamaican-speaking children, for a period of 18 months. At the start of the data collection the children were between 18 and 23 months old. This age range corresponds to the period when syntax emerges and when target inconsistent forms have been documented for other languages (De Lisser 2015). Three girls and three boys were strategically selected for inclusion in the study. The children came from households where Jamaican was predominantly spoken, with special consideration given to the socio-demographic profile of their primary caregiver and the level of speech production by the children. The data was collected by recording the spontaneous speech of the children in a natural setting. One hour recording of each child was done every 10 days for the first five months of the study, and every 15 days thereafter. The first two months of the data collection process included familiarization and final selection, and therefore the data gathered during this period was not included in the analysis. A total of 204 hours of recording was used as the corpus for the study presented below. The data was transcribed using the JLU (Jamaica Language Unit) modified Cassidy-LePage orthography (LangwiJumieka n.d.) and coded for morphosyntactic relations. A total of over 80,000 child utterances were produced, of which 30,621 pronouns were attested, which form the basis of the present analysis. Experimental data was also collected. A series of three yes/no judgement tasks (similar to that used by Chien and Wexler 1990) were administered to seven Jamaican-speaking children between the ages of 3;03 and 5;04 (39 and 64 months). The children were shown pictures with characters performing an action and were asked yes/no questions, in Jamaican, about the pictures. Like the Morisyen and Seselwa experiments detailed above, the experiments focused on the truth value judgements of sentences with Principle B violation and identical sentences without violation. A double match and mis-match condition was employed, where for each correct scenario provided a mis-matching scenario was given, as was the opposite scenario (see 19):

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(19) Task 1 Scenario: Picture shows a boy bathing a dog. Matching: Dis a  wahn bwai, an  dis a  wahn daag. Di bwai  a  bied  im? this COP  a   boy  and  this  COP  a   dog   the  boy  ASP  bathe 3sg ‘This is a boy, and this is a dog. Is the boy bathing him? ’Mis-matching: Dis a  wahn bwai, an dis a  wahn daag.  Di bwai a  bied imself? This COP  a   boy  and  this  COP  a   dog  the  boy  ASP bathe  REF ‘This is a boy, and this is a dog. Is the boy bathing himself?’ Opposite scenario: Picture shows a dog bathing himself and a boy playing ball. Matching: Dis a  wahn bwai, an dis a   wahn daag.  Di daag a  bied imself? this  COP  a   boy  and  this  COP  a   dog  The  dog  ASP  bathe  REF ‘This is a boy, and this is a dog. Is the dog bathing himself? ’Mis-matching: Dis a  wahn bwai, an dis a   wahn daag.  Di daag a  bied   im? this  COP  a   boy  and  this  COP a   dog   The  dog  ASP  bathe  3sg ‘This is a boy, and this is a dog. Is the dog bathing him?’ Scenarios 2 and 3 are detailed in Appendix 1. All scenarios were repeated with three verbs and different characters, thus generating a total of 12 sentences per scenario. Verbs used for scenario 1 were luk pan ‘look at’, bied ‘bathe’, and riid tu ‘read to’; scenario 2 verbs were kuom ‘comb’, paint ‘point’, and hog ‘hug’; and scenario 3 had the verbs plie wid ‘play with’, krach ‘scratch’, and daans wid ‘dance with’. This resulted in a total of 36 test questions. All 36 items were presented in a randomized manner. The children were tested individually in a quiet classroom. Each child sat at a table with the researcher and the pictures were displayed via a laptop screen. Administering the task took approximately 10 to 12 minutes.

4.1  Longitudinal data in Jamaican As detailed in Table 15.1, there is a gradual increase in the children’s production of pronouns as their MLU (Mean Length of Utterance, calculated by words) increased. The six participants collectively produced 157 pronouns in their utterances during the period when their MLU was less than 1.49. This increased to a total of 12,533 when their MLU was 4.5 or greater. A closer examination of the pronouns, as Table 15.2 reflects, shows that children start off producing twice as many first person singular pronouns compared to third person singular pronouns, thereby confirming the observation that first person singular pronouns are the first set of pronouns to be used in significant numbers (Chiat 1986). By stage 2 MLU, there is a drastic shift in the production of Table 15.1 Production of pronouns in Jamaican MLU (Words)

Number of Pronouns

Total

157 2,121 7,718 8,092 12,533 30,621

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Dany Adone and Tamirand De Lisser Table 15.2 Distribution of pronouns MLU (Words)

Total Pronouns

1sg

2sg

3sg

1pl

2pl

3pl

Demonstratives

Reflexives

Total

157 2121 7718 8092 12533 30621

90 458 2755 2964 5203 11470

9 148 945 1128 2007 4237

42 1291 3228 3173 4284 12018

0 2 8 9 32 51

0 0 0 0 8 8

1 13 108 128 238 488

15 207 656 673 732 2283

0 2 18 17 29 66

third person singular pronouns. Also evident is the clear production of singular pronouns compared to the sparse occurrence of plural pronouns. Demonstrative pronouns are also minimally attested in the dataset, and reflexives are almost non-existent. The data reveals that children generally do not make mistakes in the use of pronouns. Children are also knowledgeable that there is no difference in case marking in pronouns in Jamaican and do not entertain errors in this regard. There was only one occurrence where an obligatory reflexive marker was omitted, yielding ungrammaticality: (20) Mi Ø wash mi bak fi mi-Ø. 1sg Ø wash 1sg back for 1sg~Ø ‘I am going to wash my back for myself’.

(TYA 2;08 – De Lisser 2015)

Additionally, though reflexive pronouns are minimally attested in the dataset, as demonstrated in (21), children demonstrated adult-like performance in binding the correct reflexive pronoun with the correct antecedent 98.5% (65/66) of the time that reflexives were produced. Thus it would appear that children, from an early age, are aware of Binding Principle A. This further shows that children are knowledgeable of the principles governing syntactic binding and c-command. (21) Yu  tek  aaf  i   yuself. 2sg take off 3sg 2sg~REF ‘You should take it off yourself’.

(ALA 2;06 – De Lisser 2015)

As demonstrated in (22), it would also seem that children are knowledgeable of Principle B: (22) Shii se  mi a-go  luus  i   daag pan ari. (SHU 3;00 – De Lisser 2015) 3sg  say 1sg PROS loose DET dog  on  3sg ‘She said that I am going to loose the dog on her’. Here, for the pronoun ar to be locally free, it cannot be coreferential with the noun phrase i daag or the preceding pronoun mi, which are in the same clause or locality. Ar can, however, be coreferential with the antecedent shi, as shi is clause external to the pronoun ar, and can be bound non-locally. Also, ar shares similar properties with the 3sg root subject shi and can be co-indexed to it. The evidence from the longitudinal data demonstrates that Jamaican children, from an early age, are knowledgeable of Principle A, Principle B, and c-command. This is in keeping with findings from Seselwa and Morisyen-speaking children as presented by Adone (2012). This is also true for non-Creole languages (see Lust 1986 for counter arguments that young children do not have knowledge of Principle B), and thus provides support for the stance that Creole-speaking children are not 218

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exceptional. While the data shows no violation of the principles, we acknowledge that complex constructions occur only minimally in the dataset, and, as such, we cannot rely solely on the longitudinal data to conclude definitively whether the binding principles are fully mastered. Similarly, there was no conclusive evidence in the Morisyen or Seselwa data to determine whether children mastered the pronoun-reflexive distinction. As such, we turn to the experimental data for Jamaican, followed by a comparative analysis with Morisyen and Seselwa.

4.1  Experimental data in Jamaican As detailed in Table 15.3, the experimental data collected from Jamaican children for all three experiments revealed that children respond more accurately to grammatical sentences (96%) than ungrammatical sentences (51.4%), both for reflexives and pronouns. This presents a striking correspondence with data from Seselwa (Experiment 4), where children gave correct responses about 80% of the time when the questions matched the pictures (compared to a maximum accuracy score of 40% when there was a mis-match). A closer look at the data shows that for the grammatical sentences, the Jamaican children performed well on both reflexive (92.1%) and pronoun (98.7%) tasks, but they appeared to perform at chance on the ungrammatical sentences. This was also the case for the Morisyen experiments. For the ungrammatical sentences, the Jamaican children performed better on the reflexive sentences (58.5%) than the sentences requiring a pronoun (44.4%). Additionally, the average scores for all experiments show that the performance on the reflexives are better (75.3%) than the performance on the pronouns (72.2%). While this difference in performance is not statistically significant at p< .01 (t=.79, p=.23), this finding is not surprising as it corresponds to findings from other non-Creole languages, and also from Morisyen (Adone 2012). The Morisyen data shows that children ‘violate’ Principle B, where they performed at 75% on the grammatical Principle B scenarios and 25% on the ungrammatical scenarios. The general performance of the Jamaican children, therefore, appears to be better than those who speak Morisyen, a matter that we will seek to justify in the following section. Zooming in on the individual experiments, we see that for Jamaican Experiment 1, as shown in Figure 15.1, two children, aged 3;03 (39 months) and 3;09 (45 months), performed better on the pronouns; two children, aged 3;02 (38 months) and 5;04 (64 months) performed better on reflexives; while the other children performed the same on pronouns and reflexives. This observation shows that the seven children who participated in the experiment demonstrated that they are learning to use both structures simultaneously.

Table 15.3 Jamaican children performance on reflexives and pronouns

Experiment 1 Experiment 2 Experiment 3 Average

Type

Grammatical

Ungrammatical

Overall % of accuracy across both conditions

Reflexives Pronouns Reflexives Pronouns Reflexives Pronouns Reflexives and pronouns

100% 100% 95.2% 100% 81% 100% 96%

57.1% 57.1% 57.1% 38.1% 61.4% 38.1% 51.4%

78.6% 78.6% 76.2% 69.1% 71.2% 69.1% 73.7%

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% Accuracy

Experiment 1 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

3,02

3,03

3,04

3,09

Age(y,m) Pronouns

4,05

4,09

5,04

Reflexives

Figure 15.1  Jamaican-speaking children performance on Pronouns and Reflexives in Experiment 1

% Accuracy

Experiment 2 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

3,02

3,03

3,04

3,09 4,05 Age(y,m) Pronouns Reflexives

4,09

5,04

Figure 15.2  Jamaican-speaking children’s performance on pronouns and reflexives in Experiment 2

However, the difference in reflexives and pronouns is more pronounced in Jamaican Experiment 2, as detailed in Figure 15.2. All participants performed better at the reflexive questions, or at least as well, when compared to performance on pronouns. This means that children are more likely to give correct answers for the reflexive sentences, showing that they are knowledgeable of Principle A. It is observed that before the age of five years, some Jamaican-speaking children performed at 100% accuracy with both pronoun and reflexive sentences. This development could provide evidence that Creole-speaking children generally acquire their target grammar before non-Creole-speaking children, as English-speaking children aged six in Chien and Wexler’s (1990) study were yet to master correct pronouns, performing at only a 64% accuracy. Chien and Wexler reported that by age six, the children in their study knew that a reflexive must be locally bound, but they did not appear to know that a pronoun may not be locally bound. They suggest that children are not necessarily missing the syntactic Principle B, but rather a pragmatic principle. Again, results from Experiment 3 (Figure 15.3) support the previous findings that children are more likely to perform better at reflexives when compared to pronouns. Nonetheless, the difference 220

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% Accuracy

Experiment 3 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

3,02

3,03

3,04

3,09

Age(y,m) Pronouns

4,05

4,09

5,04

Reflexives

Figure 15.3  Jamaican-speaking children’s performance on pronouns and reflexives in Experiment 3 Experiments 1, 2 & 3 120

% Accuracy

100 80 60 40 20 0

3,02

3,03

3,04

3,09

4,05

4,09

5,04

Age(y,m) Pronouns

Reflexives

Figure 15.4  Cumulative results experiments 1, 2, and 3

between the two is not statistically significant at p< .01 (t= -.22, p=.42). The drop in performance as seen in Figure 15.3 will be discussed in the next section. The cumulative results of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 are presented in Figure 15.4. It is clear that there is a gradual upward trend in performance as the children get older. Quite evident is that children have knowledge of both reflexives and pronouns from before the age of four years. While a 50% accuracy score may appear to be random, we can conclude that children have knowledge of both Principles A and B at least from 3;09 (45 months).

5.  Discussions and conclusions The general findings for Jamaican are in line with Adone’s (2012) findings for Seselwa: children’s correct judgements of reflexives and pronouns continuously increase as they get older. Although Adone’s (1994) and (2012) studies with Morisyen-acquiring children are limited, the results seem to complement each other. Children acquiring French-lexified Creoles behave in a similar way when 221

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compared to children acquiring English-lexified Creoles, in this case Jamaican. They bind the reflexives locally. The Seselwa data, however, shows that children do not always follow Principle B in that they coindex a pronoun with a local antecedent. But as already mentioned, this, strictly speaking, is not a violation because the current adult Seselwa target grammar still allows pronouns to be locally bound. Limem competes with li and is a typical example for variable ambiguous input. Similar situations occur with bilingual children. In line with Adone (2012), we account for the drop in performance, as demonstrated in the dip towards the right of some of the graphs, as resulting from the variable nature of the input, where children, being of school age, are presented with conventional language models in French and English, but not in their Creole languages, thus resulting in this inconsistent behaviour. Another salient realization, as was also noted in the Morisyen and Seselwa data, is that while children may produce the wrong answers on Yes/No judgement tasks, when asked to explain, they gave the right information. The results from the Jamaican data, when compared to the results from the Morisyen and Seselwa data, reveal that Creole-speaking children behave in a similar way when compared to non-Creole speaking children; however, it would appear that Creole-speaking children arrive at target consistency at an earlier age than their non-Creole speaking counterparts. Taken together, both the spontaneous and the experimental data across the three Creole languages show a similar picture. In the spontaneous data for all three Creole languages, the use of reflexives was rare in early Creole grammars. However, where reflexives were used, the Creole-acquiring children construct and understand pronouns and reflexives in a target-consistent manner from an early age. The experiments reveal that Creole acquiring children behave in a similar way to non-Creole acquiring children in binding reflexives locally. However, what has been analysed as a violation of Principle B in other languages is not exactly a violation in Seselwa and Morisyen (at least the varieties of these languages spoken in the 1980s) because the adult target grammar allowed pronouns to be locally bound. The use of limem ‘himself/herself’ strongly competing with the pronoun li ‘him/ her’ in Seselwa is an outcome of variable and ambiguous input that children receive. The use of li to mark non-local and local antecedents is exactly what we find in the early stages of creolisation. Adone (2012) interpreted this development as the result of variable input and the lack of a conventional language model, which possibly led children to re-creolise their grammars. In this respect, in the absence of a conventional language model, the children resorted to a default option available in UG (see also Briscoe 2002a, 2002b for a similar explanation). If indeed the invariable use of the personal pronoun as both pronoun and reflexive is the default option in UG, this accounts for the children in the Jamaican experimental data performing at chance with the ungrammatical reflexives and pronouns, but still better than the Morisyen and Seselwa children. Similarly, it accounts for the use of the pronoun mi instead of miself in example (20). Noteworthy too is that in Jamaican, the reflexive may be used instead of the pronoun (23). (23) Meself an mi pikney 1sg~REF and 1sg child ‘My child and I’

(Patrick 2020)

Furthermore, using personal pronouns as reflexives (what Carden and Stewart 1988 referred to as unmarked reflexives) is quite common across Creole languages and is attested in Reunion and Haitian Creoles, as exemplified in (24) and (25), respectively: (24) Li prâ li  pur  ê orater 3sg  take  3sg  for  a  orator ‘He considers himself to be an orator’.

(Papen 1978: 397 as cited in Heine 2005)

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(25) Lii wè li he see him/her/it 'S/he saw her(self)/him(self)/it’.

(Lefebvre 1998: 161 as cited in Heine 2005)

Other Creole languages with this unmarked reflexive include Bislama Pidgin English, Cayenne Creole, early Chinook Jargon, Gouadeloupean Creole, Louisiana Creole, Martiniquese Creole, Negerhollands Creole, Nubi (Kinubi), Palenquero, Papiamentu, and Sranan CE (Heine 2005). While commonly attested in Creole languages, this use of pronouns as reflexives is fairly uncommon in other languages. This provides support to Bickerton’s (2014) claim that Creole languages reflect the core features of the innate biological endowment for language. It could be argued then that Creoleacquiring children (or children in general) are simply utilizing the options available to them, via the default UG, and are not actually confusing Principle B. This option is a typical structure for Creole languages, which may later be replaced based on the input received. However, reflexives are not very common in the spontaneous data, and, as such, the option of using an unmarked reflexive is not salient. The predictions of Bickerton (2014) seem to hold based on the analysis of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Jamaican, Morisyen, and Seselwa. Another interesting point worth mentioning here is the mistakes Creole-speaking children (Morisyen and Seselwa) make when learning French as an L2. Adone has observed the use of li as a reflexive with both Morisyen and Seselwa speaking children around four years of age. This observation is based on data collected at the primary level. Although no systematic study has been conducted to date, this is an area of interest, especially because of the current situation in Mauritius where French and Morisyen have come closer to each other.

6.  Future directions Research on L1 acquisition of Creole languages is minimal when compared to non-Creole languages, and, as such, this area presents much opportunity for further research. In particular, the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives in Creole languages has not gotten much attention and is in need of further study. Directly coming out of the current work, we see the need for further studies on a larger corpus of longitudinal L1 Creole data. It is a truism that children at the age of three years would start to acquire adult-like structures for some constructions; however, some constructions are not as frequently attested at such an early age, and, as such, a larger corpus, at least up to age six, would be recommended. Additionally, more experimental research is necessary, both with different types of test items and with methodologies, and a broader range of participants, so that more reliable generalizations may be made. The inclusion of more diverse Creole languages in research would present a great opportunity for comparative analysis of developmental patterns. In addition, an analysis of the input received by Creolespeaking children would provide much needed insights into language acquisition.

Appendix 1 Scenario 2: Picture shows a dog hugging a cat. Matching: Mi  si  wahn daag an  wahn kyat. Saiman se  di  daag  fi   hog  im  op.  Im  rait? 1sg see  a   dog  and  a   cat   Simon  say the  dog  MOD hug  3sg  up  3sg right ‘I see a dog and a cat. Simon says the dog should hug him. Is he right?’ Mis-matching: Mi  si  wahn daag an  wahn kyat. Saiman se  di  daag  fi   hog  op imself.  Im  rait? 1sg see  a   dog  and  a  cat   Simon  say the  dog  MOD hug  up REF  3sg right ‘I see a dog and a cat. Simon says the dog should hug himself. Is he right?’ 223

Dany Adone and Tamirand De Lisser

Opposite scenario: Picture shows a dog hugging himself and a cat sitting alone. Matching: Mi  si  wahn daag an  wahn kyat. Saiman se  di  daag  fi   hog op imself. Im  rait? 1sg  see  a   dog  and  a   cat  Simon  say the dog  MOD hug up REF  3sg right ‘I see a dog and a cat. Simon says the dog should hug himself. Is he right?’ Mis-matching: Mi   si  wahn daag an  wahn kyat. Saiman se  di  daag  fi   hog im  op. Im  rait? 1sg  see  a   dog  and  a   cat  Simon  say the dog  MOD hug 3sg up 3sg right ‘I see a dog and a cat. Simon says the dog should hug him. Is he right?’ Scenario 3: Picture shows a dog playing ball with a boy. Matching: Mi  si  wahn bwai an  wahn daag. Di  daag a   plie baal wid im.  A  chuu? 1sg see  a   boy  and  a  dog.  The dog  PROG play baal with 3sg. COP true? ‘I see a boy and a dog. The dog is playing ball with him. Is that true?’ Mis-matching: Mi si  wahn bwai an  wahn daag. Di  daag a  plie baal wid imself.  A  chuu? 1sg see  a   boy  and  a   dog.  The dog  PROG play baal with REF.  COP true? ‘I see a boy and a dog. The dog is playing ball with himself. Is that true?’ Opposite scenario: a picture was shown of a boy playing ball with himself and a dog sitting. Matching: Mi si  wahn bwai an wahn daag. Di bwai a  plie  baal wid imself. A  chuu? 1sg see a   boy  and  a   dog.  The boy  PROG play baal with REF.  COP true? ‘I see a boy and a dog. The boy is playing ball with himself. Is that true’ Mis-matching: Mi  si  wahn bwai an  wahn daag. Di  bwai  a  plie  baal wid  im. A  chuu? 1sg see  a   boy  and  a   dog.  The boy PROG play baal with 3sg.  COP true? ‘I see a boy and a dog. The boy is playing ball with him. Is that true?’

References Adamson, L. (1993). The Distribution of Personal and Reflexive Pronouns in Sranan. Paper delivered at the conference of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in Amsterdam. June 1993. Adone, D. (1994). The Acquisition of Mauritian Creole. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Adone, D. (2012). The Acquisition of Creole Languages: How Children Surpass their Input. New York: Cambridge University Press. Arends, J. (1993). Towards a gradualist model of creolization. In F. Bryne and J. Holms (eds) Atlantic Meets Pacific. A Global View of Pidginization and Creolization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 371–380. Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers. Bickerton, D. (1986). Beyond roots: The five year test. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 1, 225–32. Bickerton, D. (1999). How to acquire language without positive evidence: What acquisitionists can learn from Creoles. In M. Degraff (ed.) Language Creation and Language Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 49–74. Bickerton, D. (2014). More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 21. 491–504. Bloom, L., Miller, P. and Hood, L. (1975). Variation and reduction as aspects of competence in language development. In A. Pick (ed.) The 1974 Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology 9. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, pp. 3–55. Borer, H. and Wexler, K. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In T. Roeper and E. Williams (eds) Parameter Setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.

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Acquisition of pronouns in Creole languages Briscoe, E.J. (ed.) (2002) Linguistic Evolution Through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models. Cambridge University Press. Carden, G. and Stewart, W.A. (1988). Binding theory, bioprogram, and creolization: Evidence from Haitian Creole. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 3: 1–67. Carden, G. and Stewart, W.A. (1989). Mauritian Creole reflexives: A reply to Corne. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 4(1): 65–101. Chiat, S. (1986). Personal pronouns. In P. Fletcher and M. Garman (eds) Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development (second edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chien, Y. and Wexler, K. (1990). Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evidence for modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1(3): 225–295. Corne, C. (1988). Mauritian Creole reflexives. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 3: 69–94. Crain, S. and McKee, C. (1985). The acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In S. Berman, J.-W. Choe and J. McDonough (eds) NELS 16. Amherst: GSLA, University of Massachusetts, pp. 94–110. De Lisser, T.N. (2015). The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole: The Emergence and Transformation of Early Syntactic Systems. Doctoral Thesis: University of Geneva, no. L. 835. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/ unige:74228. Grimshaw, J. and Rosen, S. (1990). Knowledge and obedience: The developmental status of binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 187–222. Guasti, M.T. (2017). Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar (second edition). The MIT Press. Guillemin, D. (2011). Mauritian la vs. Seychellois i: Traces of French vs. Bantu influence? Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics Conference, Accra – August 2–6, 2011. Heine, B. (2005). On reflexive forms in Creoles. Lingua 115: 201–257. Kaufmann, D. (1984). On binding and control. Linguistic Inquiry 15: 417–460. LangwiJumieka. (n.d.). Accessed from: http://www​.jumieka​.com​/aatagrafi​.html. Lust, B.C. (ed.) (1986). Studies in the Acquisition of Anaphora: Vol 2. Applying the Constraints. Dordrecht: Reidel. McDaniel, D., Cairns, H.S. and Hsu, J.R. (1990). Binding principles in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition 1: 121–139. Muysken, P. and Smith, N. (1994). Reflexives in the creole languages: An interim report. In D. Adone and I. Plag (eds) Creolization and Language Change. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 45–64. Patrick, P. (2020). Jamaican Creole. In B. Kortmann, K. Lunkenheimer and K. Ehret (eds) The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Available at http://ewave​-atlas​.org​/languages​/27. Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. Rasetti, L. (2003). Optional Categories in Early French Syntax: A Developmental Study of Root Infinitives and Null Arguments. Doctoral Thesis: University of Geneva. Richie, W.C. and Bhatia, T.K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W.C. Ritchie and T.K. Bhatia (eds) Handbook of Language Acquisition. San Diego: Academic Press. Rizzi, L. (1992). Early null subjects and root null subjects. In Geneva Generative Papers 0.1-2:102-114, republished in B. Lust, G. Hermon and J. Kornfilt (eds) Binding, Dependencies and Learnability, vol. 2. Hillsdale: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, pp. 249–272. Rizzi, L. (2000). Comparative Syntax and Language Acquisition. New York: Routledge. Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74: 209–253. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vainikka, A. (1993/4). Case in the development of English Syntax. Language Acquisition 3: 257–325. Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter settings and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optimal infinitive stage. Lingua 106: 23–79.

Further reading Adone, D. (2012). The Acquisition of Creole Languages: How Children Surpass their Input. New York: Cambridge University Press. De Lisser, T.N. (2015). The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole: The Emergence and Transformation of Early Syntactic Systems. Doctoral Thesis: University of Geneva, no. L. 835. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/ unige:74228.

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16 USE OF ANAPHORIC REFERENCE BY SECOND LANGUAGE WRITERS: FROM EMPIRICAL DATA TO PEDAGOGY IN THE CLASSROOM Masumi Narita and Mark R. Freiermuth 1. Introduction Anaphoric reference plays a key role in binding texts together cohesively where the meanings of lexical items are closely tied. Consequently, the binding effect of anaphoric reference use is vital for creating unified and coherent discourses for both first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of English (Halliday and Hasan 1976, Cook 1989, Hinkel 2002, 2020). As such, readers or listeners are expected to understand precisely what is written or spoken when referential relationships are clearly identified in the discourse. Among other linguistic devices, personal and demonstrative pronouns offer typical examples of anaphoric reference in both spoken and written discourses of English. Interestingly, these cohesive devices are frequently introduced as a system encapsulating personal or spacial deixis in Japanese secondary English classrooms, especially during the early stages of English instruction as in the first two example sentences shown below (1 and 2); however, their referential functions need to be further addressed at a much later stage of the instruction as in the remaining two example sentences (3 and 4). (1) (2) (3) (4)

She is an English teacher at my school. This is my favorite picture of my friends and me. The two English words have similar meanings, but they are used in very different ways. The Japanese language has honorific expressions. This way of demonstrating respect to others is also found in foreign languages.

As such, to explore the challenges that L2 learners of various proficiency levels may encounter in creating anaphoric references, especially concerning the frequency and adequacy of pronominal or demonstrative usage, is not only warranted but a crucially important, ongoing pursuit. There is evidence of the difficulties L2 learners face; for example, in their corpus-based study, Granger and Rayson (1998) analyzed the difference in the frequency of major word categories in argumentative essays written in English by L1 and L2 speakers of English, finding that L2 speakers, who were advanced French learners of English, significantly used more pronouns, in particular, first and second person pronouns. Ringbom (1998) also found that in the seven groups of advanced English learners he observed, all of them significantly used more of the first and second person pronouns I, we, and

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you in their argumentative essays than their L1 counterparts despite their diverse L1 backgrounds. One of the consequences associated with an overuse of these person-based pronouns is that it leads to spoken-like features in academic writing (Gilquin and Paquot 2008). In more recent years, large-scale L2 learner corpus data, such as the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), are being compiled in Japan as a means to encourage an examination of how Asian learners of English vary in their L2 use when compared to their L1 counterparts (Ishikawa 2013). Using learner essay data from the ICNALE, both Ishikawa (2016) and Kobayashi (2020) found that Japanese learners of English tended to use the first person pronoun I more frequently than other learner groups in Asia. Thus, conclusions from these studies correctly point out that Japanese learners of English tend to overuse the first person pronoun in academic writing; as alluded to, such forms are considered inappropriate in terms of formality, running counter to the expected depersonalized styles of academic prose in English (Johns 1997, Recski 2004, Swales and Feak 2012, Hinkel 2020). Anaphoric reference by demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, and those) poses a further academic challenge for second language learners. These pronouns often function ambiguously, making it difficult to precisely identify their antecedents in the discourse (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik 1985, McCarthy 1994). Novice learners of English are used to employing these demonstratives as deictic devices in spoken discourse rather than as referential ones in written discourse due to the textual complexities associated with their ambiguous nature (Swales 2005, Wulff, Rӧmer and Swales 2012). Consider the following excerpt from Swales (5): (5) Many phrasal verbs in English have both literal and idiomatic meanings, and they are used in both general and highly specialized contexts. This causes problems for learners. (Swales 2005: 2; italics original) As pointed out by Swales, the confusion arising from these sentences is that the referent of the demonstrative pronoun this in the second sentence is not clear in that it may refer only to the meaning of the second clause in the previous sentence or refer to the whole sentence. In fact, to avoid referential ambiguity of this kind caused by demonstrative pronouns, both L1 and L2 writers have been advised in style guides or grammar reference books to use demonstratives as determiners that are accompanied by noun phrases (Strunk and White 1979, Geisler, Kaufer, and Steinberg 1985, Swales and Feak 2000, 2012, Markel 2004, Johnson-Sheehan 2005, Fowler and Aaron 2016). Thus, in the following sentences sourced from Swales (2005), the use of this (6b) as a determiner in the third sentence is preferable to the second one (6a) because it becomes clear which information in the first sentence (6) is being referred to when used with a subsequent noun. (6) The students said they wanted more tests. a. This surprised the instructor. b. This request surprised the instructor.

(Swales 2005: 5; italics original)

Based on the research background described in the present section, the subsequent sections focus on L2 use of the demonstrative this. Despite the scarcity of research surrounding its L2 utilization, understanding how the demonstrative this is used becomes crucial for pinpointing how L2 learners might be able to construct clear and effective discourse in their writing. The balance of this chapter consists of previous corpus-based studies on anaphoric reference use of the demonstrative this in L1 and L2 English academic prose. This is followed by our recent corpus-based case study in Section 3, which is aimed at shedding light on the use of demonstrative anaphora by Japanese learners of English, especially as it relates to their decision to choose between pronominal and determinative

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uses. Section 4 discusses how the overall research findings can be effectively applied in L2 educational settings, and the final section provides suggested research directions moving forward.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics One investigative angle is to look at the frequency of demonstratives used by L2 learners. In a seminal study by Hinkel (2002), demonstratives were found to be used significantly more frequently in academic essays produced by Chinese, Korean, and Arabic learners of English than by Indonesian, Japanese, and Vietnamese learners of English whose usage was observed at a frequency rate comparable to that of L1 English language speakers. She noted that, in line with McCarthy (1991), the prevalent use of demonstratives in the former three learner groups could be L1-induced, exemplified in the following excerpt (7) from an L2 essay produced by an Arabic student. (7) I know many situations like this in my country. Children go to school but when they arrive to college, they drop out because they don’t know anything about that….That is a bad situation for children and also his parents but I don’t know how about United States or North America. This is my opinion about my experience (Arabic speaker). (Hinkel 2002: 155; emphasis original) In alignment with observations made by Ostler (1987), Hinkel commented that, in Arabic written discourse, demonstratives are essential for ‘developing textual parallelism and syntactic cohesive ties’ (1987: 155), which could lead to interlanguage transfer affecting the writing of L2 essays by Arabic students. Although the quantity of demonstrative use can illustrate how easy it is for L2 learners to use them, the quality of how they are used is even more critical because it is relevant to the issue of whether or not to consider the pronominal use of demonstratives in academic writing in English. Of the relatively scarce research conducted to date, there are four major studies that have inspired our case study, which are highlighted in the next section: Gray and Cortes (2011), Swales (2005), Wulff et al. (2012), and Jin (2019). It should be noted that Swales (2005) may have been the driving force behind the other three studies related to his discovery that the use of pronominal this as a clause-initial subject was unexpectedly frequent despite the style norm recommended in conventional grammar reference books (as mentioned in the previous section). Table 16.1 summarizes the research topics for each study. Swales (2005) used 340 research articles from ten academic disciplines (e.g., applied linguistics, biology, mechanical engineering, philosophy, and sociology), most of which were drawn from the Hyland corpus (Hyland 1998). He examined the frequency of the clause-initial pronominal this and the most frequent nouns that follow the clause-initial determinative this across the disciplines. Table 16.1 Summary of the research topics for four major studies (in chronological order) Previous studies

Target writing

Writers’ English proficiency

Position of this/these in main focus

Swales (2005)

340 research articles (10 disciplines) 52 research articles (2 disciplines) 810 student papers 735 student essays

Proficient level Proficient level

Clause-initial subject in a finite clause All instances of this and these

Upper level Lower and higher levels

Sentence-initial this All instances of this and these

Gray and Cortes (2011) Wulff et al. (2012) Jin (2019)

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Although the frequency ratio of the pronominal use varied from 25% (in dentistry) to 56% (in philosophy), this ratio pointed to the discrepancy between the prescribed style norm and the actual use by academic researchers. He also suggested that the most frequent nouns occurring after the determinative this, across the ten disciplines, could be classified into three main categories: metadiscoursal (e.g., this study and this article), method-related (e.g., this method and this process), and resultsrelated (e.g., this result and this finding) (Swales 2005: 11). In line with Swales’s corpus-based approach, Gray and Cortes (2011) also investigated the use of sentence-initial demonstratives this and these taken from 52 research articles in two disciplines of applied sciences. They found that approximately 20% of all occurrences of these demonstratives were instances of pronominal use and that the most prevalent types of nouns following determinative demonstratives this or these were ‘shell nouns’ across the two disciplines. This is relevant inasmuch as shell nouns encapsulate specific details usually from preceding texts and so function in similar ways to pronominal demonstratives. Consider, for instance, the noun results as in ‘These results suggest…;’ in this case, results plays the role of wrapping up what has been discussed in the previous context as if it were a container (for categorizing shell nouns, see Schmid 2000). The frequently used shell nouns Gray and Cortes found include research, method, result, and model, which conformed to the finding in Swales’s (2005) study. The research suggests that the use of shell nouns indicates that there must be a need in academic writing to envelop previous chunks of discourse in reduced forms similar to the role played by pronominal demonstratives. As noted by some researchers, such as Finn (1995) and Geisler et al. (1985), the choice between pronominal and determinative usage of demonstrative this could be reduced to a question of balance between economy or simplicity for cases of pronominal use and clarity for cases of determinative use. However, for both novice English-speaking L1 student writers and L2 writers of English, if there happened to be any linguistic clues that could facilitate a choice, it would be beneficial to learn about them in academic writing instruction for the purpose of establishing better textual cohesion in production. With this notion in mind, Wulff et al. (2012) considered the linguistic elements that follow each occurrence of the demonstrative this on the basis of 5,827 sentence-initial instances of the demonstrative this extracted from 810 papers produced by university students of four different levels of study (i.e., senior undergraduates, and first-, second-, and third-year graduate students) from 16 academic disciplines. The major findings are (1) the pronominal use of this was found in 43% of all instances and the preference for the determinative use became stronger among the third-year graduate students across the disciplines; (2) the pronominal use of this might depend on a specific type of verb that follows this, and (3) the most frequently used two-word clusters were this + is/was, this + can/could/will/would and this + means/seems/suggests for pronominal uses, whereas this + paper/ process/study were dominant as determinative uses. Up to this point, the aforementioned research has explored the actual use of demonstrative anaphora by proficient- or upper-level writers in English; however, there is still a significant lack of empirical research on how demonstrative anaphora use varies with L2 writers who have not yet acquired higher levels of English proficiency. This notion was still evident in the early days of corpus-based research. For example, Petch-Tyson (2000) conducted a study using L1 and L2 learner corpora of argumentative essays produced by university students to examine the differences in the way demonstratives are used between these two student populations. The L2 writers in this study were Dutch, French, Swedish, and Finnish learners of English at the advanced level in English proficiency. From her observations, regarding the difference in demonstrative anaphora use between L1 and L2 writers of the same generation, she drew the following conclusions: L2 writers tended not only to use the demonstratives this/these less often than L1 writers but also used this/these as determiners less often than L1 writers. Her commentary offers valuable insights into the teaching of L2 writing; however, the developmental characteristics of L2 use in demonstratives as cohesive devices remained unexplored. 229

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In recent years, to address this shortcoming, Jin (2019), using an English Placement Test (at a university in the United States) to compare lower- and higher-level academic essays in the L2 (242 essays and 493 essays, respectively), examined differences in anaphoric use of this/these between the two groups of writers. She not only worked on quantitative analyses, that is, frequency counts of the demonstrative use, but also attempted to understand the function and effectiveness of demonstrative anaphora within their surrounding linguistic contexts by employing the analytical methods used in Gray (2010). She found: (1) lower-level writers used this/these less often than the higher-level writers, (2) both groups of writers showed a preference for the determinative use of this/these, and (3) higher-level writers showed more frequent and effective use of shell nouns such as problem, result, concern, situation, and challenge, especially when modified by the determinative this/these. It is important to note that the higher-level L2 writers were more often able to encapsulate in the appropriate shell noun what had been discussed in a previous context when applying phrases such as this problem, whereas lower-level L2 writers were found to mistakenly bundle several different issues into phrases such as this problem, obfuscating the meaning. Such studies indicate that academic writers who are proficient or higher level English users do employ the pronominal use of this to varying degrees depending on the academic discipline, and that they also tend to make good use of the determinative this along with nouns of specific types, including shell nouns. In addition, Jin’s (2019) study, in particular, suggests that L2 writers tend to use more demonstratives as they become more proficient in English while consistently preferring the determinative use, which may have been influenced by academic L2 writing instruction. It also appears to be the case that L2 determinative use becomes more effective as the level of English proficiency increases. Despite these tangible results, it should be noted that the two groups of student writers in Jin’s (2019) study were applicants for a university in the United States, so it is expected that even the lower-level writers in her study were much better at academic L2 writing than most English learners in the L2 classroom, especially when contemplating the realities in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) settings. Thus, we were inspired to conduct a case study as described in the next section to investigate more detailed developmental characteristics of anaphoric reference use of the demonstrative this in the sentence-initial position of argumentative essays produced by Japanese university students with varied English language proficiency levels.

3. Main research methodology: A corpus-based case study As a corpus-based case study, we have examined the use of the demonstrative this as an anaphor in academic essay writing by Japanese EFL university students. Generally speaking, Japanese university students have learned English for at least six years prior to being enrolled in university and are expected to take one or more academic writing courses in their university English studies. Textual cohesion is one of the most important topics in academic L2 writing instruction, but the emphasis is often on the effective use of transition signals, and demonstrative anaphora is rarely addressed in textbooks. The students are exposed to academic reading materials and supplementary explanations by their writing instructors, which is intended to help them become familiar with the use of demonstrative anaphora. This study addresses the following research questions: 1) How frequently is the anaphoric demonstrative this used as a pronoun and as a determiner in the essays produced by Japanese EFL university students of different proficiency levels? 2) What are the prevalent types of verbs or nouns that follow the anaphoric demonstrative this? 3) What are structural characteristics of the antecedents for the anaphoric demonstrative this? 230

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The second and third questions are intended to replicate the analyses of linguistic contexts by the previous studies, especially following the methods in Jin’s (2019) study. In addition, since the argumentative essays by L1 English-speaking university students were also available in the target data sets, we observed differences between L1 and L2 writers with regard to the three research questions previously mentioned so that we can draw pedagogical implications from the use by their L1 counterparts who we assume have also been improving their writing proficiency.

3.1  Essay data and analysis The essay data for this case study were drawn from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), which is a large-scale collection of spoken and written data produced in L2 English by Asian university students of different English proficiency levels (Ishikawa 2013). The comparable L1 data sets are also available in the ICNALE. English proficiency levels of Japanese EFL learners have been determined on the basis of their scores in standardized proficiency tests and on the vocabulary size test (Nation and Beglar 2007) in terms of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) levels. All of the students were instructed to express their opinions on a computerized form in response to the following two writing prompts (Ishikawa 2013): Topic A: It is important for college students to have a part-time job. Topic B: Smoking should be completely banned at all of the restaurants in the country. Each essay was produced within a time frame of 20 to 40 minutes without dictionary use and was required to be 200 to 300 words long. The composition of the essays used for the present study is shown in Table 16.2. For the third research question, a sub-component of the essays was used in the analysis. In line with Jin (2019), the target essays were manually analysed with the aid of the concordancing software, AntConc (Anthony 2014). This software searches a corpus for instances of the key word or phrase specified and returns the search results with the lexical content to the immediate right or the left of the search term. Thus, all instances of sentence-initial this were automatically extracted from the essays in the ‘Key Word In Context’ (KWIC) format using the software and were manually verified while categorizing each instance as a demonstrative pronoun or a determiner. The KWIC concordance also helped us to analyse the linguistic context of each instance, that is, the type of verb or the type of noun that followed the sentence-initial this. The verb types were divided into copular and non-copular verbs using Gray’s (2010) taxonomy, while the noun types were semantically categorized into concrete, abstract, and shell nouns using Jin’s (2019) taxonomy. The antecedent to each occurrence of the demonstrative this was analysed in three steps. First, the primary researcher read the preceding discourse of an individual occurrence and annotated the candidate antecedent. Then, the second researcher evaluated the adequacy of the first researcher’s interpreTable 16.2 Composition of the essays for analysis in the present study Student writers

For research questions 1 and 2

For research question 3

L1 English writers

200 essays (45,028 words) (topics a and b) 798 essays (178,462 words) (topics a and b) (CEFR levels: a2 to b2)

100 essays (22,758 words) (topic a) 200 essays (45,481 words) (topic a) (CEFR levels: a2 to b2)

Japanese learners of English

Note: Corpus size (i.e., word counts) was computed using the AntConc software application (Anthony 2014).

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Masumi Narita and Mark R. Freiermuth  Table 16.3 Taxonomy of structural characteristics of antecedents of the demonstrative this Category

Definition

Simple Noun Phrase

A specific NP without any phrasal or clausal postmodification of text that does not span sentence boundaries A specific NP with phrasal or clausal postmodification of text that does not span sentence boundaries A specific sentence or clause of text that does not span sentence boundaries A specific segment of text that spans sentence boundaries The text as a whole with no specific antecedent identified No textual reference, relying on the background knowledge of the reader

Complex Noun Phrase Sentence/Clause Extended Discourse Global/Overall Discourse Indirect Referencing

Note:   Structural categories except ‘Indirect Referencing’ were adapted from the taxonomy descriptions in Gray (2010: 173–174).

tation and left a comment on every case that needed to be reviewed, along with his own judgement. As the final step, the primary researcher examined the discrepancy between the two judgements and finalized the antecedents. The agreement at the end of the second step between the two researchers was 71.4% for L1 English essays and 80.4% for Japanese L2 essays. Although agreement is reasonably high, it may be somewhat lower than some may expect. The reason for this is due primarily to the ‘Indirect Referencing’ uniquely found in L1 English essays and the difficulties in judging Japanese writers’ intentions in extended discourse when they use demonstrative anaphors; hence, the rationale for incorporating the crucial third step. Through the subsequent discussions, the researchers were better able to determine the intention of the writers. When all of the antecedents had been resolved, they were classified in terms of structural characteristics using Gray’s (2010) taxonomy, as shown in Table 16.3. The last category, ‘Indirect Referencing’, was added to the original categories proposed in Gray’s (2010) study.

3.2  Results and discussion The frequency of anaphoric reference by the demonstrative this in the sentence-initial position is shown for each group of student writers in Table 16.4. All groups of writers in this case study were found to use this as a pronoun more frequently than as a determiner, which shows the contrasting pattern of usage by proficient or upper-level writers in English. In addition, it was found that Japanese EFL writers, overall, used the anaphoric demonstrative this in the sentence-initial position signifi-

Table 16.4 Frequency of anaphoric reference by the sentence-initial this Student writers

Overall frequency (raw)

Frequency and percentage of this as a pronoun

Frequency and percentage of this as a determiner

L1 English writers (200 essays) Japanese EFL writers (34 essays at b2 level) Japanese EFL writers (456 essays at b1 level) Japanese EFL writers (308 essays at a2 level)

97

84 (86.6%)

13 (13.4%)

14

12 (85.7%)

2 (14.3%)

137

102 (74.5%)

35 (25.5%)

93

75 (80.6%)

18 (19.4%)

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cantly less than their L1 counterparts (LL score 13.37, p < 0.001), according to the log-likelihood test (Rayson and Garside 2000). The noticeably lower ratio of determinative use of this across all of the students’ written output may be interpreted as implying that the type of writing in this study – an argumentative essay – is not scholarly writing per se, which necessitates more complex and elaborated discussion, possibly indicating that these students need more exposure to academic written discourse. The normalized frequency, which is an adjusted frequency count for accurately comparing the occurrences in corpora of different lengths, is illustrated in Figure 16.1. It seems that student writers are likely to increase their pronominal use of this as they become more proficient in English, whereas its use as a determiner remained largely unchanged across the English proficiency levels. We also focused on analysing the prevalent types of verbs or nouns that followed the anaphoric demonstrative this by following the methods primarily employed in Gray (2010) and Jin (2019). The verbs that followed the pronominal use of this in the sentence-initial position were classified into two types: copular and non-copular verbs. The raw frequency and the percentage of each type can be seen in Table 16.5. The pronominal this accompanied copular verbs far more frequently than non-copular verbs across all of the groups of student writers. It was also found that the percentage of non-copular verbs increased as the writers became more proficient in English. However, further study is undoubtedly warranted because the number of Japanese B2-level students, and, thus, the number of learner essays, is relatively small. The non-copular verbs were mostly lexical verbs such as include, make, mean, and seem. The most frequently occurring verb, mean, might be interpreted as student writers’

2.00

Normalized Frequency

1.80 1.60 1.40 1.20 1.00 0.80

As a pronoun

0.60

As a determiner

0.40 0.20 0.00 Japanese writers (A2 level)

Japanese writers (B1 level)

Japanese writers (B2 level)

Nave English writers

Figure 16.1  Normalized frequency of the sentence-initial this in each writer group (per 1,000 words) Table 16.5 Frequency of verb types following the sentence-initial this as a pronoun Student writers

Overall frequency (raw)

Copular verbs: be

Non-copular verbs (e.g., include, make, mean, seem)

L1 English writers Japanese EFL writers (b2 level) Japanese EFL writers (b1 level) Japanese EFL writers (a2 level)

84 12 102 75

52 (61.9%) 8 (66.7%) 86 (84.3%) 61 (81.3%)

32 (38.1%) 4 (33.3%) 16 (15.7%) 14 (18.7%)

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inclination to use this means as a set phrase, as was pointed out as a kind of ‘delexicalization’ by Wulff et al. (2012: 129). The syntactic patterns of the copular verbs are summarized in Table 16.6. As is evident, L1 students used the syntactic pattern BE + NP more than 60 percent of the time, whereas Japanese EFL students only used this pattern 25 to 38 percent of the time. Instead, Japanese writers preferred the syntactic patterns BE + because/why far more frequently than their L1 counterparts, which can likely be tied to the oral practices Japanese students encounter in secondary schools and the learning of formulaic expressions. When the BE + NP pattern was used, the head nouns of the NPs turned out to be mostly shell nouns such as idea, problem, reason, and solution across all groups of writers. Still, it is noteworthy that Japanese writers, especially A2-level writers, relied more on the nouns reason and thing. The least frequent syntactic pattern was mostly characterized by evaluative adjectives such as fair, important, interesting, serious, and true. Some instances of sentences beginning with the demonstrative this as a pronoun are highlighted in Table 16.7. When the demonstrative this is used as a determiner in an anaphoric form, the nouns that follow this play a crucial role in that they are expected to lexicalize what has been discussed in the previous context in a succinct and appropriate way. The occurrences of this form were infrequent and there was no significant difference in frequency between the L1 and L2 student essays in our data sets (LL score 0.05, p > 0.05). The types of the nouns that were used, however, could be classified into three categories, as shown in Figure 16.2. Since only two instances were found in the B2-level group, they are excluded from Figure 16.2. Just as Jin (2019) observed, the percentage of shell nouns was found to increase as student writers became more proficient in English. Table 16.6 Syntactic patterns of copular verbs following the sentence-initial this as a pronoun Student writers

Overall frequency (raw)

Be + adj./ others

Be + because, be + why

Be + NP

L1 English writers Japanese EFL writers (b2 level) Japanese EFL writers (b1 level) Japanese EFL writers (a2 level)

52 8 86 61

8 (15.4%) 0 13 (15.1%) 15 (24.6%)

11 (21.2%) 6 (75.0%) 50 (58.1%) 23 (37.7%)

33 (63.5%) 2 (25.0%) 23 (26.7%) 23 (37.7%)

Note: Percentages are rounded to one decimal point and thus the total may not be exactly 100%.

Table 16.7 Instances of sentences beginning with this as a pronoun Sentences produced by Japanese student writers This is fantastic thing [emphasis added] because to be wise is one of the real purposes of college students. (a2-level) This is because [emphasis added] even if we had less time to do such activities, we can train our ability to use time efficiently by joining plural activities. (b1-level) This is why [emphasis added] I think that it is important for students to get work-experience while they are still in college. (b2-level) Sentences produced by L1 English-speaking student writers This is really the best solution [emphasis added] because it keeps everyone happy and allows everyone to do exactly what they want to do without making any rules that would negatively affect one group. This is not fair [emphasis added] to the smokers who would like to enjoy themselves just as much as the nonsmokers.

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Use of anaphoric reference by second language writers 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Shell nouns Abstract nouns Concrete nouns

Japanese writers (A2 level)

Japanese writers (B1 level)

Nave English writers

Figure 16.2  Types of the nouns following this as a determiner in each writer group 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Indirect Global Extended Sentence/Clause Complex NP Simple NP Japanese writers (A2 level)

Japanese writers (B1 level)

Nave English writers

Figure 16.3  Structural characteristics of the antecedents to the sentence-initial this in each writer group

The two most prevalent shell nouns across the student essays were event/circumstantial nouns, such as experience and situation, which were used to refer to what happened and/or in what circumstances – something that the writers had already mentioned in their preceding discourse. In this way, they could support their argumentation, as can be seen from the following example (8): (8) I have a part-time job as a teacher at a cramming school now. I was taught manner by other teachers before I started working. This experience [emphasis added] is useful for my daily life and future. To make relationship with my … (B1-level Japanese writer) The last analytical measure in this study is the structural characteristics of the antecedents to the sentence-initial this. For this analysis, only a sub-component of the student essays was analysed due to the need to read each essay closely. Figure 16.3 illustrates the proportion of each structural category in each writer group (see the category definition in Table 16.3). All four instances from Japanese B2-level writers are excluded from Figure 16.3 because the sample size is too small and all are of the category ‘Sentence/Clause’. The distribution of each category shows that all of the student writers tended to rely on anaphoric reference directly in the preceding clause or sentence, possibly because they were attempting to make cohesive ties clear for the reader. The smaller percentage of the category ‘Extended Discourse’ may 235

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reflect the observation in this study that the demonstrative this was used far less frequently as a determiner than as a pronoun. If the demonstrative this were followed by a shell noun that summarizes complex chunks of information, the antecedent would ostensibly cover a wider range in preceding discourse. It is also interesting to note that Japanese writers tended to employ problematic global references in an attempt to summarize multiple viewpoints in previous discourse. Take, for example, an essay that poses three reasons for the advantage of having a part-time job. It stands to reason that Japanese students would feel quite comfortable wrapping up the essay with a sentence like, ‘This is why I think students should have a part-time job’. In such a case, the Japanese student would be certain that they have covered the three distinct reasons using the demonstrative this; however, these reasons do not form one distinct concept. Thus, L1 writers are extremely unlikely to choose to close with such a sentence, instead preferring broader inclusion such as, ‘It is for these reasons that I believe students should have a part-time job’. What is characteristic of L1 student writers is their use of the categories ‘Indirect Referencing’ and ‘Complex NP’. Instead of providing a textual reference, ‘Indirect Referencing’ requires the readers to rely on their background knowledge so as to correctly identify the intent of the demonstrative this, as is the case with the following example (9), where the antecedent seems to be indirectly referred to as ‘college life’. (9) Being able to communicate socially as well as understanding the academics is an important stage when attending college. I feel students should live in the dormitory and take part in activities offered by the school. This [emphasis added] is a time when the students will learn most by being exposed to group activities … In addition, the use of the structure ‘Complex NP’ as in the following example (10) suggests that syntactic structure of the noun phrases in L1 student essays is more complex with more postmodification involved, which seems to be closely related to the developmental stages of noun phrase complexity in L2 writing (Biber, Gray and Poonpon 2011). (10) Part-time jobs provide real-world experience which can complement one’s studies [emphasis added for the antecedent]. This experience [emphasis added] may translate to job opportunities after graduation or not: however, …

4.  Pedagogical recommendations The use of demonstratives as anaphoric expressions is infrequent in academic prose when compared to personal pronouns (Biber et al. 1999, Freiermuth 2011), but they function as important cohesive devices in that they can incorporate the preceding chunks of text and establish a connection to subsequent textual information. In consideration of this and in light of our findings, anaphoric reference by the demonstrative this requires more attention in L2 writing instruction. As discussed in this chapter, linguistic context and structural features of the antecedents seem to be relevant to the anaphoric power and property of the demonstrative this. To use the demonstrative this as an anaphoric pronoun in the sentence-initial position effectively, L2 students need to develop a repertoire of lexical verbs, such as mean and suggest, which frequently follow this, in addition to becoming aware of other syntactic patterns followed by evaluative adjectives or noun phrases. By contrast, to use the demonstrative this followed by a noun phrase in line with the broader conventions of English academic writing, L2 students need to familiarize themselves with shell nouns, which can precisely summarize the preceding discourse. Thus, the use of anaphoric demonstratives along with frequently occurring linguistic lexicon should be included in teaching materials to aid L2 writers. 236

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Structural features of the antecedents to their anaphoric demonstratives also need to be considered due to their ‘limited cohesive capacity’ (Hinkel 2020: 183). This is related to the amount of discourse that can be considered as allowable as a reference for demonstrative this. As found in the present case study, Japanese student writers are likely to wrap up multiple concepts in previous discourse using the singular demonstrative this, which is considered problematic even though the reader may be able to extract the actual intent of the writer. In L2 writing instruction, if L2 students are repeatedly instructed to identify what anaphoric demonstratives refer to in context and are encouraged to discuss whether their referential structure is appropriate or not, this should lead to more effective academic writing in practice.

5.  Future research As corpus-based studies have gained in popularity, the analytical perspective has been extended from a quantitative and a qualitative comparison between L1 and L2 speakers to detailed analyses of L2 use in its own light, especially in search of identifying developmental stages in L2 use as well as providing a means to compare L2 learners with different L1 backgrounds. In the present case study, L1 student essays, albeit not scholarly in nature, were used as reference data because L1 students are also expected to increase their writing proficiency through stages just as L2 writers are; however, L1 writers are certainly more advanced along the writing proficiency continuum in their L1 language than their L2 counterparts, as suggested by Ishikawa (2016). Due to these differences and the ongoing writing development experienced by both L1 and L2 writers, further issues involving their comparisons and their progression need to be addressed in future research from various angles. More specifically, the use of demonstratives in L2 academic writing needs to be investigated more extensively using a larger-scale data set, including various types of writing (potentially from different L2 student populations of varied English proficiency levels). In addition, although the demonstrative this is by far the most frequently found demonstrative in academic prose when compared to any other option (these, that, or those), examining key differences in the use of these four demonstratives will provide a larger and clearer picture of the anaphoric structures of demonstratives. It is also necessary to examine the differences in the referential structure of demonstratives that may arise depending on whether they are used in the sentence-initial position. Demonstrative use in the sentence-initial position may directly contribute to establishing a smooth ‘information structure’ (Halliday 1967), but a new inquiry into structural differences caused by positional variations – in the middle or at the end of the sentence – will bring new insights into the use of anaphoric demonstratives. Finally, findings from studies on demonstrative anaphora in written discourse will also provide a new perspective on how to improve reading comprehension and teaching methods with a focus on cohesive devices as outlined in this chapter. It is hoped that this line of research will motivate L2 teachers to provide appropriate tools and instruction to their L2 writers so that the learners can begin to understand how to more effectively use demonstrative anaphora.

Acknowledgments Earlier versions of the present case study were presented at the conference of the British Association for Applied Linguistics 2019 and the International Learner Corpus Symposium 2019. This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (JSPS KAKENHI): Grant Numbers JP26370703 and JP18K00840.

References Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc 3.4.4w [computer software]. Available at https://www​.laurenceanthony​.net​/software​/antconc/ (accessed 30 June 2022).

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Masumi Narita and Mark R. Freiermuth  Biber, D., Gray, B. and Poonpon, K. (2011). Should we use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2 writing development? TESOL Quarterly 45(1): 5–35. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Cook, G. (1989). Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowler, H. and Aaron, J. (2016). The Little, Brown Handbook. London: Pearson Education. Freiermuth, M. (2011). Debating in an online world: A comparative analysis of speaking, writing, and online chat. Text and Talk 31(2): 127–151. Geisler, C., Kaufer, D. and Steinberg, E. (1985). The unattended anaphoric ‘this’: When should writers use it? Written Communication 2(2): 129–155. Gilquin, G. and Paquot, M. (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1(1): 41–61. Granger, S. and Rayson, P. (1998). Automatic profiling of learner texts. In S. Granger (ed.) Learner English on Computer. London: Longman, pp. 119–131. Gray, B. (2010). On the use of demonstrative pronouns and determiners as cohesive devices: A focus on sentence-initial this/these in academic prose. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9(3): 167–183. Gray, B. and Cortes, V. (2011). Perception vs. evidence: An analysis of this and these in academic prose. English for Specific Purposes 30(1): 31–43. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English (Part 2). Journal of Linguistics 3(2): 199–244. Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Hinkel, E. (2002). Second Language Writers’ Text. New York: Routledge. Hinkel, E. (2020). Teaching Academic L2 Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar. New York: Routledge. Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ishikawa, S. (2013). The ICNALE and sophisticated contrastive interlanguage analysis of Asian Learners of English. In S. Ishikawa (ed.) Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World, 1. Kobe: Kobe University, pp. 91–118. Ishikawa, S. (2016). Strategy of identity-marking: A learner corpus-based study on use of the first person pronouns in L2 English essays/speeches by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learners. In Proceedings of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea 2016 Autumn Conference, pp. 91–106. Jin, H. (2019). On the anaphoric use of demonstratives this/these in L2 academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 38: 62–74. Johns, A. (1997). Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson-Sheehan, R. (2005). Technical Communication Today. New York: Pearson. Kobayashi, Y. (2020). Rhetorical preferences in L2 writings: A contrastive analysis of metadiscourse markers. Journal of Modern Languages 30(2): 1–24. Markel, M. (2004). Technical Communication. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. McCarthy, M. (1991). Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, M. (1994). It, this, and that. In M. Coulthard (ed.) Advances in Written Text Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 266–275. Nation, P. and Beglar, D. (2007). A vocabulary size test. The Language Teacher 31(7): 9–13. Ostler, S. (1987). English in parallels: A comparison of English and Arabic prose. In U. Connor and R. Kaplan (eds) Writing across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 169–185. Petch-Tyson, S. (2000). Demonstrative expressions in argumentative discourse: A computer corpus-based comparison of non-native and native English. In S. Botley and A. McEnery (eds) Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 43–64. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Rayson, P. and Garside, R. (2000). Comparing corpora using frequency profiling. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparing Corpora, the Association for Computational Linguistics 2000, pp. 1–6. Recski, L. (2004). Expressing standpoints in EFL written discourse. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem 2(3). Available at http://www​.revel​.inf​.br​/files​/artigos​/revel​_3​_expressing​_standpoints​_in​_efl​_written​_discourse​.pdf (accessed 30 June 2022). Ringbom, H. (1998). Vocabulary frequencies in advanced learner English: A cross-linguistic approach. In S. Granger (ed.) Learning English on Computer. London: Longman, pp. 41–52. Schmid, H. (2000). English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Use of anaphoric reference by second language writers Strunk, W. and White, E. (1979). The Elements of Style. London: Macmillan. Swales, J. (2005). Attended and unattended ‘this’ in academic writing: A long and unfinished story. ESP Malaysia 11: 1–15. Swales, J. and Feak, C. (2000). English in Today’s Research World: A Writing Guide. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swales, J. and Feak, C. (2012). Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wulff, S., Rӧmer, U. and Swales, J. (2012). Attended/unattended this in academic student writing: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 8(1): 129–157.

Further reading Finn, S. (1995). Measuring effective writing: Cloze procedure and anaphoric ‘this’. Written Communication 12(2): 240–266. Granger, S. (1998). The computer learner corpus: A versatile new source of data for SLA research. In S. Granger (ed.) Learner English on Computer. London: Longman, pp. 3–18. Hinkel, E. (2001). Matters of cohesion in L1 and L2 academic texts. Applied Language Learning 12(2): 111–132. Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics 34(8): 1091–1112. Paltridge, B. (2014). Genre and second language academic writing. Language Teaching 47(3): 303–318.

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PART 4

Making pronouns personal

17 T/V IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A CASE STUDY OF FRENCH Kimberley Pager-McClymont, Sarah Eichhorn, and Amélie Doche

1. Introduction Many languages and dialects use a formal (henceforth referred to as ‘V’, from the Latin vos) and an informal (‘T’, from the Latin tu) pronominal form (see Braun 1988/2012), which speakers must choose between when addressing different interlocutors, based on social cues or norms. Even in English, the second-person pronoun you – which is now the sole second-person pronoun in standard grammars – was once reserved for formal usage to show politeness and respect, while the word thou was the singular, familiar term (Brown and Gilman 1960: 252). While English may be a rare case where its T/V distinction fell out of use (for different historical reasons; see below), there are many languages today where pronoun choice remains an integral part of daily communication. The term ‘T/V,’ used throughout this chapter, is accepted conventionally by scholars to refer to informal and formal (respectively) forms that are researched particularly because of their pragmatic implications. Indeed, House and Kádár (2020: 3) explain: T/V-forms are prime examples of pragmatically salient expressions as their unexpected use in a standard situation may trigger (strong) feelings centred on rights and obligations. When language users choose either the T or the V-form, they display information on who and where they are. In many languages, there are more than two second-person pronouns, and this is the case for certain Romance languages, such as Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese. In those languages, the V form is achieved with the third-person pronoun. In Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, pronouns are not always used – hence our use of brackets below – but verbs convey which personal pronoun is used. In Italian, third-person pronouns lei (singular), loro (plural) are used for the formal, instead of the secondperson pronouns ti (singular) or voi (plural): (1) (2) (3) (4)

Te telefono dopo le venti (I will call you [singular, T] after 8PM). (Voi) parlate l’italiano molte bene (you [plural, T] speak Italian very well). Le telefono dopo le venti (I will call you [singular, V] after 8PM). Le richiamo, Signori, telefono loro alle venti (Let me remind you, Gentlemen: I will call you [plural V] at 8PM).

In Spanish, the third-person pronouns usted (singular) and ustedes (plural) are also used as a V form, as opposed to the second-person pronouns tu (singular) or vosotros (plural): DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-21

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(5) (6) (7) (8)

Antonio, ¿puedes (tú) ayudarme? (Antonio, can you [singular, T] help me?) (Vosotros) Vais a llegar tarde a la escuela [You (plural, T] are going to be late for school). Gracias, Señor, (usted) es muy amable (thank you [singular, V] sir, you are very kind) Señoras, ¿(ustedes) han leído esta novela? (Ladies, have you [plural, V] read this novel?)

In Portuguese, the third-person pronouns are also used to show formality (V form): instead of the second-person pronoun tu (singular), você (singular) is used, and instead of the second-person pronoun vós (plural), vocês (plural) is used: (9) (10) (11) (12)

Tu és simpatico (You [singular, T] are friendly). Vós falastes com ele? (Have you [plural, T] guys talked to him?) Você quer água? (Would you [singular, V] like some water?) Vocês são simpáticos (You [plural, V] are friendly).

In French, on the other hand, the T form is achieved through the second-person pronouns tu (singular) and vous (plural). However, the second-person pronoun vous is also used as the universal formal pronoun (both singular and plural), and thus its meaning is not immediately clear without additional context. For example: (13) Veux-tu allez au cinema? (do you [singular, T] want to go to the cinema?) (14) Voulez-vous allez au cinema? (do you [singular V or plural T or V] want to go to the cinema?) As seen above, (14) requires context – that is, knowing whether one or multiple interlocutors are being addressed – that other examples in other Romance languages discussed above have not needed. This semantic vagueness means that speakers must rely on learned social norms and cues from their interlocutors to select the most socially acceptable pronoun. The remainder of this chapter thus focuses predominantly on French. The use of the second person pronouns tu and vous in French has been the subject of a great deal of research and discourse, both academically and amongst laypeople in the domains of news media and social media. In languages such as French – as well as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as shown above – where each interlocutor must be addressed using either a formal V form or an informal T form, T/V usage and choice is a matter that plays a prominent role in daily interactions. Although speakers may not always be metalinguistically aware of their choices, they are nevertheless governed by social norms that influence the settings in which a particular pronoun is most appropriate. Our research shows that T/V forms in French would benefit from renewed attention to better understand the social phenomena surrounding pronoun choice, especially in the context of social media, which often challenges long-established boundaries and previously held beliefs. T/V usage is thus an important concept to research, as these pronouns can carry a great deal of semantic information and can also reflect contemporary attitudes toward societal norms. While much research has been carried out to examine the use of T/V amongst speakers of French, little attention has been paid to comparing the discrepancies (if any) amongst speakers of different age groups. This chapter aims to fill this gap in knowledge by first reviewing existing literature to portray the current state of the field. Second, we introduce the research methodology and data collection and analysis process of an original study conducted for this chapter, as well as emerging findings. The study consisted of a questionnaire distributed to 250 French speakers in several countries and ranging in age from 18 to 61+. Our aim is to answer the following research questions (RQs), formulated based on the literature review provided below: 244

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• RQ1: To what extent do French speakers’ perception of age and proximity to others impact their use of T/V forms?

• RQ2: To what extent do French speakers’ geographic location or culture (e.g., France, Quebec, Belgium) alter their views and use of T/V forms?

Our study revolves around speakers’ self-reports of their language usage. Lastly, we discuss the future directions that could stem from this research.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics As discussed above, most European languages other than English possess a formal V form and an informal T form, and speakers must select which one to use for interactions with each individual interlocutor. T/V choice is thus reflective of social relationships, with T often indexing notions of proximity, affection, ‘sameness’ (Norrby and Warren 2012: 230; see also Schüpbach et al. 2007: 3–4) or even deliberate insults, while V generally reflects respect and distance and is used to address interlocutors who are older than the speaker (Crédeville 2013: 25–26), and it is used in French as the universal plural when addressing more than one person. In determining which pronoun to use with a single interlocutor, Norrby and Warren (2012: 230, emphasis original) note that ‘difference is the salient feature, most commonly signalled by the interlocutor’s perceived age, general appearance and clothing’, meaning that in situations where there is a large difference in age, status, or social distance, a speaker is more likely to use V. In the case of pluricentric languages – languages spoken in more than one country (Clyde 1991) – geographic location can also play a role in T/V choice, for example in French-speaking Canada, where T can be plural (as opposed to most other French-speaking contexts, where V is the universal plural pronoun, regardless of formality) (Crédeville 2013: 27), or in Colombian Spanish, which has three forms of address, tu/vos/usted, instead of just two as in most other Spanish-speaking countries (Norrby and Warren 2012: 226). Second-person pronoun usage and choice have been extensively researched, with many studies focusing on French and other western European languages. As Schüpbach et al. (2007: 8) note, Swedish has displayed some of the most radical changes toward mutual T usage in most settings, with French, German, and Italian showing similar trends but at a slower rate and retaining some non-reciprocal T-V interactions. The late 1960s, in particular, signaled a time of sociopolitical transformation, social revolt, and a spirit of egalitarianism – spurred by the student movement at universities – that led to a ‘rapid spread of T’ (Norrby and Warren 2012: 226) in Western European languages. Although T usage has increased since this time, there are still complex systems in place that govern speakers’ address choices, in particular social distance, age, physical appearance, and perceived ‘common ground’ (Norrby and Warren 2012: 228). Age is a particularly salient feature in T/V choice in French, as previous research has found that T usage is more widespread amongst young people, with V reserved for interactions with older people or in situations with a clear social hierarchy (Schüpbach et al. 2007: 4). Crédeville (2013: 25–27) explains that the shift toward greater T usage is due to several factors, such as globalisation and widespread use of the Internet and social media, paired with the fact that these domains are most heavily experienced by the youngest generations. Brown and Gilman’s (1960) seminal study on T/V usage amongst L1 speakers of French, Italian, German, and Spanish was one of the first to explore these topics. In their study, questionnaire and interview data from speakers of these languages found that ‘the mutual T is advancing among fellow students, fellow workers, members of the same political group, persons who share a hobby or take a trip together’ (Brown and Gilman 1960: 262) and suggested further trends in this direction based on the social practices of young people. The study only included data from male university students visiting Boston, Massachusetts, in 1957–1958 and cannot be read as encompassing all language practices, but the findings nevertheless paved the way for future research exploring concepts such 245

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as ‘the T of intimacy and the V of formality’ (Brown and Gilman 1960: 257), power relations, and the propensity of young people to develop language practices that differ from those of previous generations. Brown and Gilman (1960: 252) also present a review of historical T/V usage in Western Europe, including in English, where thou was once the singular, familiar form, and you was the singular of reverence and politeness as well as the plural form. In the case of English, thou has almost completely disappeared and has been replaced by universal usage of you (with several proposed theories to explain this shift, such as general trends toward the simplification of verbal inflection; see Brown and Gilman 1960: 268), evidencing how daily language practices can be transformed as speakers adapt to broader social and cultural changes over time. The potential future ‘disappearance’ of a pronoun is often discussed in non-academic media discourse about T/V usage, with articles such as ‘Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for ‘vous’ in French?’ (Lawn 2012) becoming increasingly common and sparking Internet debates. These kinds of debates and discourse amongst laypeople provide insights into daily language practices and metalinguistic awareness and can help fill gaps that academic research has not yet explored (Coveney 2010: 132). Within the field of academic research on T/V usage, many have focused on Francophone countries to document current practices and explore potential future trends. In an early study based on fieldwork in Paris between 1988 and 1991, Morford (1997: 10) describes evidence of ‘a generalised use of tu’ amongst individuals of ‘commensurate status’, such as co-workers, neighbours, and people with whom one interacts during leisure activities. Although more flexible use of T can suggest social progress and a stronger degree of ‘openness and warmth’ amongst speakers, Morford (1997: 11) notes that some individuals may perceive this as a loss of intimacy that was once reserved for one’s closest relations. The intimacy conveyed by T is a common concept in T/V research, and Alber (2019: 3) discusses how, in French, T can be a marker of proximity, affection, and solidarity, reflecting a broader societal trend toward openness to others even outside of one’s immediate personal circle. Conversely, T can also be ‘counter-used’ as an insult or to make an interlocutor feel inferior (Alber 2019: 3) when used in contexts of inequality or where V would normally be the more appropriate choice. There has been similar research on other Romance languages, particularly Spanish (see Ardila 2003, Villarreal 2014, Wang 2022). However, less research exists on Italian (see Bates and Benigni 1975, Formentelli and Hajek 2015) or Portuguese (see Kato and Tarallo 1986, dos Santos Lopes and Marcotulio 2019), thus showing that further examination, especially from a cross-linguistic standpoint (akin to Levshina 2017), is needed. Some studies have analysed L1 and L2 speaker differences, for example Dewaele (2004: 396), whose study with 62 adults found that L2 speakers of French are more conservative in their use of T with known interlocutors than are L1 speakers, but that both L1 and L2 speakers almost always use V with strangers. An earlier study by Lyster (1996: 177) found similar results in Quebec and noted consistent usage of V in formal settings by both L1 and L2 adolescent speakers. These findings were echoed in a more recent study by van Campernolle (2015), which was conducted with 63 respondents between the ages of 18 and 29, ranging from L1 speaker to intermediate L2, and was the first of its kind to provide a direct comparison of perceptions of appropriate behaviour in relation to judgements of formality, social distance, and power. The findings revealed that T/V choice is not always clearly correlated to such judgements and is instead context-specific. Expanding upon this notion, van Campernolle (2015: 62, emphasis original) notes that T/V choices ‘are likely determined by personal choice rather than steadfast, universal rules, and this is something that must be instilled in L2 French learners’, suggesting a certain degree of personal agency and metalinguistic awareness required of speakers. Although van Campernolle’s study produced useful insights into the second-person pronoun system in French, a limitation is that it assessed each concept (formality, social distance, and power) through a single questionnaire item and did not include any open-ended questions for respondents to 246

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reflect or provide further thoughts. The present research aims to expand upon these concepts through a more comprehensive sociolinguistic study.

3.  Contemporary attitudes to T/V: A case study Despite the wide range of research conducted on the use of T/V, there is limited data on the factors of age, context, and/or the use of T/V on social media. Following van Compernolle’s (2015) surveybased method, we conducted a similar study on ‘native (L1) and non-native (L2) perceptions of appropriateness in the French second-person pronoun system’. This case study explores the following hypotheses: 1. T is more frequently reported as being used by younger individuals than by older individuals in similar situations; 2. In the context of new media, the prevalent use of T is controversial: viewers who appreciate the use of T engage positively with the content promoted. Conversely, viewers who disagree with the use of T in such contexts do not engage – or engage negatively – with the content promoted; 3. The location and cultural background of speakers will impact their use of T/V in varied situations. The survey was designed to be inclusive and was provided in both French and in English to aid those participants speaking French as a second language. We also accepted responses in both French and English. The survey was shared on social media (primarily Twitter), with Babel The Language Magazine, with l’Académie Française and other linguistics associations and journals such as the Journal of Languages, Texts and Society, the Poetics And Linguistics Association, as well as with the departments of French studies at various universities in France and overseas territories, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. This allowed us to have an overview of the language practices of a wide range of French speakers as opposed to only those residing in France. We closed the survey once we reached 250 fully completed responses, which took 19 days. The survey was anonymous and featured ten main questions, and although no question was compulsory, participants were not able to go back to a question once they had answered it. The first four questions collected demographic information. The majority of participants (79%) were between the ages of 18 and 35, although we received responses from individuals aged 36–50 (15%) and 51+ (6%). Most participants (90%) were L1 French speakers, and only one participant responded that they were not fluent in French. Participants were asked in what French-speaking countries or regions they had lived, studied, or spent long periods of time (one month or more). They could select more than one option; hence, the raw numbers in Table 17.1 exceed 250. When participants selected ‘other’, they were prompted to specify their answer. Two participants listed Luxembourg, one Peru, one Mayotte, and one Mauritius. Lastly, participants were asked about their highest level of education, as presented in Table 17.2. As the results show, the respondents in this study were highly educated, with the majority (74.4%, n=186) reporting that they had been educated at undergraduate or postgraduate level. As noted above, 79% of respondents were between the ages of 18 and 35 and thus some of these respondents may not yet have pursued studies beyond high school.

3.1  Self-reported use of T/V After the demographic section, participants were then given a textbox and asked to note in which situations they use T. Overall, 238 participants (95.2%) mentioned that their usage of T depends on how close they are to others, mostly listing friends, family, and close colleagues. The responses discussed 247

Kimberley Pager-McClymont, Sarah Eichhorn, and Amélie Doche Table 17.1 French-speaking countries and regions survey participants have lived in Locations

Number of participants

Percentage of participants

France Canada Belgium Switzerland North Africa West Africa Central Africa Caribbean Islands Polynesia or Oceania Other

136 93 11 51 11 2 2 3 2 8

42.6% 29.2% 3.5% 16% 3.5% 0.6% 0.6% 0.9% 0.6% 2.5%

Table 17.2 Survey participants’ level of education. Level of Education

Number of Participants

Percentage of participants (250=100%)

High School Undergraduate level Postgraduate Level Other

55 83 103 9

22% 33.2% 41.2% 3.6%

here are reproduced with original grammar, spelling, punctuation, and emphasis. All translations are our own and have tried to maintain the author’s original sense. (15) Quand je parle avec mes amis, ma famille, mes camarades de classe, et si quelqu’un me dit que je peux le tutoyer [When I speak with my friends, family, classmates, and if someone tells me I can use ‘tu’ with them] (16) En présence de mes proches: amis et famille [In the presence of those closest to me: friends and family] (17) Quasiment tous les temps: proches, amis, famille, collègues, clients… du moment qu’on me tutoie je fais quasi exclusivement pareil [Nearly all the time: relatives, friends, family, colleagues, clients…from the moment they use ‘tu’ with me, I do almost exclusively the same] Some participants also stated that depending on their own and others’ hierarchical status, the use of T would not be appropriate: (18) avec des personnes qui me sont proches, où il n'y a pas de différence ‘hiérarchique’ ou avec qui personnes qui m’ont spécifié pouvoir utiliser le tu [with people who are close to me, where there’s no ‘hierarchical’ difference, or with people who have specified that I can use ‘tu’] (19) Quand je m’adresse à quelqu’un je connais sauf supérieur hierarchique [When I speak to someone I know, unless they are hierarchically superior] (20) quand je connais la personne personnellement et que je me sens au ‘même niveau’ qu’elle ou supérieure (ex: un enfant) [when I know them personally and feel ‘on the same level’ or superior to them (e.g., a child)]

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Furthermore, 125 participants (50%) discussed age as a factor to consider: 51 participants (20.4%) referred to children, and others mentioned specific age groups. (21) A des proches (amis, famille). A des plus jeunes que moi (moins de 20 ans, 5 ans de marge d’erreur) dans un contexte non-professionnel [To those closest to me (friends, family). To those younger than me (under 20, with a margin of error of 5 years) in a non-professional context] (22) J’utilise ‘tu’ pour les proches : les membres de la famille, même éloigné, et les amis. Je l’utilise aussi pour les enfants et les adolescents jusque vers 14-15 ans, y compris inconnue [I use ‘tu’ for those closest to me: family members, even distant ones, and friends. I also use it for children and adolescents up to about 14-15 years old, even if I don’t know them] (23) J’utilise le ‘tu’ lorsque je parle aux personnes que je côtoie régulièrement ou lorsque je parle à des personnes dans ma tranche d’âge (36-50) ou plus jeunes que moi (36 ans et moins) [I use ‘tu’ when I speak to people I rub shoulders with regularly, or when I speak to people in my age group (36-50), or younger than me (36 and younger)]. Finally, the idea of agreement or permission to use T was also discussed by participants: (24) Avec les personnes de mon âge dans un contexte familier; lorsqu’une personne plus âgée m’a précisé que je pouvais la tutoyer [With people my age in a familiar context; when someone older than me specifies that I can use ‘tu’ with them] (25) Lorsque je parle à un proche, lorsqu’un inconnu me permet/m’en donne la permission [When I speak to someone close to me, when a stranger permits/gives me permission] (26) Quand je connais la personne et/ou que j’ai reçu la permission de la tutoyer [When I know the person and/or have received permission to use ‘tu’ with them] Participants were then asked what they thought the difference was in usage between T and V and where they might use V. Overall, the notion of hierarchy and superiority of individuals was mentioned by 94 participants (37.6%). The idea of distance with other individuals, particularly in a professional environment, was discussed by 121 participants (48.4%). (27) Avec les personnes, que je ne connais pas en general, supérieur hiérarchique [With people, who I generally don’t know, hierarchically superior] (28) Dans le cadre professionel et des personnes plus agees que moi [In a professional setting and with people older than me] (29) Inconnus, relations professionelles hors de mon entreprise [Strangers, professional relations outside of my company] Similarly, the idea of distance with unknown individuals was mentioned by 176 participants (70.4%). Moreover, 94 participants (37.6%) explained that the use of V is a marker of respect, particularly considering older individuals, which was mentioned by 127 participants (50.8%), for instance: (30) Si je m’adresse à plusieurs personnes, ou à une personne que je ne connais pas dont l'âge est visiblement supérieur à 20 ans environs [If I am speaking to multiple people, or to a person I don’t know but who is clearly 20 or more years older than me] (31) Le vous est pour une personne que l’on respcte ou pour un ensemble de personnes en societé [‘Vous’ is for someone you respect or for a group of people in society] These themes of age, hierarchy, and proximity are further discussed in the next section. To gather some quantitative data on participants’ self-reported of T/V use, they were given a matrix table fea249

Kimberley Pager-McClymont, Sarah Eichhorn, and Amélie Doche Table 17.3 Survey participants’ answers to stimuli in matrix table with a 4-point Likert Scale Stimuli

Strongly disagree

Somewhat disagree

Somewhat agree

Strongly agree

I only use ‘tu’ with people I know well I use ‘tu’ with colleagues at the same level as me I use ‘tu’ with my manager or director I use ‘tu’ with people I don’t know but seem to be my age I use ‘tu’ with people I don’t know but seem to be older than me I expect strangers to use ‘vous’ when speaking to me I use ‘vous’ with my distant family members (such as in-laws) I use ‘vous’ with older friends and family members If I were to comment on a post written by somebody I do not know on social media (Facebook, Instagram ect.), I would use ‘tu’

10.4% (n=26)

27.7% (n=69)

32.9% (n=82)

28.9% (n=72)

0.8% (n=2)

7.6% (n=19)

26.1 (n=65)

65.5% (n=163)

49.8% (n=124) 11.2% (n=28)

26.9% (n=67) 20.1% (n=50)

12.5% (n=31) 39% (n=97)

10.8% (n=27) 29.7% (n=74)

61% (n=152)

24.5% (n=61)

7.2% (n=18)

7.2% (n=18)

15.7% (n=39)

24.1% (n=60)

36.1% (n=90)

24.1% (n=60)

40.6% (n=101)

19.7% (n=49)

24.5% (n=61)

15.3% (n=38)

83.5% (n=208)

8% (n=20)

4.4% (n=11)

4% (n=10)

30.5% (n=76)

31.3% (n=78)

23.3% (n=58)

14.9% (n=37)

turing nine statements. Participants had to choose to what extent they agreed with a 4-point Likert Scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’ (Table 17.3). The scale did not include a neutral position, thus forcing them to choose. The results here suggest that in cases of social proximity – such as with colleagues at the same level, people in the same age group, and family and friends (even older ones) – participants are more likely to use ‘tu’. On the other hand, in cases of more distant or formal relationships – such as a manager, strangers who are clearly older, and even with strangers on social media – participants are more likely to err on the side of politeness and reservedness, using ‘vous’. These findings align with previous research which has suggested that age and social proximity (e.g., Norrby and Warren 2012, Schüpbach et al. 2007) are strong determinants of second-person pronoun choice.

3.2  T/V in real-life scenarios To test participants’ responses to uses of T/V in different circumstances they were presented with three scenarios. Scenario 1 featured a screenshot of a video from the French news channel BFMTV (one of the most well-known television news channels in France, established in 2005), shared on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. BFMTV has more recently expanded its reach through social media, exploring different engagement methods, such as short videos like the one discussed here. It reads ‘Ton téléphone risque-t-il d’être privé de connexion internet à partir du jeudi 30 septembre?’ [Is your phone at risk of losing Internet connection from Thursday 30 September?]. Participants were asked to comment on the use of T in this context by first choosing between the two options ‘I find the usage of tu odd in this context’ (117 participants =47%) and ‘I find the usage of tu normal in this context’ (132 participants =53%). Participants were then provided with an optional textbox to explain their answer and it was clear that those who chose to respond viewed the use of T negatively in this situation as 64 explicitly mentioned their negative view of T, as exemplified below: 250

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(32) Fausse familiarité. tentative dérisoire de faire ‘jeune’ [False familiarity. ridiculous attempt to seem ‘young’] (33) Il ne sait pas à qui il s’adresse, cela pourrait être pris pour une familiarité mal placée [He doesn’t know who he’s addressing, this could be taken as a misplaced familiarity] Alternatively, others viewed it as normal considering the channel of communication used: (34) Ce me semble ‘normal’ désormais de tenter une approche journalistique ‘copain-copain’ qui utilise le tu pour se rapprocher du public (plus jeune) visé. Peut-être tente-t-on d’imiter le contenu plus familier des réseaux sociaux. [It seems ‘normal’ to me now to attempt a ‘buddybuddy’ journalistic approach that uses ‘tu’ to bring together the (younger) target audience. Maybe he’s trying to imitate the more familiar content on social media.] Scenario 2 featured the following situation: ‘you have recently joined a book club with 10 people that meets weekly in a local café/bar. One other member is an acquaintance around your age who invited you to the club. You do not know the other members yet, but half of them seem to be around your age, and the other half are 10+ years older than you’. Two multiple choice questions followed, firstly asking participants which pronoun they would use with other members (Table 17.4). The second question asked if participants thought that in this context other members of the group would use T or V when speaking to them. Our results found that participants were conservative in their choice of pronoun and based it on social cues, as 42% (n=105) said they would wait to hear how other members speak to one another before deciding. Interestingly, on the other hand, participants were much more relaxed about how others addressed them, as the vast majority (90%; n=224) reported that they would expect others to use T with them. Scenario 3 detailed the following situation: ‘Your 23-year-old cousin, Julien, introduces you to his 41-year-old fiancée, Céline. You and your cousin are very close and see each other regularly’. Again, two questions were asked: first, participants had to decide if they would use T when addressing Céline (204 participants = 81.6%) or V (46 participants = 18.4%). Second, participants were asked which pronoun they would expect Céline to use with them, and 90.4% (226 participants) chose T whereas 9.6% (24 participants) chose V. This suggests that proximity and familial connection may be the most influential factors in this scenario, even more so than age, considering that the 41-year-old ‘Céline’ was older than most respondents. Overall, findings from our three scenarios indicate that the use of T or V is highly dependent on social contexts and cues from other speakers, as well as speakers’ perception of age for themselves as well as other speakers. The final question asked participants if they had any other comments on Table 17.4 Survey participants’ response to scenario 2 Statements

Number of participants

Percentage of participants (250=100%)

I would use ‘tu’ with each member I would use ‘vous’ with each member I would use ‘tu’ with the members around my age, and ‘vous’ with those who are older than me I would wait until I hear the other members speak to each other, and use ‘tu’ if they use ‘tu’ I would wait until I hear the other members speak to each other, and use ‘vous’ if they use ‘vous’

63 27 55

25.2% 10.8% 22%

95

38%

10

4%

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the study. Although most participants answered ‘non’ or did not respond, those who did noted that context was key in their usage of the pronouns, which aligns with our hypotheses and with findings of previous studies. For example: (35) Mes réponses changeraient certainement si je m’imaginais en France plutôt qu’au Canada... [My answers would certainly change if I imagined myself in France rather than in Canada…] (36) Avec les inconnus, le vouvoiement ou tutoiement dépend du contexte : je vouvoierais en contexte professionnel ou dans un magasin, mais pas avec des amis d’amis. L’âge compte aussi moins que le formalisme de la relation dans mon cas [With strangers, using ‘vous’ or ‘tu’ depends on the context: I would use ‘vous’ in a professional context or in a store, but not with friends of friends. Age also counts less than the formalness of the relationship, in my case] Additionally, some participants note the complexity of choosing the appropriate pronouns in varied situations, with some going as far as stating it can be a source of anxiety: (37) le tutoiement/vouvoiement est un code social [...] Pendant 10 ans, ne sachant pas si je devais tutoyer ou vouvoyer mon professeur de musique, je n’ai parlé qu’en périphrases en évitant soigneusement tous les pronoms pour ne pas faire d’impair [T/V usage is a social code [...] For ten years, not knowing whether I should use ‘tu’ or ‘vous’ with my music teacher, I only spoke in circumlocutions to carefully avoid all pronouns and not make a mistake] This shows that T/V choice is perceived as flexible by speakers depending on the situation, and it is thus potentially a matter discussed amongst speakers, or at least considered at length in individuals’ inner dialogues.

3.3  Key findings: Age, proximity, location The survey responses lead to three key findings in relation to individuals’ motivations to choose T or V: the perceived age of the addressee (and how close in age they are with the speaker); feelings of proximity or distance; and the geographical and cultural background of French speakers. This is pragmatically significant as it suggests that speakers’ choice of pronoun is based on their conceptualisation of age and their perception of others and themselves. This means that much information can be inferred from their choice of pronoun. This is linked to the idea of respect: participants disclosed that when they want to show respect (out of affection or obligation), they would use V, as T is more familiar. In situations of doubt, however, participants also stated that they are likely to discuss the matter with their interlocutor and agree on a pronoun going forward in a conversation by asking, for example, ‘on se tutoie?’ (‘are we on familiar terms?’), showing how central to conversational norms and culture French pronouns are. Similarly to age, the perceived interpersonal relationship between speaker and addressee – understood as a spectrum with intimacy at one end and distance at the other – plays a significant role in T/V decision, according to 70.04% of the respondents. While T was strongly associated with ‘proximity’ and V was associated with ‘distance’, our survey responses show that the semantic implications of pronominal decisions are more complex than one might first expect. In our dataset, V is associated with respect, hierarchy, and formality, while T is associated with friendliness, equality, and forced intimacy. In face-to-face communication, the relation between speakers and addressee can be negotiated throughout the interaction, but in online communication (such as with scenario 1), impressions of (forced) proximity and distance depend upon the speaker’s ‘mental conceptualisation of the people with whom [they] are communicating’ (Litt 2012: 331) and on the kind of relationship that they intend to establish. 252

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Indeed, 47% of participants found the journalist’s usage of T in scenario 1 odd while 53% of our participants would describe this usage as normal. However, respondents across these two groups concurred that the use of T suggested that the journalist (and the social media post more broadly) was targeting one specific audience: young people. This entails two related consequences. First, the respondents who identify with the target audience may embrace the use of T, which they perceive as a marker of inclusion enabling intimacy with the journalist. For example: (38) Cette pub vise surtout les jeunes et donc le journaliste pour se rapprocher des jeunes utilise ‘tu’. C’est une technique d’approche assez efficace car on se dit ‘il à l’air cool lui je vais l’écouter’. Mais à l’inverse en utilisant ‘vous’ il aurait été aperçu comme un vrai professionnel. [This advert especially targets young people, so the journalist uses ‘tu’ to get closer to them. It’s a rather efficient technique because we think ‘this guy looks cool, I’ll listen to him’. But, on the contrary, by using ‘vous’, he would have appeared like a real professional] Using T creates proximity with the target audience, but, as example (24) suggests, proximity may happen at the expense of professionalism or ‘formality’ (which has been identified as a key characteristic of V). This finding can be linked to Lambrou’s (2017: 137–143) insights about the ‘dialogic author’ who gets closer to their intended audience by addressing them directly (e.g., through pronouns such as ‘we’ or ‘you’) as opposed to the ‘expert’ who uses impersonal language that places them as more distant, but also as more knowledgeable. Secondly, the participants who do not feel targeted by T found it infantilising. In such a case, T generates an impression of ‘forced proximity’. (39) On vouvoie les clients […] sauf relation établie et tutoiement consenti. Je suis choquée par l’approche BFMTV et la prends pour une infantilisation. [We use ‘vous’ with customers […] except if there is an established relation and if both parties agree to address each other using ‘tu’. I am shocked by the approach adopted by BFMTV which I perceive as an infantilisation] For these participants, the journalist’s attempt at proximity creates greater distance between speaker and audience – as a result, the latter will likely decide not to engage with the promoted content (this would involve scrolling down to other content). Since communication is not simultaneous, T could not be agreed on or negotiated throughout the interaction. Thus, scenario 1 demonstrates that audience reception of and interaction with social media posts may be a fruitful avenue for future research on T/V. Indeed (40) and (41) suggest that some participants had different expectations for different media: (40) le fait[e] qu’il s’agisse d’un tiktok le tutoiement est toléré, sur BFM à la TV je ne pense pas que le tutoiement aurait été employé car moins de proximité… [because it’s a tiktok video, using ‘tu’ is tolerated, but I don’t think that ‘tu’ would have been used by BFM on TV because less proximity…] (41) ‘Tu’ est typiquement utilisé sur les RS et notamment par les médias qui y ont émergé (buzzfeed, brut…) En revanche BFMTV est d’abord un média traditionnel et cela rend l’usage déplacé. [‘Tu’ is typically used on SM and especially by emergent media (buzzfeed, brut…) However, BFMTV is first and foremost a traditional media, which makes the use of ‘tu’ inappropriate] The latter example notes that watching television does not enable the spatial and affective proximity afforded by social media. The spatial, and perhaps conceptual, distance between viewers and screens will be greater when watching television. Moreover, television viewers cannot instantly interact with the content presented through ‘liking’, ‘sharing’, and public comments. The distinction between television and digital platforms – as passive and active mediums, respectively – results in differing 253

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interpersonal relationships between speaker and addressee. Thus, some participants believe that T can be used on social media but is inappropriate on traditional media. Survey responses suggest that distance, formality, and professionalism are expected from leading conventional channels. Both examples above evidence that T is widely accepted on social media, particularly due to its dialogical aspect, which can be justified with the following explanation: (42) Pour moi, le ‘tu’ indique que la personne veut s’adresser à chaque spectateur de manière individuelle […] ; un effet de dialogue est recherché. [To me, using ‘tu’ shows that the individual aims to address each viewer personally […]; an effect of dialogue is sought after.] There is, furthermore, an interaction between age and media type. In France (and at the time of writing), the majority of TikTok users are aged between 13 to 24 (Statista July 2021, Social Films 2022), and most Instagram users are aged between 25 and 34 years old (Statista December 2021). Taking the comments about target audience above, we posit that the user demographics of BFMTV, TikTok, and Instagram would expect different pronominal strategies to appear in media targeted specifically at them: young TikTok and Instagram users feel proximity with the journalist who treats them as friends or ‘equals’ through T while slightly older BFMTV viewers feel that the use of T forces proximity and somehow annihilates respect. Despite being cited as independent factors by participants, age, and impressions of proximity and/or distance are highly entangled. The final takeaway point from our analysis concerns the geographical distribution of our participants: 136 participants (42.6%) have lived in France, 93 (29.2%) have lived in Canada, 51 (16%) have lived in Switzerland, 11 (3.5%) have lived in Belgium or North Africa each, while small percentages have lived in other parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and Polynesia or Oceania. Although the questionnaire structure did not allow us to discern how long each participant lived in each location – and was also select-all-that-apply for those who had lived in multiple countries – several comments noted country- or region-specific cultural and linguistic differences that impacted their T/V choice in different situations. The French spoken in Canada is the subject of much research and is often presented in comparison to the French of France (e.g., in discussions of linguistic purism and attitudes; see Walsh 2016). Since nearly one-third of our participants indicated that they had lived in Canada at some point, it came as no surprise that Canadian French was the variety most often discussed in responses. These comments reflected a general tendency to use T in situations where V might be expected in France. (43) On utilise beaucoup plus le pronom ‘vous’ en France et en Belgique qu’au Canada. [...] au Canada, je tutoie ma directrice au travail et je vois que les étudiant.e.s tutoient souvent les professeur.e.s, alors qu’en France je n’ai pas encore vu d’étudiant.e qui tutoie un.e professeur.e. [‘Vous’ is used far more in France and Belgium than in Canada. [...] in Canada, I use ‘tu’ with my boss and I often see students using ‘tu’ with their teachers, whereas in France I have yet to see students using ‘tu’ with a teacher.] (44) …ma région natale (Nouveau-Brunswick, Canada) n’utilisait le ‘vous’ que dans les situations très formelles et/ou avec les personnes âgées. […my native region (New Brunswick, Canada) only used ‘vous’ in very formal situations and/or with older people.] These comments reflect an awareness of linguistic differences between French-speaking Canada and France (and Belgium in (43)), suggesting that cultural norms and societal perceptions of formality may differ across these contexts. Although some examples did not compare Canada to France outright, the fact that each participant felt it necessary to specify that such practices are unique to Canada suggests the notion that the French spoken in Canada is somehow different from other contexts. 254

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While participants who had lived in Canada noted broad preferences for the use of T in most settings, other responses, particularly those from participants who had lived in Switzerland, noted region-specific differences that indicate that there are still many situations in which V is preferred. (45) En Suisse il est commun qu’un enseignant de lycée vouvoie ses élèves de 16–18 ans. Mais de moins en moins. [In Switzerland it’s common for a high school teacher to use ‘vous’ with their 16–18-year-old students. But less and less so.] (46) J’utilise le vouvoiement avec les personnes âgées de ma famille, notamment mes grands-parents, parce que c’est une marque de respect dans ma culture (je suis suisse et portugais). [I use ‘vous’ with elderly people in my family, notably my grandparents, because it’s a mark of respect in my culture (I’m Swiss and Portuguese).] Example (46) presents an interesting scenario in which a certain degree of formality and respect is maintained even within the family sphere, which was a unique finding across all of our data. Example (45), on the other hand, suggests that V is becoming less common in school situations and presumably being replaced with T. Findings such as these are important to note and indicate that T/V choice is not only context-specific (van Campernolle 2015: 62) across different social scenarios but also location-specific across cultures and regions. Our survey did not explore these differences outright but considering geographical context could be crucial in future studies on language practices and attitudes toward second-person pronouns.

4.  Future directions The study presented here aimed to catalogue French speakers’ opinions and self-reports toward and reported usage of T/V pronouns, and to explore these concepts in light of research that has previously explored T/V usage in French and other languages. Our dataset has demonstrated the influence of (perceived) age on T/V choice: older participants were more likely to use V, and consensually speakers would use V with people older than them. However, further study could be conducted to evaluate how speakers’ senses of self impact how they expect to be addressed by others, as our data highlights that, regardless of age, most participants expected their interlocutors to use T with them in varied scenarios. Furthermore, the idea of proximity also requires future research. We discovered that participants viewed the use of T by a journalist on social media as either an instance of proximity or of forced proximity, depending on their self-identification (or lack thereof) as ‘target’ audience. The evolution and omnipresence of social media platforms in our daily life is likely to impact how speakers use T/V with audiences and thus could be the focus of future studies. Finally, our data showed that speakers from different geographic locations use T/V differently, and that their usage evolves and adapts depending on the cultural context. This finding emerged through our data unexpectedly and could be incorporated into future studies to explore how social norms and expectations differ across French-speaking cultures. While our case study focused specifically on T/V usage in French, the chapter as a whole concerns T/V choice as a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. As such, comparative studies that explore how second-person pronouns are used in other languages – for example tu/vosotros/usted/ ustedes in Spanish – may shed light on broader cultural trends and patterns. A contrastive study that used social media prompts would be of particular interest. Indeed, the changes that social media and globalisation bring to society are reflected in speakers’ habits and language, including pronouns. While the wider acceptance of third-person gender-neutral personal pronouns, for example, has garnered a great deal of media and academic attention in recent years, so future research that analyses the usage and choice of both first-person and second-person pronouns may lead to better understandings of how and why people make these choices. 255

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References Alber, A. (2019). Tutoyer son chef. Entre rapports sociaux et logiques managériales. Sociologie du travail 61(1). doi: 10.4000/sdt.14517. Ardila, J.A. (2003). (Non‐deictic, socio‐expressive) T‐/V‐pronoun distinction in Spanish/English formal locutionary acts. Forum for Modern Language Studies 39(1): 74–86. Bates, E. and Benigni, L. (1975). Rules of address in Italy: A sociological survey. Language in Society 4(3): 271–288. Braun, F. (1988/2012). Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures (Vol. 50). Walter de Gruyter. Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T.A. Seboek (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 252–276. Clyne, M. (1991). Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. doi: 10.1515/9783110888140. Coveney, A. (2010). Vouvoiement and tutoiement: Sociolinguistic reflections. French Language Studies 20: 127–150. Crédeville, A. (2013). À tu et à vous, ou la diachronie des pronoms d’adresse à l’ère du numérique. Annales des Mines - Réalités industrielles: 25–28. doi: 10.3917/rindu.132.0025. Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). Vous ou tu? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope. International Review of Applied Linguistics 42(4): 382–402. dos Santos Lopes, C.R. and Marcotulio, L.L. (2019). On address pronouns in the history of Brazilian Portuguese. It’s Not All About You: New Perspectives on Address Research 1: 139. Formentelli, M. and Hajek, J. (2015). Address in Italian academic interactions: The power of distance and (non)reciprocity. In C. Norrby and C. Wide (eds). Address Practice as Social Action: European Perspectives. London: Palgrave Pivot, pp. 119–140. House, J. and Kádár, D.Z. (2020). T/V pronouns in global communication practices: The case of IKEA catalogues across linguacultures. Journal of Pragmatics 161: 1–15. Kato, M.A. and Tarallo, F. (1986). Anything YOU can do in Brazilian Portuguese. In O. Jaeggli and C.S. Corvalán (eds.). Studies in Romance Linguistics, Amsterdam: Foris. 343–358. Lambrou, M. (2017). Dialogism in journalistic discourse: An analysis of Ian McEwan’s ‘Savagely Awoken’. In J. Mildorf and B. Thomas (eds) Dialogue Across Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 137–154. Lawn, R. (7 September 2012). Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for ‘vous’ in French? BBC News. https://www​.bbc​.co​ .uk​/news​/magazine​-19499771 (accessed 12 February 2022). Levshina, N. (2017). A multivariate study of T/V forms in European languages based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles. Research in Language (RiL) 15(2): 153–172. Litt, E. (2012). Knock, knock. Who’s there? The imagined audience. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3): 330–345. doi: 10.1080/08838151.2012.705195. Lyster, R. (1996). Question forms, conditionals, and second-person pronouns used by adolescent native speakers across two levels of formality in written and spoken French. The Modern Language Journal 80(2): 165–182. Morford, J. (1997). Social indexicality in French pronominal address. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7(1): 3–37. Norrby, C. and Warren, J. (2012). Address practices and social relationships in European languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(4): 225–235. Schüpbach, D., Hajek, J., Warren, J., Clyne, M., Kretzenbacher, H.-L. and Norrby, C. (2007). A cross-linguistic comparison of address pronoun use in four European languages: Intralingual and interlingual dimensions. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society, Brisbane, Australia. Accessible at https://espace​.library​.uq​.edu​.au​/view​/UQ​:13126 (accessed 12 February 2022). Social Films. (2022). TikTok UK Statistics 2021. Social Films. https://www​.socialfilms​.co​.uk​/blog​/tiktok​-uk​-statistics (accessed 12 February 2022). Statista. (December 2021). Distribution of Instagram users in the United Kingdom (UK) as of December 2021, by age group. Available at https://www​.statista​.com​/statistics​/1018012​/instagram​-users​-united​-kingdom/ (accessed 12 February 2022). Statista. (July 2021). Share of TikTok users according to their gender and age in France in 2020. Available at https://www​.statista​.com​/statistics​/1139316​/tiktok​-user​-distribution​-age​-gender​-france/ (accessed 12 February 2022). van Compernolle, R.A. (2015). Native and non-native perceptions of appropriateness in the French secondperson pronoun system. Journal of French Language Studies 25(1): 45–64.

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T/V in the 21st century Villarreal, D. (2014). Connecting production to judgments: T/V address forms and the L2 identities of intermediate Spanish learners. Journal of Pragmatics 66: 1–14. Walsh, O. (2016). Linguistic Purism: Language Attitudes in France and Quebec. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wang, Y. (2022). Politeness and pragmatic transfer in L2 pronominal address usage: Variation of T/V pronouns in Spanish by Chinese learners. Spanish in Context 19(1): 25–47.

Further reading Abbou, J., Arnold, A., Candea, M. and Marignier, N. (2018). Qui a peur de l’écriture inclusive? Entre délire eschatologique et peur d’émasculation entretien. Semen Revue de sémio-linguistique des textes et discours, (44). doi: 10.4000/semen.10800 Engelking, T.L. (2021). Navigating pronouns of address as speakers and teachers of French: Pedagogical implications of a Tu/Vous survey. The French Review 95(2): 59–79. Ismail, I.R., Aladdin, A. and Ramli, S. (2014). Vous ou tu?: Towards understanding the politeness concept in French. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 118: 184–189. Kosnick, K. (2019). The everyday poetics of gender-inclusive French: Strategies for navigating the linguistic landscape. Modern and Contemporary France 27(2): 147–161. Tarte, K.B. (2014). Tu or vous? Forms of address and cultural understanding in Monsieur Lazhar. The French Review 87(3): 51–64. Weyers, J.R. (2011). Tù and Usted in Mexican advertising: The politeness systems of written public discourse. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 30(1): 1–14.

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18 PRONOUNS AS SHIBBOLETHS: PRESCRIPTIVE ATTITUDES TO CASE FORMS Linda Pillière

1. Introduction Although Modern English has retained very little of the inflectional system to be found in Old English, pronouns are one of the few grammatical forms to still mark case, gender, and number. As a result, specific pronoun forms have become linked to precise functions in standard written English, such as subject, object, etc. As the standard pronoun form (I, me, my, etc.) has become the socially valued form, other variants, commonly used in informal contexts or regional varieties, are invariably considered less desirable and even stigmatised. It is the standard form that is upheld in style and usage guides and presented as the ‘correct’ choice, which, in turn, leads to value judgements about the speaker who chooses not to use the prescribed form. However as Wales (1996: xii) points out, pronouns are a ‘“syntactic” phenomenon [that] cannot actually be satisfactorily explained syntactically’ and linguists (e.g., Kuno 1987, Zribi-Hertz 1989, Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1994, Stein 1997, Hernández 2012) have all demonstrated that the choice of pronouns depends frequently on stylistic and pragmatic factors. This chapter will therefore investigate pragmatic and stylistic reasons for preferring a pronoun form that is at odds with the traditional paradigm and the resulting value judgements surrounding the use of specific pronoun choice. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to prescriptive guides and grammars and their role in maintaining the standard written variety. It then examines specific constructions that are frequently highlighted by usage guides or identified by speakers as being ‘incorrect’, before suggesting how recent research calls into question a purely syntactic choice of form. For reasons of space, this chapter examines only personal pronouns.

2.  The role of prescriptivist usage guides and grammars Although usage guides have been identified as belonging to a long tradition dating as far back as Tudor times (Tucker 1961, Algeo 1991), they are generally considered to be a direct offshoot of prescriptive eighteenth-century grammars (Peters 2006: 761). Thus, even if usage guides have specific characteristics that distinguish them from the early grammars and ‘represent a different stage in the standardisation process’ (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2018), they adhere to the basic principle of ‘one form, one function’ that was upheld by eighteenth-century grammarians (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2012: 324). This principle is still found in more recent usage guides (Fowler 1926, Phythian 1979, 258

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-22

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Burchfield 1996), all of which frequently react against choice and alternatives in grammatical patterns, preferring, wherever possible, to advocate one grammatical structure, spelling, or pronunciation over another. Even when these guides may differ in their judgement, they still prefer to avoid variability and to uphold one form. As a result, the codification and prescription of these grammars and usage guides has legitimised: the norms of formal registers of standard English rather than the norms of everyday spoken English … One result is that there is a general belief that there is only one form of correct, i.e. legitimate, English, and a feeling that colloquial and non-standard forms are perverse and deliberate deviations from what is approved by ‘law’ i.e. they are ‘illegitimate’. (Milroy and Milroy 1991: 37) It is therefore not surprising that pronouns, whose forms are extremely varied in spoken English and in dialectal varieties (Wales 1996: 17), feature heavily in such guides. Although the pronoun paradigm in standard English suggests that there is a close correlation between a pronoun’s form and its function in written standard English, spoken English and dialectal varieties have a wide variety of forms for each function, thereby offering alternatives that prescriptive guides and grammars are swift to criticise and exclude. More specifically, prescriptive grammars and usage guides tend to focus on a fixed and limited set of structures with many writers of usage guides choosing to criticise the very same forms that their predecessors criticised before them. Prescriptive rules are thus ‘repeated again and again, gaining a life of their own and solidifying into a body of folk-linguistic knowledge whose truth is taken for granted and no longer challenged even in scholarly publications’ (Mair 2006: 18). Consequently, such guides often focus on the expression between you and I or the use of the first-person singular objective case for the function of subject: John and me went shopping, but ignore other more controversial examples such as John and him went shopping. Moreover, there is rarely any reference to the actual use of the forms under scrutiny, and even less reference to linguistic variation, be it social, regional, or genre-based (Peters 2006: 620). It is no surprise, then, that prescriptive guides and grammars have been accused of being ‘articulators of an anonymous tradition’ (Peters and Young 1997: 137), upholding rules that are ‘not linguistic fact, but classroom folklore, invented by eighteenth-century grammarians out of whole cloth, repeated by editors unwilling to determine whether those rules comport with reality, taught by teachers who teach what textbooks tell them, and ignored by the best writers everywhere’ (Williams 1995: 169–170). The rules that are upheld are therefore not based on observations of usage but personal preference and traditions. Heffer (2014: 223) states that ‘everyone who writes a book about English usage will have his (sic) own rules and presume to inflict them on his (sic) readers’. It is ‘the writer’s value system (which) is foregrounded’ (Peters and Young 1997: 317), resulting in a polarization of ‘values of right and wrong’ (Peters 2006: 761), even though there is often little attempt to justify preferences on grammatical grounds. The introduction to The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style illustrates this characteristic clearly: I do not hesitate to distinguish between right and wrong usage when the difference is clear. My inclination is to question deviant forms, challenge innovations to prove themselves, and resist senseless fads. (Lovinger 2000: viii) Once a specific form has become judged as being correct, it becomes socially valued and all other variants are deemed less desirable. The prescribed form is given further value as it has to be taught: the choice of pronoun form for a specific function may not come naturally for an L1 speaker whose local variety uses a different form. Saying John and I went shopping instead of John and me went shopping does not necessarily come naturally. Prescriptive rules, therefore, become equated with 259

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education and failure to apply the rules is, in turn, equated with lack of education. It matters little whether the original preference is arbitrary or whether linguistic variants have existed for some time; usage rules gain their influence from the underlying belief that the form advocated by the usage or style guide not only has social prestige or linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991), but also that it can be distinguished from the non-standard variant. Prescriptive grammars and guides, therefore, work to maintain that distinction and to reaffirm the standard variety. The choice of pronoun forms is thus a usage problem. Ebner (2017: 7) defines usage problems as ‘social constructs which can perform a divisive function in society through which the language use of parts of this society is deemed incorrect, uneducated and the like’. As Crowley (2003: 116) indicates, ‘Standard English … is now a class dialect’ and a similar point of view is expressed by Ritchie (2013: 9), who argues that standard English is spoken by the wealthier socioeconomic groups, and that ‘the purpose of all the old-school grammar guides and usage manuals isn’t to impart linguistic knowledge but to provide a rulebook for middle- and upper-class membership, and keep out the 85 per cent who don’t use the right passwords’. A divide thus exists between what is considered to be educated English, spoken by a minority but also found in formal written registers, and the everyday use of language outside of a specific institutional setting. Prescriptive usage guides usually justify their preferences on the grounds of correctness, clarity, propriety, and elegance, and debates about maintaining these standards and values quickly transform themselves into debates on morality and behaviour: clarity becomes a synonym for politeness to the reader; good writing is ‘considerate’ (Lederer and Dowis 1995: 8); ‘Standard American usage is linguistic good manners’, according to the Columbia Guide to Standard American English (Wilson 1996: ix), and its absence is equated with being ‘a social problem’ (Williams and Bizup 2014: 6). Unclear prose has long been associated with weasel words and dishonesty (c.f. Orwell 1946) and not applying the rules of standard English is quickly equated with carelessness and sloppiness. However, judgements and stigmatisation can go even further. For Batko, writing in her Foreword to When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People (2004: 17), the way language is used reveals a person’s personal qualities: language can tell people a good deal about your personal qualities—your way of thinking, your alertness, your concern for useful communication with other people—and your concern, your respect, for the English language itself. Taken to its logical extreme, not respecting language standards results in falling standards in society at large, as the often-quoted interview with the Conservative minister Norman Tebbit on the Today programme in 1985 illustrates: If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people can just turn up filthy and nobody takes any notice of them in school – just as well as turning up clean – all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose your standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime. (cited in Marshall 1997: 111) As Swann (1985: 386) points out It is indeed a powerful lesson to those people who claim that Britain is already a just and pluralist society to find how readily ‘not speaking English’ or ‘not speaking English properly’ seems to be taken to indicate that an individual is inadequate and in some way inferior. Prescriptive rules are, therefore, not so much grammatical as they are moral for, as Cameron (1995: 8) argues, ‘the “force” of a linguistic prescription has little to do with persuasion in the sense of rational argument’ and is instead based on appeals to speakers’ inherent sense of right and wrong. 260

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However, in their desire to erect and maintain the standard use, prescriptive grammars and usage guides often fail to distinguish between formal and informal registers, between oral and written styles, and, as Huddleston and Pullum (2005: 4) argue, ‘it isn’t sensible to call a construction grammatically incorrect when people whose status as fully competent speakers of the standard language is unassailable use it nearly all the time’. More importantly, the standard paradigm for pronouns omits any pragmatic or stylistic considerations, as shown in the following four case studies.

3.  Pronouns as a usage problem As Table 18.1 shows, in standard written English, the various pronoun forms are labelled according to their function in the sentence: nominative or subjective, accusative or objective, and genitive or possessive. Assigning a specific label to a pronoun form such as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ and justifying that label in standard written English grammars and usage guides result in a solidifying of the link between form and function. Subjective forms are used for subject functions (I, we, etc.), objective forms (me, us, etc.) are used for complements, and reflexive pronouns (myself, ourselves, etc.) are used for reflexivity. In practice, this division is not at all watertight and the table is deceptively straightforward, as it only presents the pronouns of standard written English and suggests that pronouns are stable and fixed in both form and function. Various linguists (Dennsion 1996, Wales 1996) have demonstrated that the pronunciation, forms, and functions of pronouns vary according to where one lives, and to the register and style being used. Thus, while prescriptive grammars and usage guides argue for the choice of pronoun form on syntactic grounds, the continuing use of variants suggest that other factors also need to be considered. Thus, this chapter seeks to address the following questions: 1. How far do prescriptive guides reflect contemporary usage of pronouns? 2. What other factors, apart from syntactic ones, may explain a difference in form and function? 3. How far do prescriptive guides influence the choice of pronouns? To explore these questions, four common problems of pronoun usage will be examined: the variation in case assignment for the first person singular; the choice of case and form in coordinated pronouns; the choice of pronoun after than and pronoun choice with the -ing gerund-participle.

3.1  

Case study one: Variations in case assignment for the first person singular

Not all pronouns retain the interest of prescriptivists, only those where there is visible variation. As the pronoun you has the same form for both subjective and objective cases (see Table 18.1), it does Table 18.1 Traditional paradigm of pronouns in standard English Person/Number 1st person sing. 1st person pl. 2nd person sing. 2nd person pl. 3rd person sing.

Subjective/ nominative I we you you he, she, it

Objective/ accusative me us you you him, her, it

Possessive/ Genitive my our your your his, her, its

Possessive/ independent mine ours yours yours his, hers, its

3rd person pl.

they

them

their

theirs

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Reflexive myself ourselves yourselves yourselves himself, herself, itself themselves

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not feature in prescriptive grammars and guides. The first person singular, on the other hand, features widely, probably because it occurs frequently in spoken English (see Biber et al. 1999: 334) being the pronoun that speakers use to refer to themselves and also because spoken English is less standardised than written English, thus allowing a wider range of variation or functional variability (Hernández 2011: 59). One frequently stigmatised form is the choice of case for the first-person pronoun after copular or linking be: It is I vs It is me. The prescriptivist belief that the subjective case should be used in such instances because the verb to be cannot take the objective case (Stratton 1949: 146, Phythian 1979: 113) is influenced by early grammarians’ arguments based on an analogy with Latin. However, this is a clear case where some prescriptivists are at odds with actual usage, and where their influence is less noticeable. As Brians (2013: 132) remarks: Those who continue to announce ‘It is I’ have traditional grammatical correctness on their side, but they are vastly outnumbered by those who proudly boast ‘it’s me!’ There’s not much that can be done about this now. Similarly, if a caller asks for Susan and Susan answers ‘This is she,’ her somewhat antiquated correctness is likely to startle the questioner into confusion. For Pullum (quoted by Gibb 2002), using the subjective form ‘sounds ridiculously stuffy’. Other scholars point to the importance of word order: when a pronoun follows a verb it is usually in the objective case. In other words, it is possible to argue that word order is more important than case in present-day English, and so a post-verbal objective form is correct. Those usage guides that allow the use of the objective form tend to underline that it is a question of register. In The Longman Guide to English Usage, Greenbaum and Whitcut (1988: 114) conclude: ‘such sentences with me and other objective pronouns chiefly occur in speech or written dialogue, and they are legitimate in those contexts; but in formal writing use It is I and This is he’. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 9) also consider the difference in usage to be one of register, but what exactly constitutes formal writing or register is less easy to define. In all events, it might be considered desirable by some users to respect ‘formal written usage’. Things are a little more complicated in cleft structures such as It was he who told me, where the use of the subject relative pronoun may influence the subjective case, even if him is also used. Another variant for first person reference is the reflexive pronoun myself. Prescriptive guides are quite clear on what they deem to be the ‘correct’ use of reflexive pronouns such as myself, yourself, himself, herself, etc.: ‘the key to the use of a reflexive pronoun is that they should in fact reflect an antecedent’ (Garner 2003: 644). This statement echoes Chomsky’s (1981: 188) syntactic theory regarding anaphors, whereby, according to principle A, a reflexive pronoun binds with its antecedent or noun phrase (NP) within a local domain (the smallest inflectional phrase containing the antecedent): (1) John said that Michaeli thought a lot of himselfi. Here himself refers to Michael within the embedded inflectional phrase: Michael and himself are coindexed. Personal pronouns, on the other hand, can coindex with NPs that are not within their local domain: (2) Johni said that Michaelii thought a lot of himi. In this instance him refers back to John, not to Michael, meaning that the personal pronoun is free within its binding domain. Other uses of reflexive pronouns that are identified as acceptable are emphatic:

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(3) I did it all by myself When reflexive pronouns do not follow the syntactic rules outlined above, they are identified as ‘untriggered reflexive pronouns’ (Parker, Riley, and Meyer 1990, Paterson 2018), ‘override reflexives’ (Huddleston and Pullum 2002), or ‘independent self-forms’ (Hernández 2011). While prescriptivists accept the use of the objective me after to be in informal registers, albeit sometimes begrudgingly, the use of myself, on the other hand, is highly criticised when used instead of I or me. Its use is identified as ‘poor grammar and style’ by The Times columnist Oliver Kamm (2015: 278), and Heffer, in Strictly English (2011: 108), goes even further: ‘“he gave it to myself” or “I saw yourself” are sheer abominations’. If the use of me can be explained by an analogy with usual word order, the use of myself is a little more baffling. For some (Todd 1989, Filppula 1999, Paterson 2018), these untriggered reflexives are characteristic of specific regional varieties, such as Irish English or American English vernaculars (Heacock 2008). Another common explanation for this use of myself is the indirect influence of prescriptivism. Gorrell and Laird (1953) explain that the use of myself is ‘a mistaken effort to avoid the choice between I and me’. In other words, the prescriptivist insistence on the use of I where a speaker might more naturally use me has led to basic linguistic insecurity among speakers of English and a deliberate avoidance of the objective case. A similar stance is taken by Lass (1987: 152), who argues that ‘people have been taught that me is “bad”, so they avoid it except where they can’t possibly’. Such avoidance leads to the use of myself. In this particular case, the influence of prescriptive usage guides has backfired. However, it is unlikely that linguistic insecurity is the sole reason, for myself as an untriggered reflexive can be found long before prescriptive guides were in common use. Its use dates back to at least the fifteenth century (Paston letters CCCXC p.110): ‘he gave it to myself, by my troth’. Studying the letters and journals of the eighteenth century, Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1994: 229–232) suggests, following Churchward (1955), that the use of myself is a ‘modesty device’ to avoid the more direct use of I or me. Dixon (2017: 42) adopts a similar approach, arguing that ‘in many Englishspeaking societies there is a social convention not to put oneself first’ and this argument can also be used to justify the order of pronouns in coordinated sentences (see below). Parker, Riley, and Meyer (1990) suggest that different pragmatic principles should be considered. They point out that first and second person pronouns are essentially deictic, so their pragmatic use will be different, and the choice of pronoun may be influenced by the aim of the speaker. Following Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) distinction between exophoric and endophoric reference, they posit that the pronoun may emphasise a discourse referent (endophoric reference) and not the discourse participant or, on the contrary, emphasise a participant within the discourse (exophoric reference) and not the discourse referent (Halliday and Hasan 1976). They thus explain that a speaker who uses an exophoric pronoun to refer to himself (sic), as in This is a picture of me is focusing on his (sic) role as a discourse participant – the speaker in the discourse. On the other hand, a speaker who uses an anaphoric pronoun to refer to himself (sic), as in This is a picture of myself, is focusing on his (sic) role as the discourse referent – the topic of the discourse. (Parker et al. 1990: 60) The use of untriggered reflexives for emphatic use to designate the discourse topic is borne out by Hernández’s (2011) findings using the FRED corpus. This use of myself has been dubbed ‘the estate agents’ self by Telegraph columnist Tom Chivers (2012) and stigmatised as a ‘pointless upgrading of “me” to “myself”’’. Commentators (c.f. Rebellato 2012) have been quick to note recent examples of myself instead of me in the BBC game show The Apprentice as in the following two examples from series 12, episode 10:

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(4) Lord Sugar: So next day you’re going to talk to the wine and spirit merchant and who pitched that to them? Contestant: Myself and Frances. (5) Lord Sugar: Who designed the label for this? Contestant: That would be myself. In this game show it is important that contestants promote their own self-image in an attempt to convince the game show host, Lord Sugar, that they should be his next business partner. The pronoun myself is therefore used by a contestant to give themselves the dominant role. Hernández (2015) expands on this use of unbound exophoric forms by examining the use of selfforms when speakers comment on photographs: That’s a picture of myself vs. That’s a picture of me and concludes that the choice of these forms do indeed encode pragmatic meaning even though they are rejected by prescriptivist usage guides and grammars. She points out that ‘sentence-based grammars equate “self-forms” with “reflexives”, wrongly implying bound reflexivity as a general condition for all occurrences’ of -self (Hernández 2015: 49). Another approach to this use of untriggered reflexives that also offers a pragmatic interpretation is the concept of empathy introduced by Kuno (1987: 206) in relation to Japanese. This has been extended to English (Zribi-Hertz 1989) with the idea that empathy varies from an objective representation of events (zero empathy) to an identification with a speaker’s and participant’s viewpoint. The use of a reflexive pronoun in a narrative, for example, would therefore indicate that there is empathy with the character’s viewpoint. Whatever explanation one adopts, it is clearly evident that a number of stylistic and pragmatic factors may be at play in the choice of the first person pronouns, factors unaccounted for in most usage guides.

3.2  Case study two: Coordinated pronouns Categorising pronoun choice becomes even more difficult – and is even more stigmatised – when the pronoun is coordinated with another noun phrase or pronoun, allowing even greater possible variation: (6) a. Me and Jill both drink coffee b. Jill and me both drink coffee c. Jill and I both drink coffee d. Jill and him both drink coffee e. He bought a coffee for Jill and I f. Between you and I, I don’t think it’s a good idea Most usage guides focus on instances where the objective case is used in subject position, as in (6a) and (6b), and instances where the subjective case is used in object position, as in (6e) and (6f). Although both forms are criticised, the degree of criticism is not identical. An early usage guide (Gwynne 1852: 16–17) maintains that there ‘exists a marked distinction between the errors of the ill-bred and those of the well-bred man’. To use the objective instead of the nominative is a vulgar error; to use the nominative instead of the objective is a genteel error. No person of decent education would think of saying ‘Him and me are going to the play.’ Yet how often do we hear even well-educated people say ‘They were coming to see my brother and I;’ ‘The claret will be packed in two baskets for Mr. Smith and I;’ ‘Let you and I try to move it;’ ‘Let him and I go up and speak to them.’ ‘Between you

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and I,’ etc., etc. All faults as heinous as that of the vulgarian who says ‘Him and me are going to the play,’—and with less excuse. This milder chastisement of the use of I, where me is the expected form, is perhaps due to the fact that the ‘idea has grown up that it’s socially superior to use I rather than the ‘proletarian’ me. If words are an army, then I is officer class while me belongs to the ranks’ (Palmer 1993: 87), an idea echoed by Sobin (1997: 318), who identifies the use of the subjective case, I, as a prestige construction. The use of the subjective case after a preposition has even been labelled ‘the nob’s phrase’ (Howard 1993: 209), and its use identified with the Royal Family. Howard (1993: 209) quotes Queen Elizabeth II as saying on her return from a Commonwealth tour: ‘This is a wonderful moment for my husband and I’. Other usage guides are more critical of the use of between you and I. The 1988 edition of MerriamWebster’s Dictionary of English Usage refers again to what its use might reveal of a person’s ‘character, background or education’: You are probably safe in retaining between you and I in your casual speech, if it exists there naturally, and you would be true to life in placing it in the mouths of fictional characters. But you had better avoid it in essays and other works of a discursive nature. If you use it, someone is sure to notice and disparage your character, background, or education. What is more, it seems to have no place in edited prose (1988: 183). John Simon (1980: 18) goes as far as to say that between you and I is ‘a grammatical error of “unsurpassable grossness”’ Writing in Esquire he asks: What is this between you and I – to take its most frequently heard form – and where does it come from? It is the flouting of a very simple, basic rule; not so long ago, any halfway selfrespecting high-school student would sooner have bitten off and swallowed the tip of his (sic) pencil than have committed that error. Prescriptive style guides and grammars focus on the expression between you and I to the detriment of other prepositional phrases, which illustrates how such books repeat established rules and traditions that do little to help the reader in other cases of a similar nature. For readers uncertain of the pronoun case after between, Wyrick (2017: 558) suggests they recall ‘there is no “I” in “between” only ‘e’s’ as in “me”’. This rule of thumb may be useful for between but will hardly help with other prepositions such as from and to. Moreover, as Hernández’s research (2012: 127) shows, between is not necessarily the most common preposition used with me, underlining again how usage guides focus on a specific construction without really reflecting or considering actual usage. There are several possible reasons why the use of I persists when grammatical rules require the objective case me. The first is hypercorrection, an excessive, socially motivated desire to be correct. Using the example Mrs Forster and me are such good friends, Gowers (1954: 147) suggests that [o]ne might suppose that this mistake was corrected by teachers of English in our schools with such ferocity that their pupils are left with the conviction that such combinations as you and me are in all circumstances ungrammatical. This tendency to hypercorrect is neatly illustrated in Richard Osman’s novel The Man Who Died Twice. Elizabeth, a former intelligence officer who at one point is compared to ‘the sort of teacher who terrifies you all year’ (Osman 2020: 9), is at pains to correct a less-educated DCI Chris Hudson: 265

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‘But other than that, there’s nothing me and Donna can do’ Elizabeth looks at him ‘Donna and I, Chris’ (Osman 2021: 46) A little later in the same novel, Chris Hudson, visibly at pains to avoid being corrected again, extends the use of I when speaking to Elizabeth: ‘I don’t understand what you need from Donna and I?’ says Chris. ‘From Donna and me, this time,’ says Elizabeth. (Osman 2021: 347) Hypercorrection is mentioned as a cause or reinforcement of between you and I by several other commentators, among them Sweet (1892), Mencken (1963), and Copperud (1980). Once again, it seems unlikely that the hypercorrection theory tells the whole story as uses of between you and I have been found in early texts such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (‘All debts are cleared between you and I’). Tieken-Boon van Ostade also lists a number of uses of the hypercorrect form in the eighteenth century. If hypercorrection is taken to be a sign of linguistic insecurity, born from a desire to be ‘correct’, then such hypercorrect forms are arguably an offshoot of usage guides, since they are ‘the response to prescriptive pressure – in which the speaker’s attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an ‘incorrect’ result’ (Collins 2022: 279). Another explanation is collocation for the choice of me and the suggestion that such binary pairs function as a compound (Chomsky 1986) so the individual elements in the phrase are not assigned case individually. Parker, Riley, and Meyer (1988: 215) point out that case forms that would not appear in simple NPs can systematically appear in coordinated structures, with varying degrees of acceptability. So while They told Sara and I what had happened is possible, They told I what had happened is more problematic.

3.3  Case study three: Pronoun case after than Another preposition that retains the attention of prescriptivists is the choice of case after than. Linguists and grammarians differ in their labelling of than, with some identifying than as a preposition and therefore requiring the objective case, while others identify than as a conjunction (Fowler and Fowler 1906, Leech and Svartvik 1975) and requiring the subjective case. Prescriptivists also differ in their choice. Heffer (2014: 273) prefers the objective case in a contracted clause, John is richer than me, whereas the Chicago Manual of Style (2010) argues that the elliptical construction should be avoided altogether. Few opt for the bare subjective pronoun, I. Once again, register is considered important. The Oxford Guide to English Usage (Weiner and Delahunty 1983/1994: 222) states that in informal English the objective case should be used but ‘this is unacceptable in formal usage’. The use of the subjective case in an elliptical construction is therefore stilted but its rarer use may be due once again to linguistic insecurity, and the fact that prescriptivists do not all agree on whether than is a preposition or a conjunction only adds to speakers’ uncertainty. Similarly, myself is sometimes found after than, probably to avoid the choice between I and me. This case study again illustrates that the prescriptivism to be found in usage guides and education creates linguistic insecurity and leads to hypercorrection.

3.4  Case study four: Pronoun choice and gerunds Disputed usage arises also over whether the gerund should be preceded by a possessive pronoun or a pronoun in the objective case. Should one say I see no point in me doing this or I see no point in my doing this? Webster (1789: 280) advocated the possessive as ‘the genuine natural idiom’ a view echoed by Fowler (1926: 206). For Fowler, the use of the objective case (me in the example) 266

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and the participle is a fused participle, not a gerund. Later usage guides tend to be more moderate in their approach. Follett ([1966] 1998: 158) states that ‘Whenever the idea that governs the verbal noun (participle) is one that clearly calls for stress on the person, the fused participle may be used; whenever the stress falls equally well or better, on the action expressed by the participle, the possessive case must be used’. For Garner (April 2, 2013) it is a difference of register: in ‘educated English — or edited English — there is a preference for possessives before gerunds where they are idiomatically possible’. Once again, it is suggested that one form is more prestigious, indicative of education. Although Peters (2006: 627), working on five corpora, demonstrates that use of the objective pronoun has gained considerable ground and argues that the effect of ‘the prescriptions of Fowler and Strunk and White’ has faded, she does quote Murray-Smith (1989: 403) as saying that ‘people of a literary bent may feel uneasy if the possessive is not used’. For Peters, the preference for the objective case, especially in Australian usage, is indicative of a general trend towards a more informal colloquial register, a view also upheld by Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1192). Peters suggests that the choice of objective or possessive personal pronoun depends on stylistic and sociolinguistic stratification. The above case studies have revealed several social, stylistic, and pragmatic factors that can trigger the choice of pronoun. First, there is the avoidance of me and the belief that I is socially more prestigious, which is due to prescriptive grammar stigmatising expressions such as It is me or Me and John and spreading ‘linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries’ (McWhorter 1998: 62), often resulting in hypercorrection in expressions such as between you and I. Other reasons for choices, specifically in the order of coordinated pronouns may be politeness, collocation, or empathy. There are also grounds for interpreting the choice of pronoun as being influenced by viewpoint or discourse topic. To these can be added dialectal variation, which has been beyond the scope of this chapter.

4.  The impact of usage guides on the use of pronouns The role of prescriptive guides and grammars might seem the last cry of a dying breed, a final attempt to put a finger in a dyke and many linguists would probably share Finegan’s opinion (2012: 978) when he states that prescriptivism has probably not had much lasting effect on the English language. Dennison (1999: 109), for example, argues that the use of the objective case (as in (6b) Jill and me both drink coffee or as in (6d) Jill and him both drink coffee) is ‘arguably widespread enough among educated speakers in [present-day English] to be called Standard’ and represent the unmarked case. However, leaving specific forms aside, to dismiss the advice of prescriptivist usage guides and grammars as simply old-fashioned traditionalists would be to underestimate their impact on the general public and on the printed word. The fact that prescriptive rules can lead to hypercorrection has already been examined. Two other areas where usage guides’ comments on pronouns have had an effect are the way they fuel the complaint tradition, and the way in which they influence the printed word through copyeditors and inhouse style guides. Milroy and Milroy (1991: 33) refer to the complaint tradition as an important component in language ideology. They identify three types to be found in this tradition, but it is principally the first type that concerns us here. Type 1 refers to writers who believe 1 That there is one, and only one, correct way of speaking and/or writing the English language. 2 That deviations from this norm are illiteracies, or barbarisms, and that non- standard forms are irregular and perversely deviant. 3 That people ought to use the standard language and that it is quite right to discriminate against non-standard users, as such usage is a sign of stupidity, ignorance, perversity, moral degeneracy, etc. (Milroy and Milroy 1991: 33) 267

Linda Pillière Table 18.2 General acceptability rating of pronoun usage in Mittins et al.’s 1970 study Usage item

General acceptability rating

The members of the team laughed at each other He is older than me They invited my friends and myself Told Charles and I It was us who had been singing Between you and I she drinks heavily

59% 42% 33% 27% 25% 23%

These writers’ opinions are frequently found in letters to the editor, on social media, and, of course, in books. While not everyone may still read Fowler, the beliefs of Type 1 are widespread in the media. David Crystal’s (1981) study of a hundred or so letters complaining about the decline of the English language revealed that the number one spot was held by ‘whether to use I or me in such phrases as you and I or you and me’. The influence of such opinions is strengthened by the fact that such letters may be written by influential people, thus reinforcing the idea that they are the people who ‘know’ how language should be used. Newspaper columnists also reinforce negative views on some pronoun use (c.f. Chivers 2012 on myself). In the light of the strength of the complaint tradition, recent research has turned to examine lay people’s attitudes more closely. In the late sixties, Mittins et al. carried out a survey using 457 respondents (mainly educationalists) to ascertain the acceptability of 55 usage items. All these items were ‘currently subject to variation in practice and dispute in theory’ (Mittins et al. 1970: 4). Respondents were to judge the acceptability of each of the 55 sentences in informal speech, informal writing, formal speech, and formal writing. Not surprisingly, pronouns featured quite heavily in the survey. As Table 18.2 shows, the sentences featuring pronoun use scored different rates of acceptability, with ‘between you and I’ judged as the least acceptable (23%). The context for this particular sentence was limited to informal speech and writing.​ Following on from Mittins et al. (1970), Ebner (2017) conducted an online attitudes survey among speakers from London, Oxford, and Cambridge. She updated the sentences from the Mittins survey and notably substituted between you and I, he will not be considered for the job for Mittins’ between you and I, he drinks heavily, with the aim of proposing a less offensive sentence that was ‘more suitable for all contexts’ (Ebner 2017: 124). Despite extending the contexts in which the structure is used to include more formal contexts (between you and I is usually associated with informal, spoken English), Ebner (2017: 271) found an increase in the average acceptability rate of between you and I (27.1% compared to Mittins’ study) and concluded that: The highest acceptability rating of 50 per cent was found in the informal speaking context, while the context with the lowest acceptability rate of 15.2 per cent was the formal writing context. With an average acceptability rate of 27.1 per cent between you and I as a usage problem ranks relatively low in comparison to other usage problems discussed above, such as the double negative. The fact that younger people found the structure more acceptable suggests that attitudes may be changing. The other area where prescriptivist guides have influenced the use of pronouns is more invisible but, nonetheless, just as influential and that is in the work of copyeditors. As Cameron (1995: 39) states:

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The fact that published printed text is more nearly uniform than any other kind of language underpins the ‘ideology of standardization’ by persuading English speakers, against all evidence to the contrary, that uniformity is the normal condition whereas variation is deviant; and that any residual variation in standard English must therefore be the contingent and deplorable result of some users’ carelessness, idleness or incompetence. It is copyeditors and proofreaders who maintain the illusion of uniformity by applying the rules of prescriptive grammars and usage guides to manuscripts before publication. Such changes only become evident when different editions are compared, or when an author’s manuscript is compared with the copyedited text. Ironically, Butterfield in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English (2015) uses a quotation from Fay Weldon’s short story Mischief (1988 [2015]) to illustrate how writers use myself: ‘It wasn’t that Peter and myself were being singled out’, but in the 2015 digital edition of the short story (available on Google Books) this has been ‘corrected’ to ‘Peter and I’. Pillière (2020) discusses the results of a survey sent to copyeditors on both sides of the Atlantic, with examples of changes made to British novels for the US reader. The survey sought to discover whether all copyeditors agreed with the changes and how far their decisions might have been influenced by prescriptive style and usage guides. Among the changes made was one concerning the choice of pronoun after than: (7) a. ‘I have a sister’, she said. ‘She’s younger than me’. b. ‘I have a sister’, she said. ‘She’s younger than I am’. Sentence (a) was from Schindler’s Ark (Keneally 1982); sentence (b) was from the American English edition Schindler’s List (Keneally 2000). Out of the 181 respondents who answered the question, 52% of British copyeditors preferred sentence (a) and 40% found both (a) and (b) acceptable. However, the US copyeditors who participated in the survey were more divided, with 52% having no preference and slightly more preferring sentence (b) (25%) compared to sentence (a) (22%). Most of those who preferred sentence (a) identified it as more natural, colloquial, or more fitting for the dialogue, or for the register (fifteen respondents). Respondents were therefore sensitive to the difference of pronoun use in spoken and written speech. Those who preferred sentence (b) did so on the grounds that it was more grammatically correct. Overall, the proscriptive terms ‘wrong’, ‘incorrect’, and ‘correct’ occurred twenty-five times in the answers, as did the terms ‘grammar/grammatically/grammatical’. Certain answers used a similar judgemental labelling to that of prescriptivist guides: terms such as ‘unequivocally incorrect’, ‘wrong’, and ‘poor grammar’ were used and the pressure of linguistic norms was evident in one answer: I would say b. As a child, I would have said ‘She's younger than I,’ without adding ‘am’, because that's how we talked in my family. But when I went to school I found that talking like that makes people want to punch you. If I added ‘am’, then it was still correct but didn't make other people crabby. (US 11) Others underlined that the forms were socially marked: I don't know the social class or level of education of the speaker, so it isn't for me to say which is more naturalistic. (US 104) To return to the questions originally asked at the outset, this chapter has demonstrated that prescriptive usage guides tend to be slow to reflect contemporary usage of pronouns be that regional, social, or spoken. Usage guides are concerned with upholding the norms of standard written English, which 269

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are slower to change than spoken varieties. However, their influence is particularly important in two domains: the fuelling of the complaint tradition, with its accompanying linguistic insecurity, often leading to hypercorrection, and in the ‘correction’ of written texts by copyeditors who apply the rules to be found in style and usage guides. Further, the case studies have shown that syntactic factors do not account for all the different forms and functions of pronouns. Other factors that need to be considered are pragmatic factors, as well as social and regional factors and the choice of register.

5.  Future directions In recent years, corpus-based studies have presented new possibilities for interrogating pronoun usage and the relationship between prescriptivism and pronoun variability. Corpora such as the Brown/Frown corpora for American English and the LOB/FLOB corpora for British English, along with ACE (Australian English) and WWC (New Zealand English), mean that it is possible to carry out synchronic contrast to gain a clearer idea of how contemporary English usage corresponds to prescriptivist guidelines. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999) uses the Longman Spoken and Written Corpus (LSWE) to study the frequency of grammatical forms in context and is thus able to note register and genre. Siemund (2010), Hernández (2012), Lederer (2013), and Paterson (2018) have also used corpora to shed insight on the use of non-standard pronouns. Corpora can enable the researcher to discover patterns and frequencies that isolated texts cannot. They also offer the possibility of examining collocation patterns, helping to ascertain whether certain pronouns occur in specific contexts, along with the possibility of comparing prescriptivists’ claims using examples out of context with actual language use. More work needs to be carried out in examining the specific contexts in which pronoun forms appear. It is also important to update previous research. Ebner’s (2017) update on Mittins et al. (1970) gives useful insights into changing perceptions of what is acceptable or not. Crystal’s (1981) study of a letter complaining about the decline of the English language would also be worth updating. A comparative study of letters from the 1980s and the twenty-first century, similar to Ebner’s comparison of a contemporary survey with that of Mittins, could provide interesting findings. Other areas that could usefully be explored further include the relationship between lay people’s attitudes and prescriptive guides. The Hyper Usage Guide of English Database (HUGE) compiled for the research project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable’ (Straaijer 2014), offers a useful corpus of usage manuals that can give us a clearer picture of people’s perceptions and values. It would also be interesting to study the use of non-standard pronouns from a multimodal perspective to investigate how verbal and non-verbal features of communication interact. Does the use of untriggered reflexives, for example, come accompanied by specific gestures or emphasis? The Nottingham Multimodal Corpus (Knight et al. n.d.), compiled between 2005 and 2008, could offer a useful source for such research. Finally, the rising number of World Englishes offers further potential for studying pronoun use across varieties. It would be interesting to examine how much the pronoun forms used by speakers might differ from those advocated by prescriptive usage guides and grammars.

References Algeo, J. (1991). Sweet are the uses of diversity. Word 42: 1–17. Batko, A. (2004). When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People: How to Avoid Common Errors in English. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brians, P. (2013). Common Errors in English Usage (third edition). Sherwood, Oregon: William, James and Company.

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Linda Pillière Kuno, S. (1987). Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lass, R. (1987). The Shape of English: Structure and History. London: Dent. Lederer, J. (2013). Understanding the self: How spatial parameters influence the distribution of anaphora within prepositional phrases. Cognitive Linguistics 24(3): 483–529. Lederer, R. and Dowis, R. (1995). The Write Way: The Spell Guide to Good Grammar and Usage. New York: Simon and Schuster. Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1975). A Communicative Grammar of English. London: Longman. Lovinger, P.W. (2000). The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style: A Readable Reference Book, Illuminating Thousands of Traps That Snare Writers and Speakers. New York: Viking. Mair, C. (2006). Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, B. (1997). Education: The great education debate? Critical Quarterly 39(1): 112–118. McWhorter, J. (1998). Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of ‘Pure’ Standard English. ‎New York: Basic Books. Mencken, H.L. (1963). The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (fourth edition). New York: Knopf. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. (1988). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster. Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1991). Authority in Language. Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (second edition). London: Routledge. Mittins, W., Salu, M., Edminson, M. and Cone, S. (1970). Attitudes to English Usage. London: Oxford University Press. Murray-Smith, S. (1989). Right Words: A Guide to English Usage in Australia. Ringwood: Viking. Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. www​.orwell​.ru​/library​/essays​/politics​/english​/e​_polit. Osman, R. (2020). The Man Who Died Twice. London: Penguin Random House. Palmer, R. (1993). Write in Style: A Guide to Good English. London: Spon. Parker, F., Riley, K. and Meyer, C. (1988). Case assignment and the ordering of constituents in coordinate constructions. American Speech 63(4): 214–233. Parker, F., Riley, K. and Meyer, C. (1990). Untriggered reflexive pronouns in English. American Speech 65 (1): 50–69. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. (1971). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Available at http://name​ .udml​.umich​.edu​/Paston (accessed 14 March 2023). Paterson, L.L. (2018). ‘You can just give those documents to myself’: Untriggered reflexive pronouns in 21st century spoken British English. In V. Brezina, R. Love and K. Aijmer (eds) Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech. Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken (BNC2014). Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 23–255. Peters, P. (2006). English usage: Prescription and description. In B. Aarts, A. McMahon and L. Hinrichs (eds) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 615–635. Peters, P. and Young, W. (1997). English grammar and the lexicography of usage. Journal of English Linguistics 25(4): 315–31. Phythian, B. (1979). A Concise Dictionary of Correct English. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Pillière, L. (2020). US Copy editors, style guides and usage guides and their impact on British novels. In D. Chapman and J. Rawlins (eds) Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 264–290. Rebellato, D. (2012). That Would Be Myself, Lord Sugar. Available at http://www​.danrebellato​.co​.uk​/spilledink​ /2013​/3​/12​/that​-would​-be​-myself​-lord​-sugar (accessed 4 June 2022). Ritchie, H. (2013). English for the Natives. London: John Murray. Siemund, P. (2010). Grammaticalization, lexicalization and intensification. English itself as a marker of middle situation types. Linguistics 4(48): 797–836. Simon, J. (1980). Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Sobin, J. (1997). Agreement, default rules, and grammatical viruses. Linguistic Inquiry 28(2): 318–343. Stein, D. (1997). Syntax and varieties. In J. Cheshire and D. Stein (eds) Taming the Vernacular – From Dialect to Written Standard Language. London: Longman, pp. 35–50. Stratton, C. (1949). Guide to Correct English. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company. Swann, M. (chairman). (1985). Education for All. Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups. Department of Education and Science. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Available at http://www.educationengland. org​.uk​/documents​/sw​ann/ (accessed 26 March 2023). Sweet, H. (1892). A Short Historical English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Pronouns as shibboleths Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (1994). Standard and non-standard pronominal usage in English, with special reference to the eighteenth century. In D. Stein and I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds) Towards a Standard English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 217–242. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2018) English Usage Guides. History, Advice, Attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2012). English at the onset of the normative tradition. In L. Mugglestone (ed.) The Oxford History of English Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todd, L. (1989). The Language of Irish Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tucker, S. (1961). English Examined: Two Centuries of Comment on the Mothertongue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, N. (1789). Dissertations on the English Language. Boston: I. Thomas and Company. Weiner, E.S.C. and Delahunty, A. (1983/1994). The Oxford Guide to English Usage. London: BCA. Weldon, F. (1988 [2015]). Mischief. London: Head of Zeus. Williams, J.M. (1995). Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, J.M. and Bizup, J. (2014). Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (eleventh edition). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Wilson, K.G. (1996). Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage. New York: Columbia University Press. Wyrick, J. (2017). Steps to Writing Well, 2016 MLA Update. Boston: Cengage Learning. Zribi-Hertz, A. (1989). Anaphor binding and narrative point of view: English reflexive pronouns in sentence and discourse. Language 65: 695–727.

Further reading Boyland, J. (2001). Hypercorrect pronoun case in English? Cognitive processes that account for pronoun usage. In J. Bybee and P. Hopper (eds) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chapman, D. and Rawlins, J. (eds) (2020). Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Grano, T. (2006). ‘Me and her’ meets ‘he and I’: Case, person, and linear ordering in English coordinated pronouns. BA thesis, Stanford University. Kjellmer, G. (1986). ‘Us Anglos are a cut above the field’: On objective pronouns in nominative contexts. English Studies 67(5): 445–449. Schaefer, M. (2023). Between you and I: The emergence of a nominative absolute in English. doi: 10.13140/ RG.2.2.21472.76809/3. Available at https://www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​/368282059​_Between​_You​ _and​_I​_The​_Emergence​_of​_a​_Nominative​_Absolute​_in​_English (accessed 23 March 2023).

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19 IDENTIFYING WHO USES FIRST-PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUNS AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS THIS LANGUAGE MAY HAVE Nicholas S. Holtzman and Logan C. Delgado 1. Introduction How we communicate about ourselves, how we think about ourselves, and how we communicate with ourselves—whether written, in an audible way, or internally in an inner voice—may make a difference in psychological outcomes such as depression. As a chapter in the Handbook of Pronouns, this paper focuses on two main topics: Who uses pronouns about themselves (like I and me), and what psychological effects does this have? Does such pronoun use predict future psychopathology (like depression)? Does using more of these pronouns have negative causal effects on one’s psychological well-being? If so, pronoun usage might have important psychological implications for everyday life and in therapeutic contexts. In this chapter, first we review the psychological variables, such as depression, that are associated with using first-person singular pronouns like I, I’d, I’ll, I’m, I’ve, me, mine, my, and myself (henceforth ‘I-talk’). This first-person perspective is frequently measured using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Francis, and Booth 2001, Pennebaker et al. 2015), a computer program that counts words that fall in given categories. For instance, a person may write about themselves in a blog using words like I and me and LIWC can easily count the instances of these first-person pronouns; then, researchers can infer that the first-person perspective is common in this individual. Thereafter, researchers can compute associations with other moment-to-moment psychological features (like sadness) and longer lasting psychological features (such as emotional instability). In a subsequent section in this chapter, we review the psychological effects of manipulating this first-person perspective (vs. its opposite) on psychological states like momentary sadness (Kross 2021) and traits like emotional instability. Then, we present the methodological shortcomings of this literature. Finally, we point to potential avenues for future research in this area. In the end, this chapter complements key reviews in this research literature (Pennebaker 1997; Orvell et al. 2019; Berry-Blunt 2021; Kross 2021). This chapter mainly provides a roadmap for navigating the literature on linguistic interventions – like persuading someone to stop saying I so much. From a practical standpoint, the ultimate aim of reviewing the literature on these linguistic interventions is to inform how to best alleviate mental illness (like depression) and elevate desirable outcomes (like happiness). 274

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-23

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2.  Current research Before we can provide a critical evaluation of the current research on pronoun use and mental illness, a distinction must be made for this literature to be sufficiently interpreted. Social-personality psychologists (i.e., those who study individual differences and situational factors that impact psychological outcomes) distinguish between states and traits (Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015). ‘Traits’ refer to relatively enduring patterns of affect, emotion, cognition, behavior, desires, and motivations. Traits are comprised of individual ‘states’ like momentary sadness – more fleeting events – aggregated across time and situations (and are sets of accumulated states; Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015). This distinction between traits and states provides a framework for understanding the two main contributions to the first-person pronoun, or I-talk, literature: the personological literature on traits (in relation to I-talk), which is mostly correlational, and the social-psychological literature (involving the manipulation of moment-to-moment language usage), which favors experimentation (i.e., involving manipulated variables comprised of an experimental and control condition). Accordingly, in the subsections that follow, we provide a tour of the correlational literature on personality and first-person singular pronouns as well as a tour of the experimental social psychology literature on manipulating pronoun use. In the end, this will allow us to understand how pronoun usage may serve a critical function in shaping one’s psychology, both in the short term (i.e., in psychological states) and in the long term (i.e., in psychological traits).

2.1  Personality and self-referential pronouns Tragically, in 1963, the eminent poet and novelist Sylvia Plath committed suicide. The quote below is from her semi-autobiographical novel called The Bell Jar. It provides an example of how using the first-person perspective may correlate with psychopathology. I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film première, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963: 30) In this prose, and in her life more generally, Sylvia Plath shows evidence of emotional instability (including depressive affect and nervousness), and this presumably manifests in excessive rumination. In the paragraphs that follow, and using this excerpt as a vivid example, we question what it says about Plath that she frequently uses first-person pronouns. Might this excessive self-focus be suggestive of mental illness and, in turn, foreshadow her tragic ending? Previous work suggests this may be the case (Stirman and Pennebaker 2001). To provide a complete understanding of what first-person pronoun use correlates with (and what it does not correlate with), it will be necessary to briefly delve into a seemingly unrelated literature on a different form of psychopathology – narcissism. Initial research by Raskin and Shaw (1988) suggested that frequent I-talk is associated with grandiose narcissism (an arrogant, vain, and domineering personality). A more exhaustive study done by Carey et al. (2015), however, found that grandiose narcissism was virtually unassociated with using I and the like. The large sample size (N = 4,811) from Carey et al. (2015) compared to the sample size obtained in Raskin and Shaw (N =48) shifts the weight of the evidence toward a zero association between grandiose narcissism and first-person singular pronoun use (for context, see: Berry-Blunt et al. 2021). A replication and extension by Holtzman et al. (under review) further confirmed that the correlation between grandiose narcissism and first-person singular pronoun use, as measured by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, is trivial. That is, there is not a meaningfully large effect linking people with narcissistic 275

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personality traits to using more first-person pronouns, and this is evident in a variety of written and spoken language contexts, such as public and private contexts (Carey et al. 2015; Holtzman et al., under review). We could infer from this foray into the narcissism literature that Sylvia Plath is not necessarily high in grandiose narcissism (she may be or may not be), because first-person pronoun usage provides little information about grandiose narcissism. Though the poet does not necessarily exhibit arrogant or domineering tendencies, her pronoun use may reflect other key individual differences in mental illness. While grandiose narcissism is often seen as a trait that involves ‘acting out’ in a way that is socially aversive and troublesome for other people (known as the ‘externalizing spectrum’ in psychology), it turns out that Plath’s traits might be better understood as part of an internal struggle (known technically as the ‘internalizing spectrum’ in psychology; Eaton et al. 2013). This distinction between externalizing and internalizing traits helps provide a way to understand what kinds of mental illness might be implicated when using first-person pronouns. The life of Sylvia Plath is exemplary in this way: she was not markedly externalizing, but she was noticeably high in internalizing, and this captures her internal struggle – and furthermore foreshadows her tragic demise. One key internalizing trait is depression (lethargy, anhedonia, etc.) and one meta-analysis computed the positive correlation between I-talk and depression (N = 3,758, r =.13; Edwards and Holtzman 2017). That is, the more participants used first-person pronouns in numerous contexts, the higher they scored on measures of depression (Edwards and Holtzman 2017). This correlation was not moderated by gender (Edwards and Holtzman 2017), nor was it moderated by whether previous findings had been published (ruling out a publication bias that would be biased in favor of a positive association; Edwards and Holtzman 2017), thus strengthening the claim that first-person pronoun usage serves as at least a subtle linguistic marker of depression. These researchers discovered a correlation between depression and an immersed, first-person perspective, and this finding was primarily based on research involving expressions offline, in private writings, or in small group discussions. This left unanswered an important question: do these findings transfer to online life? A paper by Eichstaedt et al. (2018) extended these findings to online life and, more specifically, to social media. In their study of 683 patients 114 of whom had depression diagnoses, they found that participants who ended up having a diagnosis of depression, in fact, used more first-person singular pronouns (LIWC dictionary: β = 0.19; p < .001) than non-depressed individuals. The correlation between a first-person perspective and depression illustrates how the self-focused attention in depression shows up in everyday online language use, much like for Sylvia Plath – that is, in public writing. Based on this study (Eichstaedt et al. 2018), it seems the association may be similar in offline and online contexts. In a similar way, one other longitudinal study of 29 inpatients with clinical depression found that first-person singular pronoun use predicted depressive symptoms roughly eight months later (Zimmerman et al. 2016); this finding held up even after factoring out initial depression scores, a testament to the predictive power of I-talk. Collectively, these findings show that immersed language appears to be both a contemporaneous (cross-sectional) correlate and a prospective predictor of depressive symptoms. Based on this literature, we might infer that Plath’s frequent use of first-person pronouns reflects a negative self-focus, and, from a predictive standpoint, it would have elevated her likelihood of a depression diagnosis. It also appears to foreshadow her eventual suicide. Both depression and negative emotionality (a trait that involves vulnerability, anxiety, volatility, impulsivity, depression, and chronic negative affect) constitute psychopathological traits that are part of the internalizing spectrum (Eaton et al. 2013), and so it makes sense that an immersed (I-talk) perspective should have a positive association with neuroticism (AKA emotional instability), as depression is a facet of neuroticism. It turns out that in a wide array of contexts (e.g., personal contexts and momentary thought contexts) the correlation between first-person singular pronoun use, as measured by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and emotional instability is positive (N = 276

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4,754, overall r = .13; Tackman et al. 2019); this represents a comparable (Edwards and Holtzman 2017) if not greater association relative to the magnitude for the relationship between I-talk and depression (Tackman et al. 2019). The overarching association between I-talk and neuroticism reflects first-person singular pronoun use and has a robust correlation with negative emotionality. Neuroticism serves as a significant risk factor of a variety of psychopathologies, physical illnesses, and diminished quality of life (Widiger and Oltmanns 2017). Taken together, we might infer that Sylvia Plath probably had above-average neuroticism, as revealed in her excessive I-talk. In both clinical and non-clinical studies, the personality trait that is most responsive to therapy is neuroticism (Roberts et al. 2017), and it is this trait that is most likely to change in therapy (Roberts et al. 2006; Roberts et al. 2017). With this information, we turn to the therapeutically relevant intervention literature in social psychology and to the goal of reducing neuroticism or emotional instability.

2.2  Social psychological pronoun interventions Intervention research differs sharply from correlational research in that at least one variable (the independent variable) is manipulated, whereas in correlational research nothing is manipulated. Two main approaches to language intervention predominate in this literature are distanced self-talk (Kross et al. 2014; Orvell et al. 2017) and immersion (I-talk), with the latter happening through direct confrontation with one’s sometimes traumatic past (e.g., journaling and expressive writing [Pennebaker 2011; Pennebaker and Evans 2014]). To illustrate distancing and how it may be facilitated, we review a key manipulation by Kross’s team: Kross et al. (2014) randomly assigned half of their participants (Studies 1a and 1b; N = 149) in a negative emotion recall study to use first-person singular pronouns as much as possible, which is how immersion is implemented. The researchers randomly assigned the other half of the participants to the non-first-person (‘distancing’) group, who were instructed to use you as well as their own name. Kross et al. (2014) cleverly exemplified this ‘distancing’ in the introduction of the paper by citing basketball superstar LeBron James and his tendency to refer to himself as LeBron rather than I – he would say LeBron thinks… instead of I think…. This distinction between immersion (i.e., first-person I-talk) and distanced self-talk (second-person and third-person pronouns) can also be seen as a consistent theme elsewhere in this landscape (Ayduk and Kross 2010; Orvell et al. 2017; Orvell and Kross 2019). Kross posits that distancing through the use of secondperson and third-person pronouns (vs. using an immersed perspective) is an effective way to manage negative emotion (e.g., Kross 2021).

2.3  Psychological distancing Self-distancing has been explored in numerous ways. Several studies cite how using second-person and third-person pronouns can be used to implement psychological distancing (Kross et al. 2014; Orvell et al. 2017; Orvell and Kross 2019); therein, the person in question is creating (mental) distance between oneself (by using you instead of I) and the other concepts about which one is thinking. This happens because the you does not typically refer to the language producer. With this in mind, and in the paragraphs that follow, we look at the specific regulatory mechanisms of self-distancing. We highlight key studies and experiments in which the use of second-person and third-person pronouns facilitates self-distancing, and we highlight some of the effects of these manipulations. Self-distancing is thought to act as an effective emotion regulator in times of stress, among other improvements in psychological outcomes across a variety of ages, emotional intensities, and applications (Kross 2021), and this may translate to therapeutic settings. For example, Kross et al. (2014; Study 3; N = 89) discovered that using one’s own name (instead of I) facilitates self-distancing and acts as a way to regulate emotions under social stress. It leads participants to reevaluate threatening anticipated events, such as knowing that one must give a public speech in the near future, in sig277

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nificantly less threatening terms. So, using you or one’s own name appears to have advantages for emotion-regulation, at least in the short term. Does this emotion-regulation benefit extend to behavior? In experimental studies, researchers found that using you in self-talk (and use of imperatives, i.e., Do well, in which you is implied) was spontaneously used by participants in scenarios that required self-control (Zell et al. 2011). This finding was extended in a study examining using you as a form of self-talk vs. the more immersed I-talk (as well as a control condition). Using you served as an effective emotion-regulation tool and it facilitated better task performance across three experiments (Dolcos and Albarracín 2014), including two studies (Ns = 95 and 143) involving solving complex puzzles called anagrams. By extension, referring to oneself as you (instead of using the immersed version, I) may help people solve cognitive tasks or problems in everyday life. It seems that creating some mental distance between oneself (as the subject) and a difficult or aversive task (as when a person says to themselves, You can do this!) could optimize performance outcomes. Moreover, using you instead of I could serve a broader function in terms of making meaning out of events. Using you may be the default choice (as opposed to using I) when people are trying to make meaning about negative events (see Experiment 6; Orvell et al. 2017). The word you – when applied to the self – may serve as the bridge between thinking about oneself and generalizing to other people, as in You just learn from these kinds of trials. Thus, self-distancing seems to be effective in short-term change (for emotion regulation, problem solving, and making meaning), but more research is needed to better understand if this tool could be effective for long-term change. In addressing the effects across time, one collaborative team found key evidence that self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) journaling led to positive emotional trajectories for up to 16 days (Dorfman et al. 2021), ultimately reaching a ‘saturation point’ at which self-distancing (using you) was no longer as useful, and this point occurred at approximately the 16th day (of the 24 days measured). This was part of an impressive micro-longitudinal study to better understand the longer-lasting effects of self-distancing (Dorfman et al. 2021). Importantly, these (mostly short-term) effects about pronoun choice facilitating emotion regulation and increasing well-being appear somewhat applicable across related negative-emotion constructs, such as depression; that is, both depressed and non-depressed people may benefit from this type of intervention. This was the case in one small study (N = 96, Kross et al. 2012) about people high in a depression measure based on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-IV; First, Spitzer, Gibbon, and Williams 2002). Depressed individuals who used a self-distanced perspective using you (vs. self-immersed perspective using I) reported less negative affect and had diminished cognitive access to depressive thoughts (measured in how quickly they reacted to depressive thoughts). This means that they had less of an inclination to adopt negative thoughts when in the distanced (you) condition. Also, the researchers found that both depressed and non-depressed participants using selfdistanced language recounted less emotionally arousing parts of negative feelings and ‘reconstrued them in ways that promoted insight and closure’ (Kross et al. 2012: 559), suggesting induced emotional tranquility across different levels of depression. Moreover, self-distancing was not associated with promoting psychological avoidance (i.e., attempting to avoid thinking about a negative experience) in this sample, so distancing did not come with this potential cost. Self-distancing served as a valuable tool for depressed and non-depressed individuals alike, and Kross et al.’s (2012) study provides some evidence that distancing may not be positively related to avoidance (although there remains tension in this literature surrounding this finer point; cf. Beck 1970). The theme that emerges from this literature is that distanced self-talk serves as an accessible, cheap, practical, and effective psychological tool for emotion regulation; it may help people improve task performance, may help people recall negative experiences in a healthy way, may help individuals respond to future events with lower threat perceptions, and may help depressed individuals foster insight through (distanced) reflection. Using self-talk that avoids immersion (as in avoiding the 278

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immersed word, I) seems to yield benefits that help with task performance and with coping (Zell et al. 2011; Dolcos and Albarracín 2014; Kross et al. 2014; Orvell et al. 2017; Giovanetti et al. 2019; Etzel et al. 2020). All in all, shifts away from I-talk and toward using you-talk tend to down-regulate negative states. These brief interventions serve as a potential tool for state change (in the short term), although, very importantly, it remains unclear if such linguistic shifts lead to trait change (in the long term).

2.4  Psychological immersion with I-talk Distanced self-talk may not always be feasible, and we speculate that it may be difficult, at least for some folks in Western cultures where notions of self-hood predominate (McAdams 1995); recently, one research group argued immersion (e.g., using I) is the ‘default’ linguistic perspective in the flow of conscious activity (Dorfman et al. 2021). The concept of the self (James 1890, Chapter 10) as well as the notion of the ‘storied self’ (McAdams 1995) – developing a narrative identity around oneself, the self-concept, one’s ego, and the I – suggest that distancing may not be feasible at all times, for example, trying to make sense of traumas involving oneself. In turn, cognitive life turns to focusing on the I (Dorfman et al. 2021) and to using an immersed perspective in a way that directly confronts sometimes traumatic and semi-traumatic self-involved memories, thus allowing oneself to boldly understand the self from the first-person perspective. So, we turn to describing the immersed perspective (e.g., in journaling and expressive writing) and how it fares compared to the distanced perspective in its ability to facilitate longer-lasting change, and then we discuss the potential mechanisms involved. The majority of evidence for the importance and utility of immersion comes from research into journaling and expressive writing (Pennebaker 1997; Seih et al. 2011; Pennebaker 2011; Pennebaker and Evans 2014). When people use an immersed perspective, they are indeed more emotional (Pennebaker 1997) – a position that is consistent with previously discussed research (e.g., Kross 2021). This is corroborated by a large body of literature showing that ‘hot button’ issues and emotional trauma, such as natural disasters that one has experienced, need to be addressed directly (e.g., via immersion; I), but that doing so too quickly (i.e., close in time to the negative precipitating event) might come with psychological costs (Kleim et al. 2018). For example, someone who recently lost their home to a natural disaster should not be asked to use an immersed perspective (I) to describe their traumatic experience. When using an immersed perspective in journaling, however, it is also the case that people are more likely to use language in a way that reflects deeper cognitive processing, as manifest in ‘cognitive processing’ word use (counts from Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a computer program that counts word frequencies; Seih et al. 2011). The use of immersion may come with a (potent) semantic encoding benefit, whereas distancing comes at the cost of reduced semantic encoding, that is, less of an ability to make meaning from that which is discussed (cf. Orvell et al. 2017). Based in part on this evidence – and this is a crucial counterpoint to Kross’s work – Seih et al. (2011: 936) speculate that using the ‘first person perspective may be associated with longer term benefits’. We also offer a logical argument as to why immersion may actually be necessary for full recovery from trauma-related negative affect. To illustrate this topic, we return to the quote from Sylvia Plath, who arguably exhibits negative emotionality. One can see her frequently associating negative words (e.g., sad) with words like I and me. Thus, the pairing of I with negative concepts (e.g., those existing prior to intervention) might have to be acknowledged by the neurotic Sylvia Plath in order for her to exhibit real change. A distanced self-perspective may blunt negative emotions for Plath in the short term (because the negative self-concepts will not be fully activated in semantic memory, as the individual forgoes activating key concepts like I; James 1890), but it would seem unlikely that she can consciously ‘re-pair’ the negative self-concept without acknowledging the painful associations 279

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between negative affect and key self-referential words like I. To achieve well-being and to reduce negative emotionality, Sylvia Plath likely needs to pair positive concepts with these first-person singular pronouns and learn to overcome negative self-thoughts (again, replacing negative selfthoughts like I’m awful with positive self-thoughts like I’m smart), perhaps via journaling (replacing negative self-concepts, one by one). We speculate that using an immersed perspective in journaling could help prevent undesirable increases in neuroticism, as well as demonstrate post-traumatic growth. Again, this involves ‘re-pairing’ associations with I by replacing negative self-thoughts with positive self-thoughts (Tracy et al. 2021). Having a negative view of the self (e.g., being ‘lazy’), and then confronting this self-concept (via literally using words like I) is the only way to directly alter this view of the self. Using immersion may help a person combat this negative self-view (because now I is being directly re-paired, instead of repairing some, less potent, second-person or thirdperson pronoun), and this allows one to reappraise the self directly. This line of reasoning suggests that confronting the self via immersion may constitute an effective way to transform this negative self-concept to a more positive self-concept – a direct approach. This approach may be superior to using terms for oneself that are purposefully indirect and are only loosely related to the self-concept (such as you). Immersed perspectives have been explored in multiple ways. For instance, one study by KennedyMoore and Watson (2001) suggests that the better a person understands their emotional experience, the better they can cope. Facilitating this coping entails controlled immersion, which can be facilitated through first-person pronoun use (Seih et al. 2008; Pennebaker 2011; Seih et al. 2011). Furthermore, employing a therapeutic approach in diary writing (Jin 2005), researchers discovered the use of immersed language (compared to self-distanced perspectives) played an active role in the therapeutic process (Seih et al. 2008). This research elucidates how immersion can be a useful tool in the therapeutic process – a finding that runs counter to the recommendation of constantly limiting I-talk (Fuentes et al. 2018). There remains a puzzle about why I-talk tends to be positively associated with neuroticism (Tackman et al. 2019) at the zero-order level of analysis (i.e., correlating the two variables, without any partialling in the regression analysis). Specifically, why would it be the case that (immersed) I-talk is beneficial if (immersed) I-talk is associated with neuroticism? We suspect that there are several different kinds of immersion. There is immersion that is ‘productive’ in the form of pairing positive concepts with I (e.g., I am becoming stronger), and there is immersion that is ‘counterproductive’ in the form of pairing negative concepts with I – as in the neurotic prose of Sylvia Plath, who pairs I with depressive, negative words. Because immersion is associated with rumination (Holtzman et al., in progress), and because using immersed language in a ‘productive’ manner is extremely difficult without professional guidance (e.g., some expert who is trained to stop the person and tell them that they are engaging in a cognitive distortion or in rumination), the zero-order positive correlation between immersed language and negative individual differences (neuroticism, vulnerable narcissism, depression, rumination) is a typical result (e.g., Edwards and Holtzman 2017; Tackman et al. 2019). These speculations about ‘productive’ immersion will need to be tested in future research.

2.5  Moderators of how effective psychological immersion can be There are several potential moderators of the efficacy of immersed language use (for an early discussion in this literature, see: Pennebaker 1997). These moderators include (1) the time since the negative event, (2) whether one chooses to use a positive or negative valence surrounding the selfconcept, as the personal narrative develops surrounding a negative or traumatic event, and (3) how long one engages in the immersed task. These potential moderators of the efficacy of an immersed perspective are articulated and detailed in the following paragraphs. 280

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The first potential moderator of the efficacy of an immersed I-talk perspective is the amount of time that has passed since the precipitating negative event. Although immediately confronting strongly aversive events (like trauma) shortly after the aversive event is ill-advised, and unlikely to work (Pennebaker 1997, Pennebaker 2011, Pennebaker and Evans 2014, Kleim et al. 2018), eventually confronting negative events (like traumas) may be necessary (Pennebaker and Evans 2014). To be sure, in the short term, confronting negative events may be harmful. In a sample of 48 adults diagnosed with PTSD, a self-immersed condition led to experiencing increased physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance rating), as compared to no effect for the distanced condition; this demonstrates that the immersed perspective is aversive – at least in close proximity to the negative precipitating event. In other words, the other primary linguistic approach, namely psychological distancing, may serve as a buffer (in the short term) against the effects of trauma (Wisco et al. 2015). Importantly, once people are ready to address a traumatic memory, using immersed language may facilitate recovery and growth, when compared to self-distancing. As Nietzsche (1889/2019) philosophized, ‘that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’– this popular quote is highly relevant to Pennebaker’s approach in directly confronting life’s adversity. The key, we argue, is to figure out when to confront that adversity. Future research should test when exactly it is most appropriate to approach trauma using the immersed perspective. The main idea is that once intense emotions subside, it may be a worthwhile approach to use expressive writing (Pennebaker 2011) in an immersed manner in order to promote growth and recovery. We return to discussing this moderator and elaborate upon it in a subsequent section. The second potential moderator is the semantic context surrounding notions of self-hood, and surrounding I-talk in particular, in the narrative an individual is creating about oneself. That is, if a person is constantly replacing negative self-thoughts (as an oversimplified example: I am bad) with positive self-thoughts (I am good), then one is likely more effective than if one is constantly associating negative thoughts with the self-concept (as is common in folks who ruminate; Kross 2021). Importantly, if a person were to erroneously assume that immersive journaling is always adaptive – even when rumination is present – then that client might get worse. If the immersive experience is contaminated with rumination, then the endeavor is likely filled with cognitive errors. The personality literature (which focuses more on relatively stable individual differences) can offer assistance here: It seems that the people most likely to engage in both I-talk and in rumination are people who are high in neuroticism (Tackman et al. 2019; Holtzman et al., in progress). Thus, if a client is neurotic, then it will be important that the client is instructed to avoid repetitive, ruminative, and negative thoughts. Unsupervised journaling by neurotic individuals may cause harm. Supervision may be crucial. The third potential moderator is how long one engages in the immersed task. A meta-analysis conducted by Reinhold et al. (2018) found that expressive writing in reducing depressive symptoms was moderated by the duration of expressive writing. This highlights how increasing the duration and frequency of expressive writing tends to alleviate depressive symptoms; one cannot reasonably expect that a short-term immersive intervention will be effective (Pennebaker 1997; Kross 2021). Thus, any successful intervention will likely require multiple immersed writing sessions; one immersed writing session with a single-shot follow-up is not likely to produce results that are favorable to the immersed strategy (so, alleviating depressive symptoms is not ‘cheap’).

3.  Interrogation of methods In this section, we interrogate the methods that personality and social psychologists have used. The largely correlational personality and individual differences literature on I-talk suffers (by design) from generally being incapable of making causal claims. For instance, the fact that neuroticism is positively associated with producing immersive language does not mean that immersive language 281

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causes neuroticism, nor does it mean that neuroticism causes immersive language use. As the old adage goes, ‘correlation is not causation.’ The personality literature generally has these limitations. The main advantage of the personality literature is that it speaks to general and relatively lasting personality tendencies, which are potential targets of interventions if the aim is to create lasting personality changes. Another advantage of this literature is that the researchers involved tend to use open science practices with large and therefore statistically powerful samples; for example, a key paper showing the correlation between I-talk and neuroticism (r = .13; 95% CI = [.11, .16]) included 4,754 valid participants (Tackman et al. 2019). This was corroborated in a large-sample pre-registered project (valid N = 1,939; Dixon et al. 2020; Holtzman et al. in progress); the estimates of the correlations between neuroticism and I-talk fell within the originally discovered confidence interval (Holtzman et al., under review; Study 2: r = .13; Study 3: r = .15). Thus, a large amount of data (N > 6,500) from various labs converges on the correlation between neuroticism and I-talk. It seems to be hovering around .10 to .15 (comparable to Cohen’s d = .20 to .30). This literature tends to produce large samples of replicable, yet relatively small associations, as judged by traditional standards (Cohen 1988). The largely experimental social psychological literature on I-talk, on the other hand, focuses on psychological states (state-level cognition and affect), which are, by definition, quite fleeting psychological experiences, and which are easier to change than traits (Roberts 2018). So, it becomes easier to produce larger effects, albeit typically for only brief periods. The main advantage of this literature is that it can reveal causal relationships (and can rule out confounds), which crucially allows for interventionists to have a degree of control over the influences on cognition and, presumably in turn, emotion. Experimental social psychological methods, mainly the manipulation of pronoun usage (such as saying you instead of I or using one’s own name instead of using I), give us hope for identifying the effects of certain linguistic interventions. In general, researchers working within this framework have been more reluctant to use and reference open science practices, such as pre-registration and a priori power analyses that are openly shared, and importantly – probably because of the (more intensive) experimental approaches employed – the samples tend to be smaller. In Kross’s research, for example, oftentimes open science practices are typically not used (or at least not publicly); although there are laudable improvements occurring on this front (e.g., see Orvell and Kross; https://osf​.io​/eja4p/). Some practices, such as reporting rules for when data collection will stop (i.e., stopping rules), are generally not used in this literature; when stopping rules are not reported, it remains unclear when the researchers intended to stop collecting data, and it is possible to stop when the results are statistically significant (Francis 2012). Such practices increase the likelihood that the published literature on distancing is biased. Importantly, there is some mixed (yet inconclusive) evidence indicating publication bias in the distancing literature (Moran and Eyal 2022), meaning that it is possible that the real effect for psychological distancing is smaller than that which is published. The solution to this methodological problem, we argue, is simply to adopt open science practices. Adopting open science practices, such as pre-registration (including pre-registering stopping rules), could strengthen the evidentiary status of the effects and also encourage widespread acceptance of these potentially promising interventions in the scientific community (Simmons et al. 2020). It would also be useful for independent researchers to corroborate these findings. These two literatures, from personality psychology and social psychology, could inform one another by combining their strengths. We would find continued collaborations from social-personality psychology to be both exciting and promising. One model for such collaboration in social-personality psychology would be the literature on romantic and sexual relationships, spearheaded by leaders in social psychology, on the one hand, and evolutionary personality psychology, on the other (see Durante et al. 2016). We recommend and encourage researchers from social and personality psychology to bring together their unique strengths, such as understanding trait change and employing experimental psychology, respectively, and bring these strengths to bear on pronoun-use interventions. In turn, 282

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this could become a useful intervention for practitioners in clinical and counseling psychology, for example.

4.  Future research In terms of future research, independent replication will also help solidify confidence in the distanced self-talk effects (especially when using a large-sample pre-registered effort or registered replication effort; Seih et al. 2008; Kross, et al. 2014; Orvell et al. 2019). The way forward is to combine the advantages of the personality literature, namely focusing on high-powered studies of lasting personality tendencies through longitudinal studies (Luhmann et al. 2014), with the essential advantage of the social psychological literature, namely focusing on experimentation, as randomized control trial experiments are the standard (at least in the United States; Hariton and Locascio 2018) for establishing causality and corroborating the efficacy of interventions. The goal is to focus on high-powered studies of lasting personality tendencies through longitudinal research that integrates the best practices of randomized control trials, which randomly assign participants to conditions such as intervention and control, and which will help prevent p-hacking, which can happen when analytic plans are not specified prior to data collection (Simmons et al. 2011). This is no small task. It will require developing and contrasting repeated interventions, as short interventions of major personality traits tend not to work, yet longer ones do (Reinhold 2018). It will also require numerous affectively based, cognitively based, and personality-based outcome measurements, assessed longitudinally, to measure how long the effects last; one-shot outcome measurements are not enough, in part because changes can reverse over time (Luhmann et al. 2014), such as when people have more time for reflection. The personality measurements that we suggest as the focal point are neuroticism and its facets (including depression) and related constructs like rumination. Neuroticism seems to be not only (a) a key associate of I-talk, but also it seems to be (b) a malleable personality trait that is amenable to intervention (Roberts et al. 2017). Possible interventions include distanced self-talk (Kross 2021), as well as confronting negative associations with first-person (immersed) thoughts using words like I (e.g., via expressive writing and journaling). Here, we make a falsifiable prediction (Popper 1959) – a prediction that integrates much of our narrative in this chapter. The prediction is one that focuses on and builds upon our articulation of the first key moderator, discussed above. The prediction is that, in the long run, directly confronting negative self-thoughts (in line with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; Beck 1970) will be the most effective method of reducing negative emotionality (AKA ‘neuroticism’) and related constructs like depression and rumination. Although distanced self-talk may be effective in emergencies (and apparently people already do this in emergencies and culturally traumatic events; Pennebaker 2011; Guntuku et al. 2020), in our view it is likely not a long-term solution (Wang et al. 2012; Reebs et al. 2017; Giovanetti et al. 2019; Dorfman et al. 2021). Perpetually avoiding direct (immersed) self-referential language like saying I may be suboptimal (or may even be unrealistic in individualistic cultures). This avoidance manifests, for example, in using third-person language, and some research points to spontaneous use of the third-person perspective being associated with dysfunctional avoidance of distress for those with a vulnerability to depression or having a depression diagnosis (WallaceHadrill and Kamboj 2016; cf. Kross et al. 2012; cf. Kross and Ayduk 2017). Indeed, ‘in some cases, a shift to the third-person perspective aids emotional regulation in the short-term, but for longerterm adaptive processing, new information needs to be incorporated’ (Wallace-Hadrill and Kamboj 2016: 9). In short, we agree with Wallace-Hadrill and Kamboj (2016). In our line of thought, the incorporation of this ‘new information’ requires an immersed perspective (e.g., using the word, I; Reebs et al. 2017) and this is best achieved long after the precipitating negative event, that is, when the wound has had some time to heal. People need some time before they can skillfully contemplate memories of negative events and then they can ultimately begin to heal. But after this time point, 283

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Greater Treatment Efficacy

we posit that ‘that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger’ (Nietzsche 1889/2019); that is, people likely eventually must confront themselves in order to heal. This is probably particularly likely in individualistic cultures. Inevitably, at least in the Western hemisphere (McAdams 1995), notions of self-hood, as manifest in the first-person singular pronouns (e.g., stories about ‘me’), will tend to seep into consciousness, as such self-references are endemic in Western culture (James 1890; McAdams 1995; Dorfman et al. 2021), and this likely shapes one’s thoughts (e.g., Symons and Johnson 1997), at least to some extent (see Hunt and Agnoli 1991). Long after the precipitating negative event, some direct confrontations with negative self-thoughts are likely necessary for some (if not most) people, as psychological distancing reaches a point at which it is no longer quite so effective (Dorfman et al. 2021), and Pennebaker’s journaling methods provide hope for interventions that directly cope with how one thinks of oneself in an immersed manner (Pennebaker 2011; Pennebaker and Evans 2014). See Figure 19.1 for a depiction of our prediction. A necessary caveat here is that not all research is consistent with our prediction (e.g., for one study that is at odds with our prediction, see: Andersson and Conley 2012). The figure captures our falsifiable prediction: Treatment efficacy (e.g., enhancing well-being) is a function of the interaction between (a) the time since the precipitating and potentially traumatic negative event, and (b) the type of self-talk intervention. The prediction shows the effects of psychological distancing and psychological immersion in the short term and long term after a negative event. Self-distancing is depicted as the best tool for emotion regulation in the short term (Kross 2021), with research not yet comprehensively examining the effects in the long term (but see Dorfman et al. 2021). Immersion is depicted as relatively detrimental in the short term (Pennebaker 1997), but as beneficial for recovery and growth in the long term, long after the precipitating event (Pennebaker and Evans 2014). This depicts time since the precipitating negative event as a crucial variable for determining which intervention (immersed, distanced) one should deploy. Beyond our falsifiable prediction (and not depicted in Figure 19.1), it remains possible that a combination of distancing and immersed approaches may be considered as a viable joint-intervention (i.e., captured by a statistical interaction) pertinent to reducing negative emotionality and to increasing well-being. Future research might involve using a combination of immersed self-talk and distanced self-talk to see whether the interaction effect emerges (that is, above and beyond the additive effects of either approach by themselves). Finally, switching among various perspectives (e.g., distancing and immersion) may also be effective (Seih et al. 2011; Barbosa 2021), which would give

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This part of the prediction for distanced self-talk remains unexplored.

Time Since Precipitating Negative Event

Figure 19.1  Falsifiable prediction: Treatment efficacy as a function of time since the precipitating negative event as well as type of self-talk intervention (distanced vs. immersed)

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a person with trauma the opportunity to effectively use whichever perspective is most helpful for the given circumstance. In this chapter, we attempted to integrate the literature on distanced self-talk and immersion, and we provided the falsifiable prediction that self-distancing may ultimately be seen as an effective way to regulate emotions in the short term, but it remains somewhat unclear if this distancing strategy works well in the long term. In contrast, immersed self-talk may be harmful in the short term, as has been found in trauma research (Pennebaker 1997; Kleim et al. 2018), but it may be helpful in the long term, especially for deeper levels of well-being beyond mere positive affect, such as meaning-making and purpose. Future research should examine how to use intervention strategies, such as distancing and immersion, in ways that optimally enhance short-term emotion-regulation and in ways that yield long-term recovery. Finding the most efficacious interventions will be efficiently achieved if and when social and personality psychology researchers bring their relatively unique practices (e.g., experimental interventions and open science practices, respectively) as well as their complementary insights to elucidate the language shifts that likely affect key clinical health outcomes.

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Popper, K.R. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York, NY: Routledge. Raskin, R. and Shaw, R. (1988). Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns. Journal of Personality 56(2): 393–404. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1988.tb00892.x. Reebs, A., Yuval, K. and Bernstein, A. (2017). Remembering and responding to distressing autobiographical memories: Exploring risk and intervention targets for posttraumatic stress in traumatized refugees. Clinical Psychological Science 5(5): 789–797. doi: 10.1177/2167702617713786. Reinhold, M., Bürkner, C. and Holling, H. (2018). Effects of expressive writing on depressive symptoms: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 25(1): e12224. doi: 10.1111/cpsp.12224. Roberts, B.W., Walton, K.E. and Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin 132(1): 1–25. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1. 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Journal of Consumer Psychology. doi: 10.1002/jcpy.1208. Symons, C.S. and Johnson, B.T. (1997). The self-reference effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 121(3): 371–394. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.121.3.371. Tackman, A.M., Sbarra, D.A., Carey, A.L., Donnellan, M.B., Horn, A.B., Holtzman, N.S., Edwards, T.S., Pennebaker, J.W. and Mehl, M.R. (2019). Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116(5): 817–834. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000187. Tracy, A., Jopling, E. and LeMoult, J. (2021). The effect of self-referential processing on anxiety in response to naturalistic and laboratory stressors. Cognition and Emotion 35(7): 1320–1333. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2021.1951675. Wallace-Hadrill, S.M.A. and Kamboj, S.K. (2016). The impact of perspective change as a cognitive reappraisal strategy on affect: A systematic review. 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First-person pronoun use in spoken language as a predictor of future depressive symptoms: Preliminary evidence from a clinical sample of depressed patients. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 24(2): 384–391. doi: 10.1002/cpp.2006.

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Further reading Andersson, M.A. and Conley, C.S. (2012). Optimizing the perceived benefits and health outcomes of writing about traumatic life events. Stress and Health 29(1): 40–49. Berry-Blunt, A.K., Holtzman, N.S., Donnellan, M.B. and Mehl, M.R. (2021). The story of I tracking: Psychological implications of self-referential language use. Social and Personality Psychology Compass e12647. Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. New York: Crown. Orvell, A., Kross, E. and Gelman, S.A. (2017). How you makes meaning. Science 355(6331): 1299–1302. Tackman, A.M., Sbarra, D.A., Carey, A.L., Donnellan, M.B., Horn, A.B., Holtzman, N.S., Edwards, T.S., Pennebaker, J.W. and Mehl, M.R. (2019). Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116(5): 817–834.

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20 STRATEGIC USES OF PRONOUN DROP IN ECONOMIC DECISION-MAKING Tai-Sen He 1. Introduction Virtually all economic transactions, from daily grocery shopping to major financial expenditures, are facilitated through certain forms of verbal or written communication. In that sense, language is ultimately the primary means by which people communicate transaction-related information. A natural question thus emerges: Do the ways languages are structured to present information affect individual perception and decision-making or even the wider social, economic, and political outcomes? This classical question has been asked in several related disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology for centuries. The idea was initially formulated by J. G. Herder (1744–1803) and W. V. Humboldt (1767–1835), later espoused by F. Boas (1823–1899), and further developed into the linguistic relativity hypothesis by E. Sapir (1884–1939) and B. L. Whorf (1897–1941), known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis holds that language influences thoughts – meaning the linguistic structure embedded in the language(s) spoken shapes the way we think and behave. As a result, people who speak different languages may have diverse mental representations of physically similar states of affairs. Earlier attempts aiming to test this hypothesis have found very limited support (Krauss and Chiu 1998). More recently, behavioral scientists have documented new evidence somewhat supporting the claim that language influences thought patterns or default modes of interpreting the world (e.g., Boroditsky 2001), although the validity of the linguistic relativity hypothesis remains a hotly debated issue. Until recently, however, economists have paid little attention to how languages affect economic decisions, perhaps due to the perfect rationality assumption, which posits that individuals can make logical and consistent decisions that aim to maximize their utility, independent of social, emotional, and linguistic factors. In a pioneering paper with more than 800 citations according to Google Scholar in March 2023, M. Keith Chen (2013) proposed the linguistic-savings hypothesis that the grammatical marking of the future makes people feel differently about the future – those who speak a language that requires its speakers to use future tense (e.g., English and Spanish) would feel that the future is further away, and, hence, they behave less patiently in various future-oriented behaviors than those who speak a ‘futureless’ language that does not force its speakers to use future tense (e.g., German and Chinese). Chen (2013) and many subsequent studies have documented abundant empirical evidence supporting the linguistic-savings hypothesis, although recent experimental

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-24

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evidence has started to shed doubts on the concept (Chen, He, and Riyanto 2019, Angerer et al. 2021, Jäggi et al. 2022). In this chapter, we will focus on a specific linguistic feature – pronoun drop. Pronoun drop, also known as pro-drop, refers to the grammatical feature of languages that permits certain classes of pronouns to be omitted when they are pragmatically inferable. A prominent example of pronoun drop language is Mandarin Chinese: When saying ‘今天我有考试’ (jīn tiān wǒ yǒu kǎo shì; I have a test today), Chinese speakers can simply omit the pronoun ‘I’ by saying ‘今天有考试’ (jīn tiān yǒu kǎo shì; have a test today). Another example is the common greeting ‘你吃饭了吗?’ (nǐ chī fàn le ma?; have you eaten?); Chinese speakers typically omit the pronoun ‘you’ by saying (‘吃饭了吗?’ (chī fàn le ma?; have eaten?). Other pronoun drop languages include Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, and Slavic languages. In contrast, non-pro-drop languages, such as German, French, and English, typically do not allow pronoun-dropping. In such languages, pronoun omission is considered a violation of grammatical rules and may sound unnatural to speakers. Does the linguistic feature of pronoun drop systematically influence the speakers’ judgment, perception, and decision-making, especially in economic contexts? Existing evidence from several studies support this idea. Perhaps the first attempt to examine the psycholinguistic effect of pronoun drop was by Kashima and Kashima (1998). They hypothesized that the first-person singular pronoun I is a reminder of the independent self; thus, those whose languages do not allow pro-drop would think more frequently about themselves, tending to make them more individualistic. In contrast, the linguistic licensing of pronoun drop, particularly the omission of the first-person pronoun, reduces the prominence of the speaker as a person, leading speakers of pro-drop languages to be more collectivistic than speakers of other languages. Consistent with the hypothesis, Kashima and Kashima (1998) showed that people from cultures in which the language does not permit pro-drop tend to exhibit a higher level of individualism than those from cultures in which the languages allow speakers to drop personal pronouns in a sentence. However, in what is likely the most comprehensive paper exploring global evidence on economic preferences to date, Falk et al. (2018) cast doubt on the link between pronoun drop and individualism; instead, the researchers found that pronoun drop is strongly correlated with time preference, the degree to which people are willing to forego immediate gratification in exchange for a larger reward in the future. Relatedly, Feldmann (2019) uses both individual- and country-level data to show that speakers of non-pro-drop languages have a higher probability of completing secondary or tertiary education than speakers of pro-drop languages. Although previous research, including the studies mentioned above, has established a connection between the linguistic phenomenon of pronoun drop and certain behavioral traits, the overall results are mixed. More importantly, the analyses in such studies mainly rely on cross-cultural or cross-country comparison while focusing on behavioral differences between speakers of pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages. The observed relationship in such settings could also be driven by culture rather than the linguistic structure per se. Thus, the existing literature still lacks compelling evidence to draw a firm causal conclusion. Although it may be tempting to resort to experimental methodology to establish the causal relationship, the main obstacle in doing so is that a language’s grammatical rules typically constrain the use of personal pronouns, the violation of which would cause the demand or confusion effect. Disentangling this effect from the main treatment effect that we hope to uncover is inherently difficult. In this chapter, we present a series of very recent studies in which researchers overcome that difficulty by hinging the identification strategy on a unique linguistic feature of certain pronoun-drop languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, in which the language allows speakers to freely choose whether to use personal pronouns in a sentence. The omission of personal pronouns does not change the meaning of a sentence and is grammatically acceptable. In such languages, the grammatical flexibility provides the opportunity to manipulate the use of personal pronouns in a way that sounds natural to the subjects in order to cleanly examine the effect on economic decision-making. Notably, in some studies, researchers designed a decision environment in which omitting personal pronouns in 290

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a sentence still sounded natural to participants even if the decision options were conveyed in a nonpro-drop language like English. Ultimately, this chapter aims to give an overview of current research and contributions in this nascent field and to provide an introduction to the research tools that are immediately actionable to researchers in behavioral sciences, including economics, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. The remainder of the chapter will be organized as follows. In Section 2, we summarize the theoretical background underlying the pronoun drop effect. Then, drawing on examples from Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English, we discuss how pronoun drop can be strategically used to influence intertemporal, risky, prosocial, and moral decisions in Section 3. Finally, Section 4 concludes the chapter by outlining promising avenues for future research.

2.  Theoretical background Does the omission of personal pronouns influence people’s perceptions and decision-making? At least two strands of psychological literature in social and cultural psychology have provided evidence on this intriguing area. In this section, we draw on this literature to discuss the theoretical foundation of the pronoun drop effect. The first strand of literature on the pronoun drop effect can be traced back to Kashima and Kashima (1998). In a paper published in the Journal of Cultural Psychology, they proposed that the linguistic practice of pronoun drop, particularly the omission of the first-person singular pronoun, is linked to the psychological differentiation between the speaker and the context of speech. The authors reasoned that explicit use of the pronoun I highlights the speaker as a figure against the context of the speech, whereas the absence of I reduces the speaker’s sense of independent self in the speech context. Accordingly, if a language allows its speakers to drop first- or second-person pronouns in conversations, the general tendency to pronoun drop in discourse would reduce the conceptual differentiation between the person and the context, leading to a less prominent focus on the speaker’s self. Thus, compared to non-pronoun-drop languages, pronoun drop languages are more associated with a contextualization of the person. (As noted in Kashima and Kashima [1998], contextualization means that the person is not the central focus of conceptual attention as opposed to the speech context.) As this sense of contextualization of the self is linked to the propensity for individualism, Kashima and Kashima (1998) predicted the association between pronoun drop and individualism – speakers of pro-drop languages would think less frequently about themselves than would speakers of non-prodrop languages, exhibiting a lower level of individualism (more prosocial). The researchers examined this relationship across 39 languages spoken in 71 cultures and found that, consistent with their hypothesis, cultures with pro-drop languages tended to be less individualistic than those with nonpro-drop languages. Since the publication of this seminal study, the findings have been well received in psychology and economics. Later studies reported consistent findings and extended the pro-drop effect to include other dimensions, such as a country’s economic performance (Kashima and Kashima 2003), human capital accumulation (Feldmann 2019), governance norms (Licht, Goldschmidt, and Schwartz 2007), and overall quality of government institutions (Tabellini 2010). However, due to the inability to ideally manipulate the linguistic structure of a language in controlled experiments, most existing evidence on the pronoun drop effect is primarily correlational. On the other hand, the psychological literature on self-distancing provides some compelling experimental evidence in line with the pronoun drop effect. Pioneered by Ozlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross (Ayduk and Kross 2008, Kross and Ayduk 2008), self-distancing is a psychological technique that cues people to increase the psychological distance from their own egocentric perspectives when assessing a particular situation, event, or experience (see Kross and Ayduk [2017] for a comprehensive review). Relevant research demonstrates that this psychological technique, such as by instructing participants to visualize their own negative experiences from a neutral observer’s perspective, facili291

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tates emotional regulation and wise reasoning. For instance, when adopting a self-distanced perspective, people were less emotionally aroused by negative experiences and consequently exhibited fewer aggressive behaviors when provoked (Mischkowski, Kross, and Bushman 2012), performed better under stress (Kross et al. 2014), and reasoned more wisely (Kross and Grossmann 2012, Grossmann and Kross 2014, Kross et al. 2017). More recently, this line of research shifted to the domain of language and found that a self-distancing effect can be induced through a subtle manipulation in pronoun use. Kross et al. (2014), for example, induced a self-distanced perspective by asking participants to self-talk using their own names (as opposed to using I) in socially anxious situations (e.g., delivering a public speech in front of an evaluative audience with limited preparation time). Nook, Schleider, and Somerville (2017) explored a bidirectional relationship between using distanced languages, such as those using present tense and first-person pronouns, and emotion regulation. The researchers showed, in particular, that intentionally prohibiting the use of first-person singular pronouns reduced participants’ self-reported negative affect when writing about negative images. Overall, these results are broadly aligned with Kashima and Kashima’s (1998) hypothesized pronoun drop effect in the sense that the omission of the first-person singular pronouns creates a psychological distance between the speakers and the speech context. As a native Chinese speaker, the author of this chapter would like to share some anecdotal evidence regarding how Chinese-speaking people drop the first-person singular pronoun I to spontaneously self-distance themselves from unfortunate events in everyday conversation. In Chinese culture, death and critical illness are extremely taboo conversation topics (The Economist 2018), especially for the older generation, who tends to shun away from talking about such personal misfortunes. However, when unable to avoid discussing these issues, Chinese people are typically educated to be careful about not saying I die or you die as speakers or listeners might feel like they are being ‘cursed’ (Chung 2019). Chinese people instead adopt a practical way to talk about these taboos: by either dropping the pronoun or using a third-person pronoun. This spontaneous self-distancing strategy can effectively mitigate the bad feelings. In fact, insurance agents in the greater Chinese markets are well trained and skilled in these linguistic strategies and draw on them when pitching life or critical illness insurance products to clients.

3.  Main research methods and contributions Like psychological experiments, economic experiments aim to test a hypothesis – a tentative statement about the causal relationship between a treatment variable and an outcome variable. Researchers systematically vary the treatment variable and observe its effect on outcome variables. For the scope of this chapter, the treatment variable of interest is pronoun drop; thus, participants are randomly assigned to either a control condition (decision items are conveyed using the pronoun I) or a treatment condition (the pronoun is omitted). As for the outcome variables, experimental economists typically follow standard economic preference tasks to elicit deserved outcome variables, which will be described in detail in the subsequent subsections. Here, we would like to highlight two fundamental principles that separate economic experiments from psychological experiments. First, decisions should be properly incentivized in economic experiments, so the decisions participants make should be properly incentivized in the way that participant payoffs are calculated based on the decisions. Thus, unlike participants in psychology experiments who typically receive a flat fee for their participation, the earnings from participating in economic experiments vary across participants. Although exceptions are possible, violation of this principle would likely result in an immediate rejection of a study from most economics journals. Second, deceiving participants about the goals or content of the study is largely banned in economic experiments. Although permitted in psychological research due to the needs of research design, the use of deception is, in principle, prohibited in economic experiments for reasons of lab credibility and data reliability. 292

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In the subsequent subsections, we will discuss the pronoun drop effect on various types of economic decision-making, including intertemporal decisions (Section 3.1), risky decisions (Section 3.2), prosocial decisions (Section 3.3), and moral decisions (Section 3.4). Research in these areas subtly embeds the pronoun drop manipulation in the decision items to unobtrusively examine the effects of pronoun drop on decision-making. For example, a decision option of receiving $100 in one month can be described using the first-person singular pronoun as follows: I will receive $100 in one month. In pro-drop languages such as Chinese and Japanese, the pronoun can be omitted, and the decision option can be described as (will) receive $100 in one month. Notably, although using the base form of the main verb without a subject typically expresses the imperative mood in English, seeing sentences without a subject is common in a pro-drop language such as Mandarin Chinese, especially when the subject can be easily inferred from the context. Thus, the subjects are unlikely to interpret the statement will receive $100 in one month in the ‘No Pronoun’ condition as a command in the experimental context. Accordingly, the omission of pronouns in describing monetary options does not violate any grammatical rules, so any descriptions with pronouns would remain coherent and natural to the speakers.

3.1  Intertemporal decisions Intertemporal choices refer to decisions trading off between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger, delayed reward. Many aspects of daily life, from dieting and exercising to saving and pursuing an education, involve intertemporal decision-making. When people face such choices, the ability to resist immediate gratification has long-lasting consequences on health, wealth, and well-being (Mischel et al. 1989, Golsteyn et al. 2014). A well-received theory to explain intertemporal decisions is the dual-systems model (Kahneman and Frederick 2002, Loewenstein et al. 2015), which postulates that the hot, intuitive System 1 tends to be triggered by options with immediate rewards, leading to myopic and impulsive choices, whereas the cool, reflective System 2 deliberates the relative valuation of immediate and delayed rewards and analyzes outcomes in a future-oriented perspective. The latter system results in more patient choices. Based on this dual-systems framework, then, if the emotional responses driven by immediate gratification could be effectively regulated, individuals would likely switch from the hot system to the cool system and, subsequently, make more patient choices. In other words, given that mentally stepping back from one’s own situation facilitates emotion regulation, self-distancing would inhibit the emotional impulses during the intertemporal decision-making process in the hot system. That inhibition would thereby make individuals focus on deliberating the relative valuations of the immediate and delayed rewards, which would lead to more patient choices. In a recent study, Chen and He (2021) used pronoun drop to facilitate the self-distancing effect and examined its impact on intertemporal decisions. The researchers elicited intertemporal preferences using a modified version of the multiple-price-list method (Frederick et al. 2002). The decision-making task was administered in Mandarin Chinese and consisted of 24 rounds. In each round, participants made binary choices between NTD $100 (roughly USD $3) paid today (i.e., on the day of the experiment) and a larger amount paid in m weeks, with m equal to 1, 4, and 12 to indicate the duration of delay in weeks. The larger delayed monetary amount took on eight different values: $105, $110, $115, ……, $135, and $140. The decision items were presented to the participants in a random order, and one item was randomly drawn to implement the payment. Time preference is measured by the switch point – the minimum amount at which the decision-maker is willing to switch from the immediate, smaller reward (i.e., NTD $100 paid today) to a delayed, larger reward. An earlier switch point (e.g., $110 in 1 week) indicates a higher level of patience compared to a later switch point (e.g., $120 in 1 week). Chen and He (2021) naturally embedded the pronoun drop linguistic manipulation in the description of the delayed options in the choice menu by administering two conditions: ‘I’ and 293

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‘No Pronoun’. Motivated by the linguistic self-distancing measures in Kross et al. (2014) and Nook, Schleider, and Somerville (2017), Chen and He (2021) described the monetary reward in the self-immersed ‘I’ condition using the singular first-person pronoun 我 (wǒ; I): I will receive $X in m weeks. When designing the self-distancing condition, however, the researchers did not follow the existing procedures by using non-first-person pronouns or participants’ names because replacing the pronoun I with he (she) or the participant’s name could cause confusion or anonymity concerns, respectively. The researchers instead took advantage of the linguistic feature of the Mandarin Chinese language as a pro-drop language, which allows for the omission of pronouns in a sentence, and they created the No Pronoun condition by simply omitting the pronoun in the description of the monetary reward, using will receive $X in m weeks. The omission of pronouns in describing monetary options did not violate any grammatical rules, so the descriptions remained coherent and natural to the participants. In addition, the researchers supplemented the experimental design with a complementary ‘Direct Address’ condition given that 你 (nĭ; you) is commonly used in economic experiments to convey payoff information. In this condition, the monetary reward was described as You will receive $X in m weeks, wherein you was being directed at the participant. Those in the Direct Address condition were being addressed by an external actor using a second-person singular pronoun, so participants were predicted to likely adopt a first-person perspective, just like those in the ‘I’ condition. To ensure the participants paid sufficient attention to this subtle manipulation, the options were shown to the participants while a sound clip with the options played concurrently. The finding from Chen and He (2021) is consistent with the hypothesis: the subtle pronoun drop in the description of the monetary rewards significantly reduced participants’ tendency to discount future rewards, leading to more patient choices. During the main task, participants made a total of 24 binary decisions between NTD $100 paid today and a larger amount paid on a future date. The researchers first pooled all observations and compared the proportion of the delayed options chosen in the three conditions: 55.9% in the ‘I’ condition, 59.1% in the Direct Address condition, and 69.1% in the No Pronoun condition. The results indicate that not using a pronoun to convey payoff information increases patience compared to using a first- and second-person pronoun; thus, participants appeared to be more likely to choose delayed options. To provide a more rigorous analysis, the researchers compared the average minimum amount that participants required to switch from the immediate to the delayed option (i.e., the switch point). The results showed a consistent pattern of the pronoun drop effect. For each duration of delay (1, 4, and 12 weeks) and aggregate level (i.e., mean), participants in the ‘I’ condition required the highest amount of delayed reward, followed by those in the Direct Address condition; those in the No Pronoun condition required the least amount. According to the two-sided Mann–Whitney test, the difference in the mean switch point between the No Pronoun and ‘I’ conditions was significant at the 5% level (p-value = 0.02), the difference between the No Pronoun and Direct Address conditions was marginally significant (p-value = 0.08), and the difference between the ‘I’ and Direct Address conditions was not significant (p-value = 0.52).

3.2  Risky decisions Risk preference, i.e., one’s attitude toward risk, determines a wide range of economic behaviors under risk and uncertainty in daily life, including portfolio selection, insurance purchases, heavy drinking, and aggressive driving (Barsky et al. 1997, Anderson and Mellor 2008, Sapienza, Zingales, and Maestripieri 2009). These risk behaviors can sometimes have devastating consequences, such as personal bankruptcy, serious injury, critical disease, and even death. However, many such undesirable outcomes initially stem from impulsive risky decisions. Research on psychological distancing reveals that pronoun use alters the perspective people adopt during introspection and directly influences their thoughts and feelings under social stress. For exam294

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ple, subjects who adopt a self-immersed perspective by using I to self-talk display higher levels of stress in socially anxious situations than those who adopt a self-distanced (observer) perspective by using non-first-person pronouns to self-talk (Kross et al. 2014). He (2017) hypothesized that the use of I is thought to promote a self-immersed perspective in which individuals perceive outcomes as their own gains or losses, and, subsequently, they become more risk-averse in their decision-making. Dropping I creates psychological distance between decision-makers and the ensuing outcomes, such that decision-makers feel the gain/loss less personally and behave in a less risk-averse manner. In He’s (2017) experiment, all the subjects participated in a lottery-choice experiment for a total of 12 rounds. In each round, the subjects were presented with a menu of 13 choices (rows) between a lottery option and a sure outcome option (see Figure 20.1 for a sample round). If the lottery option was chosen, the subject obtained either ‘a’ experimental tokens or ‘800-a’ tokens with equal probPlease select ‘left’ or ‘right’ in each of the following rows Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 40 for sure.

Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 80 for sure.

Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 120 for sure.

Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 160 for sure.

Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 200 for sure.

Left

Right

I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 240 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 280 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 320 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 360 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 400 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 480 for sure.

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 560 for sure.

Left

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I choose where there is a 50% chance of winning 800 and a 50% chance of winning 0.

I choose to win 640 for sure.

Left

Right

Decision

Figure 20.1  A sample round of the lottery-choice task Note: This figure illustrates a sample round in He’s (2017) lottery-choice task. The participants choose between a lottery (left) and a sure outcome (right) option in each row.

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ability. The value of a indicates the better outcome of the lottery. Twelve different values (690, 700, …, 790, 800) were used throughout the experiment. The order is randomized to counterbalance the order effect. The subjects are paid by one randomly selected decision to control for the wealth effect. The experimental earnings are converted to Singapore dollars using the 40 tokens = SGD $1 rate (roughly USD $0.7). Each option was spelled out in a short sentence to facilitate a simple manipulation of the use of the first-person singular pronoun. In the ‘I’ treatment condition, all instances of I were included. In the ‘No I’ treatment condition, all instances of I were omitted. Therefore, the I occurred 312 times in the ‘I’ treatment and 0 times in the ‘No I’ treatment over the 12 rounds of the main task. A betweensubject design was used, and the subjects under one treatment condition were unaware of the other treatment condition. He (2017) performed the experiment on a total of 108 undergraduate students in Singapore. The experiment was administered in English. Participants were randomly assigned to either the ‘I’ or the ‘No I’ conditions. Each of the 12 sessions lasted for roughly 30 minutes. The average monetary earnings were S$13.18 (roughly equivalent to US$10), including the guaranteed S$3 participation fee. Following Holt and Laury (2002), He (2017) excluded inconsistent decisions and used the number of Safe options (i.e., the options that entail sure outcomes) chosen in a round as an indicator of risk aversion. The pooled average number of Safe options was seven in the ‘I’ treatment and six in the ‘No I’ treatment. The researcher further broke down the treatment effect by lottery. For each of the 12 lottery choices, the average Safe options chosen were always higher in the ‘I’ treatment than in the ‘No I’ treatment. The treatment effect was statistically significant at the 5% or 10% levels in half of the 12 lottery choices using two-tailed Mann–Whitney tests. Overall, this result provides support for the pronoun drop effect: people are more risk-averse when the payoff information is presented using the first-person pronoun; dropping the pronoun appears to increase risk tolerance.

3.3  Prosocial decisions In economics, social preference refers to people’s tendency to care about not only one’s own material payoff but also the payoffs of others in the reference group. This prosocial tendency was largely ignored in traditional economic models but has become widely accepted by economists today. In a recent study, He et al. (2020) studied how the use of pronoun drop influences the trade-off between one’s own and others’ payoffs. The study is derived from Kashima and Kashima’s (1998) pioneering work that proposed that the linguistic licensing of pronoun drop, particularly the omission of the firstperson pronoun, is linked to the psychological differentiation between the speaker and the context of speech. Kashima and Kashima (1998) predicted that speakers of pro-drop languages would think less frequently about themselves, exhibiting a lower level of individualism (more prosocial). Using cross-cultural or cross-country data, Kashima and Kashima (1998) and subsequent researchers found ample evidence supporting the original hypothesis. However, from an economist’s perspective, one caveat is that the measures of individualism in such research are based on hypothetical survey responses rather than incentivized choices, raising potential external validity issues. Moreover, Kashima and Kashima’s (1998) study and others like it are mainly based on cross-cultural or linguistic comparisons; however, this empirical strategy prevents researchers from distinguishing the influence of the linguistic rule from the role of cultural differences that extend beyond linguistics. To address the methodological issues mentioned above, He et al. (2020) performed a large-scale incentivized online experiment to examine the causal relationship between pronoun drop and prosociality. Different from psychological studies on prosocial behaviors, the researchers followed the standard experimental economics procedure to properly incentivize subjects’ decisions using monetary incentives when eliciting social preferences. More importantly, 296

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the researchers examined the effect of the pro-drop rule on prosociality through the dropping of a first-person singular pronoun わたし (watashi; I) during communication in a decision-making task, using a single language (i.e., Japanese) that allows for the retention or omission of the pronoun. This experimental design allowed for bypassing the challenge of isolating the effects of language on decision-making and behavior from those caused by differences in cultural backgrounds. In the above experiment, the researchers measured prosociality using the Social Value Orientation (hereafter, SVO) task developed by Murphy, Ackermann, and Handgraaf (2011). The task was administered entirely in Japanese and consisted of 15 decision items: six primary items and nine secondary items. In each item, a decision-maker (DM) was presented with nine different pairs of payoffs for themself and anonymous others, and the DM then acted as a dictator by choosing the most preferred pair from nine options, as shown in Figure 20.2. The DM’s responses to the SVO items were then summarized into a single score: the SVO angle. Next, the SVO angle was used to categorize the DM’s behavioral type as altruistic, prosocial, individualistic, or competitive. By design, the nine secondary items were used to distinguish motivations for prosociality (total-payoff maximization vs. egalitarianism) once a DM was classified as prosocial. To examine the effect of a first-person singular pronoun on people’s social decision-making, the researchers then employed the between-subject design and implemented two conditions: the ‘withI’ condition and ‘without-I’ condition. In the ‘with-I’ condition, each option of the SVO items was spelled out, such as I receive 100 JPY; the other receives 50 JPY. In the ‘without-I’ condition, the researchers dropped the first-person singular pronoun, and the option was spelled out as Receive 100 JPY; the other receives 50 JPY. The first-person singular pronoun occurred 135 times in the ‘with-I’ condition and never occurred in the ‘without-I’ treatment condition throughout the SVO task. Accordingly, the linguistic manipulation was naturally embedded in the decision items so that subjects were unlikely to notice the subtle manipulation in pronoun use. To obtain a representative sample of the Japanese population, the researchers hired MyVoice Inc. to administer the online experiment on a total of 2,000 participants, who were randomized into one of the two treatment groups. Eligible subjects made decisions on 15 SVO items presented in a randomized order. One item was randomly chosen to implement payment. Then, subjects completed a post-experiment questionnaire eliciting their demographic information at the end of the study. Completing the whole survey took each participant 5–10 minutes, and the average payment was 215 JPY (roughly USD $2). Contrary to Kashima and Kashima’s (1998) hypothesis, He et al. (2020) reported a negative result. The mean SVO angle of the ‘with-I’ group in the latter study was significantly higher than that of the ‘without-I’ group (p-value = 0.04, two-sided Mann–Whitney test), indicating that the Japanese subjects exhibited a higher level of prosociality when they were repetitively exposed to the pronoun わたし (watashi; I). The researchers also found that the pronoun drop effect is more pronounced

Please choose your most preferred option from the following nine alternatives: 1. I receive 100 tokens, the other receives 50 tokens. 2. I receive 98 tokens, the other receives 54 tokens. 3. I receive 96 tokens, the other receives 59 tokens. 4. I receive 94 tokens, the other receives 63 tokens. 5. I receive 93 tokens, the other receives 68 tokens. 6. I receive 91 tokens, the other receives 72 tokens. 7. I receive 89 tokens, the other receives 76 tokens. 8. I receive 87 tokens, the other receives 81 tokens. 9. I receive 85 tokens, the other receives 85 tokens.

Figure 20.2  A sample decision item of the SVO task

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among those who are older or more educated. In addition, He et al. (2020) conducted a follow-up study to refute an alternative explanation that Japanese subjects may perceive the omission of the first-person singular pronoun as being careless or impolite, thus behaving less prosocially in the pro-drop condition. The researchers interpreted their subsequent results using the Utz (2004) selfactivation hypothesis, which postulates that the first-person singular pronoun activates one’s central values and enhances one’s inherent social-value orientation. The inherently prosocial Japanese subjects would thus behave more prosocially when primed with the first-person pronoun than when not primed.

3.4  Moral decisions At the center of moral decisions is trust, which essentially forms the foundation of the human economic system. In the absence of adequate trust, people can barely engage in transactions. Thus, in the past decade, economists have begun to understand why most people choose to behave honestly and morally. One striking but robust finding is that people are intrinsically honest: even in a tightly controlled condition with a clear monetary incentive to make a false statement, which can neither be detected nor affect others’ payoffs, subjects still lie very little (Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi 2013, Abeler et al. 2014, Gneezy et al. 2018, Abeler et al. 2019). In the economic literature on dishonesty, a common task economists use to measure lying is the coin-tossing task. In this task, subjects are asked to toss a coin 10 times privately and then report the outcome for each toss. For each coin toss, subjects can earn either a fixed amount (e.g., USD $10) if the outcome is a win or nothing otherwise. Subjects know in advance whether heads or tails would yield the monetary payoff for a specific coin toss. Although experimenters cannot observe the occurrence of lying for each trial, dishonesty can be detected at the group level by comparing the reported fraction of successful outcomes with the 50% benchmark implied by honest reporting. To examine whether, and the extent to which, children in early childhood incur the intrinsic lying cost, He and Qin (2020) modified the coin-tossing task into a child-friendly ball-withdrawing task. In this task, child participants were asked to withdraw a ball from an opaque box containing equal numbers of red and blue balls. The child would report the result of his or her ball draw to an experimenter, whose view was blocked by a black screen to eliminate concerns about lie detection. If a red ball was reported, the child could choose a reward from a box of mixed tokens. However, if a blue ball was reported, no reward was given. The task consisted of 10 trials for each child. Again, dishonesty was measured at the group level by comparing the reported fraction of ‘wins’ with the 50% benchmark. In the experiment, He and Qin (2020) administered a linguistic manipulation that aimed to heighten the perceived intrinsic lying cost. If subjects incurred the intrinsic cost of lying, they were predicted to reduce the propensity to lie in the treatment condition with a higher perceived lying cost. To test that hypothesis, the researchers designed two treatment conditions in which unobtrusive manipulation was naturally embedded into the ball-withdrawing task on a trial-by-trial basis. If randomly assigned to the heightened perceived lying cost (HC) condition, the child subjects were instructed to report the outcome of the ball-drawing using a first-person singular pronoun by saying I got a red/ blue ball. Otherwise, the child subjects simply said red/blue ball in the control condition. The above linguistic manipulation is motivated by the existing studies in psychology and communications that have previously demonstrated that individuals use fewer self-oriented pronouns (e.g., I and me) when lying than when telling the truth (Newman et al. 2003, Hancock et al. 2008). One possible explanation based on self-distancing is that, when lying and feeling guilty, people may distance themselves from the lies by dropping the self-oriented pronouns. Another strand of psychological literature on self-awareness also supports this view. Self-awareness refers to individuals’ capacity to take themselves as the object of thought – people can think, act, and experience, and they 298

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can also think about what they themselves are thinking, doing, and experiencing. Children typically demonstrate self-awareness by age 2. According to Duval and Wicklund’s (1972) objective self-awareness theory, inducing self-awareness can increase one’s self-evaluation and enhance sensitivity to social and moral norms, rules, and standards. Numerous studies in psychology provide extensive support for this theory with evidence from studies involving both adults and children. For example, Beaman et al. (1979) revealed that children are more likely to adhere to the rule (taking only one candy from the bowl) when they are individuated (by being asked their names and where they live) and when a mirror is placed in front of the candy bowl to induce self-awareness. These studies show that, in engaging with lying behavior, individuals with greater self-awareness are more likely to evaluate their lying behavior with internal standards and thus come into greater conflict with moral values. Consequently, the mandatory use of the pronoun I heightens the perceived intrinsic lying cost and is predicted to reduce children’s propensity to lie. He and Qin (2020) conducted the experiment with 225 child participants aged 3 to 8 years old. The researchers found that, although young children, on average, told two lies in the task (an average winning rate of 71%), the children lied significantly less than the maximum level (i.e., lying 100% of the time), indicating the presence of intrinsic honesty among young children. The pattern was largely similar across genders and the age range studied. The researchers also observed the pronoun drop effect in the lying task. The results showed that, if asked to report the outcome using the first-person singular pronoun (i.e., HC condition), the subjects reported an average of 6.8 wins. On the other hand, if the use of the pronoun could be omitted in their reports (i.e., control condition), subjects reported an average of 7.4 wins. The difference is statistically significant, and such outcomes mean that the subtle linguistic manipulation reduced the winning rate by roughly 9%.

4.  Future directions Pronouns are one of the most common parts of speech that occur in a sentence. Accordingly, the way a language grammatically governs the use of pronouns, such as pronoun drop, may have a profound effect on people’s perceptions and decision-making. In this chapter, we have discussed the theoretical foundation of the pronoun drop effect and demonstrated recent research on the pronoun drop effect in economic contexts, including intertemporal, risky, prosocial, and moral decisions. Overall, the existing studies suggest that, when applicable, pronoun drop can be strategically used to induce a specific set of desired behaviors. Notably, the linguistic intervention is simple and cost-efficient as it only requires the omission of pronouns in verbal or written communications. To conclude this chapter, we will discuss possible avenues for future research in this nascent field. First, current research reveals that the subtle omission of personal pronouns impacts decisions in various dimensions; however, the literature still lacks direct evidence showing the channels through which pronoun drop influences decision-making. Although we have discussed how pronoun drop can cause behavioral effects via the self-distancing mechanism in Section 3.1, subsequent research should supplement additional evidence supporting this hypothesized mechanism. Second, current research primarily relies on evidence from laboratory settings; gathering causal evidence in field settings would therefore be a worthwhile avenue for future research. Third, current research has studied the pronoun drop effect in a very small set of languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and English. Future research should therefore test the extent to which the pronoun drop effect can be extended to other language environments, especially among other flexible pro-drop languages (e.g., Indonesian) that allow speakers to switch pronouns on and off without violating a grammatical rule. Finally, in a broader sense, languages play a central role in facilitating economic transactions; however, limited research has focused on understanding how human economic behaviors and outcomes are ‘nudged’ by subtle but significant linguistic cues—a promising interdisciplinary area that requires collaboration from linguists and economists. 299

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Strategic uses of pronoun drop in economic decision-making Kross, E. and Ayduk, O. (2008). Facilitating adaptive emotional analysis: Distinguishing distanced-analysis of depressive experiences from immersed-analysis and distraction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(7): 924–938. Kross, E. and Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 55). Elsevier Inc. Kross, E. and Grossmann, I. (2012). Boosting wisdom: Distance from the self enhances wise reasoning, attitudes, and behavior. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141(1): 43–48. Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J. and Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106(2): 304–324. Kross, E., Vickers, B., Orvell, A., Gainsburg, I., Moran, T., Boyer, M., Jonides, J., Moser, J. and Ayduk, O. (2017). Nudging people toward rationality: Third person self-talk reduces Ebola anxiety and risk perception. Applied Psychology: Health & Wellbeing 9(3): 387–409. Licht, A.N., Goldschmidt, C. and Schwartz, S.H. (2007). Culture rules: The foundations of the rule of law and other norms of governance. Journal of Comparative Economics 37: 659–688. Loewenstein, G., O’Donoghue, T. and Bhatia, S. (2015). Modeling the interplay between affect and deliberation. Decision 2(2): 55–81. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y. and Rodriguez, M.L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science 244(4907): 933–938. Mischowski, D., Kross, E. and Bushman, B. (2012). Flies on the wall are less aggressive: The effect of selfdistancing on aggressive affect, cognition, and behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48: 1187–1191. Nook, E.C., Schleider, J.L. and Somerville, L.H. (2017). A linguistic signature of psychological distancing in emotion regulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146(3): 337–346. Sapienza, P., Zingales, L. and Maestripieri, D. (2009). Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(36): 15268–15273. Tabellini, G. (2010). Culture and institutions: Economic development in the regions of Europe. Journal of the European Economic Association 8(4): 677–716. The Economist. (2018). Taboos make it hard to discuss mortality in China. Available at https://www​.economist​ .com​/china​/2018​/06​/07​/taboos​-make​-it​-hard​-to​-discuss​-mortality​-in​-china (accessed 30 May 2022). Utz, S. (2004). Self-activation is a two-edged sword: The effects of I primes on cooperation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40(6): 769–776.

Further reading Ginsburgh, V. and Weber, S. (2020). The economics of language. Journal of Economic Literature 58(2): 348–404. Kashima, Y., Kashima, E.S. and Kidd, E. (2014). Language and culture. In T. Holtgraves (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 46–51. Lee, S. (2017). Rethinking the relationship between pronoun-drop and individualism with Bayesian multilevel models. Journal of Language Evolution 2(2): 188–200. Nook, E.C., Hull, T.D., Nock, M.K. and Somerville, L.H. (2022). Linguistic measures of psychological distance track symptom levels and treatment outcomes in a large set of psychotherapy transcripts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(13). Pepinsky, T.B. (2022). On Whorfian socioeconomics. Language 98(1): e44–e79.

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21 WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN A COMPUTER SAYS I? Andrew Gargett

1. Introduction Consider that since about the middle of the first decade of this century, interactions such as the following have become increasingly common: (1) User: Hi, I would like to speak to someone about my account. Chatbot: Hello. Certainly, I can connect you to the right person. Which department are you after, electricity or gas? This chapter is concerned with the use of the first-person pronoun (1SG) by computers when interacting with humans, i.e., the I in the chatbot’s response above. The familiarity of such linguistic exchanges indicates how well-integrated into the fabric of everyday life computers have become. In parallel, high-profile achievements using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, not only for board games (e.g. Deep Blue beat chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of Koreas top Go players in 2016), and game shows (Watson won a contest of Jeopardy! against former winners in 2011), but also cutting-edge science (e.g., AlphaFold won the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction in 2018), have led to increasing optimism about progress (Toews 2022). Yet, fundamental challenges remain, particularly within areas of AI focusing on natural language, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), not only technical challenges involving the complexity of natural language communication (Mitchell 2020), but also fundamental questions around responsible research especially where this is driven by very large amounts of data (e.g., Bender et al. 2021). Note that for the purposes of this chapter, ‘natural language’ is defined as any language which is/has been a ‘mother tongue’ for a group of humans. In addition to answering the question in the title of this chapter, by way of comparing human and computer use of I, we will also see how consideration of even a single pronoun, the 1SG, raises all kinds of questions and issues that are central to AI. However, other questions which could be asked but are out of scope for this chapter include whether a computer ever means anything at all by its use of the 1SG, or indeed by any of the language it might produce – such additional questions require an account of the intentional behaviour of computer agents as language users, which is a longstanding and very much unresolved area of research (e.g. Dennett 1989, Papagni et al. 2021). These further questions raise fundamental considerations about what it means to use a language, and

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whether there are ways of determining whether linguistic competence in computers is even possible, such as membership of a language community being a pre-requisite to becoming a fully competent language user in the way that human language users are. Such issues and related ones are touched on throughout this chapter, and while acknowledging their significance, for the most part interested readers will be directed to relevant literature. By way of pre-empting a possible mis-reading of the chapter heading, we should note this chapter will not tackle related questions such as ‘What does a/the computer mean when it says I?’, since questions about the minds of computers are far beyond what we can properly consider here (and even those in favour of the ‘intentional stance’ tend to avoid it, e.g. Dennett 1997, also see remarks on ‘Complexity of Intentional Systems’ in Papagni et al. 2021). One naïve reply to the question of what a computer means might be: whatever the human programmer of the computer system intended it to mean. Similar responses could be used for not only animals, for example parrots taught to mimic the speech of their human trainers/owners, but also for pre-linguistic children who enter a language in large part through mimicry of their primary carers. Of course, this presumes an account of linguistic meaning based on what a speaker/writer intended (e.g. Grice 1991). However, note that there is nothing analogous to this situation with what is meant by a human having grasp of at least one language saying I – it would be nonsensical for someone to claim that their use of the 1SG means whatever the person who taught them to use it intended by its use (and assuming a single person teaches another how to speak a language is of course highly unlikely anyway). Of course, even if it is accepted that computer systems such as robots can meaningfully use the expression I (we will see later there may be reasons for doubting this), this raises a range of questions about what is actually going on in such a case, answers to which would, in turn, provide insights about lingering challenges on the conceptual side of Artificial Intelligence. A further ambiguity concerns the distinction between meaning in a narrower, ‘linguistic’ sense versus the wider psycho-social-cultural setting of language use. A major focus of this chapter is on the linguistic meaning of the 1SG. However, the broader social significance of computers’ use of aspects of natural language, such as 1SGs, which may lead to humans accepting some level of agency (perhaps authority) on the part of the computer system, raises all kinds of urgent questions and considerations about the wider psychological, social and cultural risks posed by such systems. There is some discussion of such issues in what follows. Of course, central to this chapter is the need for at least a working definition of ‘meaning’, and to this end, the chapter begins with brief overviews of details of both the meaning of the 1SG, as well as aspects of AI, that are relevant to the rest of the chapter. These sections aim to provide necessary technical background in both linguistics and AI to enable a general audience to follow the discussion on issues around the use of 1SGs by AI systems in later sections of this chapter. We then present a brief, high-level overview of approaches to developing AI relevant to the wider discussion in this chapter around what it means for a computer to be using the 1SG. Finally, we draw various threads from earlier parts of the chapter together, to try to formulate an overall answer to the question of what it means when a computer says I.

2.  Background to meaning This section provides a somewhat selective account of what it means for someone to use the 1SG – given that the literature on this topic is vast, the main aim here is to set the ground for considering the use of the 1SG by computers. To this end, a helpful place to start is the following quote from Wittgenstein (1953): ‘I’ is not the name of a person, nor ‘here’ of a place, and ‘this’ is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It is also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words (Wittgenstein, PI 1, 410, emphasis added). 303

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As noted by Wittgenstein, ‘I’, ‘here’, or ‘now’ enable language users to flexibly pick out and track information about everyday events regarding speaker, location, or time, respectively. However, such linguistic items are not reducible to the standards or conventions of physics, such as the International System of Units to measure time (via UTC coordinates) or location (via GPS coordinates) of a speaking event, and there are no analogues in physics for ideas like the identity of a speaker (something which we will come back to later). But there are a range of complications in unpacking what it might mean for any agent to use the 1SG, human or artificial, and this is what the current section aims to do. The 1SG, realised by a morphophonemically separate word I in English (other languages are considered below), belongs to a broader class of linguistic phenomena variously termed ‘indexicals’ (Jackobson [1957] 1971), ‘shifters’ (Silverstein 1976), ‘deictics’ (Levinson 2004), etc. The study of what is often termed ‘indexicality’ in human communication more generally (Levinson 2004) has been distributed across anthropology, semiotics, and the like (Moore 2020); indeed, in such broader work, there is sometimes a distinction between referential forms of indexicality (sometimes also termed deixis, Levinson 2004) and non-referential indexicality (covering the ways a person’s body, language, clothes, etc., may indicate all kinds of social-cultural information about them, including about their sex/gender, emotional state, respect, social memberships, etc). Expressions such as 1SGs uniquely straddle such classifications, having both a referential function (linguistically indicating salient information about the situation of communication), and yet are also a bit like physical pointing, bodily gesturing, and the like (Levinson 2004). What is common across the meaning of such expressions is that this depends on the immediate spatiotemporal setting in which the item is used. Labels for this setting have included ‘context’ (Fetzer 2017, Blommaert et al. 2020), ‘background’, ‘frame’ (Fillmore 1982), and ‘situation’ (Kratzer 2021), and they can cover not only what is physically observable, but also what has been called to mind, and/or what might in some sense be determining, constraining, or simply guiding the behaviour of those communicating (including culture, style, register, etc.). Much of the work on the indexicality of language throughout the twentieth century focused on philosophical conundrums raised by such phenomena (see reviews in Martin and Hinzen 2014, Braun 2017). A key moment from the beginnings of such work is Pierce’s ([1867] 1982) distinction between icons (a sign, elsewhere in semiotics termed signifier, that resembles its object, i.e., signified, for example, a portrait painting may resemble the person being painted), indexes (signs that depend on the situation in which they are used for their meaning, such as smoke indicating fire), and symbols (signs that are more a matter of convention, including natural language). It should be noted that Pierce came to understand that many aspects of our daily communication involve some combination of all three kinds of signs (Atkin 2013). Another noteworthy contribution, which came somewhat later, is Kaplan’s (1989) classification of the items mentioned in the earlier Wittgenstein quote, I, here, and now, as ‘pure indexicals’, distinct from ‘true demonstratives’ (e.g., she, he, her, his, that). For Kaplan, the content of the former is uniquely determined by information from their context of use (e.g., the speaker determines who I refers to, the present location determines where here is), whereas for the latter, content and reference depend on the speaker’s intention (plus accompanying demonstrations, thus the label for this class). However, an intriguing case raised by John Perry’s case of the so-called messy shopper, suggests Kaplan’s account is at best incomplete: I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my car down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally, it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a mess. And I was right. But I didn’t believe that I was making a mess. This seems to be something I came to believe. And 304

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when I came to believe that, I stopped following the trail around the counter, and rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to explain my change in behaviour (Perry 1979: 167). Note in this account the central role of the 1SG in the protagonist’s realisation that they are themselves the messy shopper they have been looking for – while the third-person reference they used earlier to refer to the mysterious messy shopper is co-referring, nevertheless the 1SG is irreplaceable as a means of gaining the important insight that the messy shopper is in fact themself. For Perry and those following his work, the 1SG, otherwise termed the ‘essential indexical’, crucially provides the speaker a way of accessing so-called first-person attitudes (Corazza and Genovesi 2021: 338). Although the speaker uniquely determines the referent of I, in the other direction, the first-person reference (‘I am the messy shopper’) determines the agency of the speaker as the one making the mess. While the detail and rigour of the long-standing formal and philosophical literature related to the 1SG has proven useful to researchers in AI (some of which is sampled below), and has usefully facilitated broader, cross-disciplinary discussion of the indexicality of natural language, such work has for the main part focused on individual speakers. Yet, arguably communication involving two or more people is the more natural site for investigating linguistic phenomena (Pickering and Garrod 2021), particularly indexicality. Other disciplines, especially in the social sciences, including sociology and ethnomethodology, have indeed investigated this aspect of indexicals. Lynch (2019) provides an overview of social scientific work on indexicals, although there is overlap with the formal and philosophical work discussed earlier (including common origins in the work of Pierce). Thus, Moore’s (2020) proposal that aspects of the social identity of a speaker (including features of their language, such as dialect, or features of their communication, such as register) stem from the indexicality of natural language, is in some respects similar to speakers using firstperson attitudes (Corazza and Genovesi 2021) for self-identity, to identify themselves as speaker. Nevertheless, the emphasis across these disciplines is somewhat different – rather than distinguishing first- from third-person attitude during speaking events (as is done in more philosophically motivated work), Lynch distinguishes between ‘“context-free” or “objective” knowledge’ vs. contextually anchored expressions such as indexicals (cf. ‘indexical knowledge’ in Lespérance and Levesque 1995, discussed below), where such objective knowledge might well include, for instance, the time and location of a speaking event (recall the earlier quote from Wittgenstein echoing a similar distinction between everyday vs. scientific understanding). Lynch notes the practice in Machine Translation of substituting indexicals for this more ‘objective’ information (e.g., ‘here’ or ‘now’ might be replaced with specific location and time), pointing out how social scientists, such as Garfinkel (1967), objected to such substitution in the social sciences while nevertheless acknowledging its usefulness in natural science. This empirical perspective in social scientific research, often missing from earlier philosophical discussion of indexicals, usefully raises broader consideration about the entangling of language with surrounding environment during communication. Within linguistics, the field of pragmatics accounts most directly for the interaction between language and environment, and pragmatics perhaps promises a way within linguistics of bridging between more formal, philosophical accounts and more empirical accounts of indexicals. From a linguistic pragmatics view on indexicality, Levinson (2006) illustrates extensively how language and the setting in which it is used are seamlessly knitted together for meaningful effect, such as in the following: (2) a. He is my father (said of man entering the room) b. Someone is coming (said with ear cocked to a slamming door) c. The funny noise is our antiquated dishwashing machine (said pointing chin to kitchen) d. What a great picture! (said looking at a picture) 305

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Similarly with more formal/philosophical accounts, Levinson (2006: 103–104) explicitly argues for the non-eliminative nature of indexical expressions (emphasis in original): [Indexical expressions] resist eliminative paraphrase into non-indexical objective description – I am Stephen Levinson cannot be paraphrased as Stephen Levinson is Stephen Levinson. The speaker of this utterance is Stephen Levinson gets closer, but fails to eliminate the indexical component now shifted to this and introduces token-reflexivity. Here, Levinson is largely in agreement with formal accounts (including philosophically inspired accounts employing mathematical logic to model linguistic indexicality, e.g., Partee et al. 1990: 427– 428) that what cannot be eliminated is the dependency of an indexical expression on the context of its use. However, Levinson goes beyond more formal accounts by linking the setting of language use to broader aspects of the surrounding environment, including social and psychological meanings, not only physical features. In this way, the 1SG is more than simply a means for presenting oneself as a speaker, but also links to various social roles and the like, such as when the committee chairperson removes themself from office by stating ‘I resign’. This suggests that the indexicality of 1SGs operates all the way up to the entire sociocultural setting. Indeed, communicative settings are many layered, with the linguistic knowledge of individual speakers (e.g., how to combine the subject I with the verb resign) being encapsulated by wider knowledge about social roles (e.g., proper conduct of a committee chairperson), all of which only makes sense against a shared background of practices, beliefs, and knowledge. Investigation of such complex sociocultural aspects of the meanings of indexicals goes some way beyond the focus on first-person attitudes in philosophical accounts. Indeed, the increased scope that comes with taking a pragmatic perspective on communication presents challenges to AI, as we will see below. Taking the pragmatic account of indexicals further, Jaszczolt (2018) extends consideration of the range of ways for expressing beliefs about oneself (sometimes referred to as beliefs de se) to patterns such as: (3) a. Surely yours truly can help. b. Let Mummy tie your laces? c. So doofus here handed his credit card number over, and guess what happened next? Jaszczolt also provides a range of cross-linguistic examples to show more generally that the inventory of apparent pragmatic indexicals includes far more than simply the 1SG or the form of this in some language or other. This account throws in doubt whether there is, in fact, a special class of linguistic items and leads to an account of linguistic indexicality covering a much broader range of phenomena whereby all manner of linguistic items can be used to achieve self-reference. Finally, no linguistically oriented account of the 1SG would be complete without some mention of language acquisition. Narrowing this to first-language acquisition, seminal work here has been carried out by Eve Clark (2001, Section 2.4), who points out that the acquisition of the 1SG (importantly, there can be variation in terms of how different case forms are learnt) often proceeds by children using ‘notions that do not receive any conventional expression in the language they are learning’. Thus, children might decide that I vs. me encodes a distinction in agency, so that perhaps one form encodes more control than the other over the action taking place. Clark points out that this attempt by children to innovate a category of agency for these pronouns are examples of what she terms ‘emergent’ categories; while such categories are a potential source of innovation in a language, this particular category in English typically gives way to the adult convention.

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This section has selectively reviewed aspects of 1SG that are useful in the rest of this chapter. The next section provides a similarly selective overview of AI, and the threads introduced in these initial sections will be drawn together for detailed discussion of computers using the 1SG throughout the rest of the chapter.

3.  Background to AI Investigation of the use of natural language by computers is the central challenge of Natural Language Processing (NLP). When considering AI systems that use natural language to replicate human communication, we can distinguish between systems that have a general capacity for everyday communication versus systems that are narrowly capable of a small number of component tasks of such communication (answering spoken or written questions from customers, analysing sentiment in a product review, translating a Turkish legal contract into Ukrainian, etc.). At present, only AI systems with narrow capabilities are in widespread use, especially when it comes to commercial applications. Replicating intelligent behaviour in computers is a long-standing objective of AI. Modern efforts to do so stem from Alan Turing’s (1950) proposal that a computer could be described as thinking if its behaviour on some complex task (say engaging in an extended conversation with a human interlocutor) is indistinguishable from a human carrying out the same task (for a detailed introduction to Turing 1950, see Copeland 2004). While Turing’s original proposal is far more nuanced than a simple suggestion that AI should aim to replicate human behaviour, nevertheless, what has come to be known as the ‘Turing test’ is often taken to represent efforts within AI to achieve the objective of replicating human-level intelligence in computers. Note that additional objectives have arisen throughout the history of AI (Russell and Norvig 2021). It should be pointed out that such work on replicating human behaviour typically focuses on narrowly defined tasks. Developing AI systems with more general capabilities is a far more difficult challenge (Bisk et al. 2020, Bishop 2021), and, indeed, addressing this challenge requires solving substantial parts of the rest of AI (and thereby counts as a so-called ‘AI-complete’ problem, Shahaf and Amir 2007). The notion of complementarity is a useful counterpoint to that of replication. While prospects for achieving replication are at best piecemeal, complementarity is arguably already widespread. As Acemoglu et al. (2021) have recently pointed out: At best, [the Turing test] was only one way of articulating machine intelligence. Turing himself, and other technology pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart and Norbert Wiener, understood that computers would be most useful to business and society when they augmented and complemented human capabilities, not when they competed directly with us. [Yet w]ith surprisingly little attempt to develop an alternative vision, it has increasingly come to mean surpassing human performance in tasks such as vision and speech, and in parlor games such as chess and Go. This framing has become dominant both in public discussion and in terms of the capital investment surrounding AI. For Acemoglu et al., whereas focus on replication has led to slower than expected adoption of AI technology within industry, complementarity has emerged as a viable alternative paradigm for designing such technology, particularly in the creative fields. Of course, this kind of critique of technology, especially of its role in society, is long-standing (particularly within the sociological and philosophical literature, see Coeckelbergh 2019), and recent heightened concerns around AI technology (Russell 2023) have, in turn, increased the urgency around such debate. Measuring progress in such a fast-moving and complex area as AI technology has also led to reassessments, where the term AI is even being taken to mean ‘augmented intelligence’ by some (this 307

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expression sometimes being taken as synonymous with AI complementarity, Bentley 2022). Finally, replication vs. complementary is related to another distinction, between direct modelling of explicit characteristics (such as those assumed to be characteristically human, like goal-driven behaviour of rational agents; see Russell and Norvig 2010) versus the less direct approach of computational modelling (where a system learns by itself what is a successful strategy for addressing the challenges it faces; see Valiant 2013). Consider an answering system for taking food orders, which, if necessary, redirects callers to a human. The chatbot manages the interaction using a pre-built template or script (such as a script-forordering-food), which acts as a template, including a sequence of slots that conversational partners can fill in with appropriate items: (4) User: Hi, I'd like to order a pizza. Chatbot: Hello. Certainly, what sort of pizza would you like? User: I'd like a vegan Margherita. Chatbot: Sorry, there is a problem with your order, please wait while I connect you to someone who can help. In the last turn of this dialogue, the chatbot system responds as it does because it has not recognised the user’s turn as one covered by the script it is using, which then triggers it to hand over the call to a human, and thereby, in a sense, fail gracefully. This is a standard strategy in designing such systems, and such limitations are a common issue with template-based systems (the most common type in production at present). Nevertheless, such complementary ways of working between humans and machines can be quite effective, even for quite simple systems. However, notice something else about the exchange above – in terms of the computer system’s role in such a dialogue, templates reduce interaction to filling in narrowly defined slots, one after another. While this is a simple, yet effective strategy given the high degree of repetition in these kinds of dialogues, a central component to meaning is choice, in that what we say in a conversation is meaningful because it has been chosen over something else we might have said (but did not). Consequently, since such choice is replaced by a dialogue template designed prior to actual communication, the conversational contributions of template-based chatbots are only meaningful insofar as they complement human contributions, with successful dialogue depending on what the human understands rather than what the chatbot means. The question heading this chapter then changes to something closer to ‘what can be understood when a computer says I?’. This view of AI systems, such as chatbots, as occupying a role somewhat closer to tools than conversational interlocutors is not unexpected from a historical perspective. Throughout history, artificial agents have persistently been viewed as somehow dual in nature: on the one hand, like machines, they are crafted from materials in the surrounding environment, leading to their being viewed as tools, albeit sophisticated ones; on the other hand, they are also somehow imbued with mental and other comparably human qualities. While being designed, they are also in some way autonomous, and they even exhibit some form of intelligence. As Mayor (2018) has noted, for the Greeks and other ancient societies, such creatures were understood as being ‘made, not born’. Mayor takes a broad view on such stories, considering them as part of the wider social and cultural context around technology, and, indeed, they point to a fascination with what Mayor terms ‘biotechne’ – in other words, ‘life through craft’. However, it might be argued that AI technology in comparison is more clearly a designed ‘tool’, able to carry out simple sub-tasks, particularly within the context of a larger set of more complex tasks that are normally carried out by humans. From the discussion immediately above, the dilemma seems to be the following: While the form of agency designed into chatbot systems and the like seems to enable them to complement human behaviour, it is still unknown whether such systems are able to fully replicate this behaviour (no such

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system has yet been created). To clarify the issues at stake, consider the following description of the communicative scenario presented in (4): (i)

A user initiates the conversation by issuing both a greeting and placing an order for a pizza in their initial turn; (ii) a chatbot system employs a template to successfully categorise both the GREETING and the ORDER, responding to the former using a pre-formulated response and the latter with a preformulated clarification regarding type of pizza; (iii) the user understands the clarification about the order, and specifies the type of pizza; (iv) due to limitations in the templates it uses, the chatbot system fails to categorise the user’s clarification, which triggers a failsafe action that alerts a human user to the need for intervention. Such template-based chatbots merely mimic the patterns of behaviour required to play a constructive role in the communication, without any need for the kind of deliberate communicative behaviour humans depend on. Therefore, the chatbot in (4) is a kind of tool, complementing the human’s attempts to achieve their goal of ordering a pizza. In terms of the broader themes of this chapter, along similar lines, a chatbot can be designed to use the 1SG in a way that humans can understand in order that humans are able to extend their reach across time and space to achieve their aims. However, this does not seem to involve humans and machines jointly performing complex sets of activities. Importantly, this implies a quite limited agency for machines; indeed, such agency almost certainly does not include first-person attitudes. Finally, an important issue mentioned earlier in this chapter concerns ethical considerations around the objective of building AI technology that replicates human conversation. Discussions in this chapter have considered issues around the so-called intentional stance (Dennet 1989), and some researchers have even proposed benefits of deliberately encouraging the adoption of this stance in users of chatbots and similar technology (Perez-Osorio and Wykowska 2020, Papagni and Koeszegi 2021). Some research has also shown the capacity for this technology to invoke this stance in users, where people interacting with an iCub robot in certain scenarios were strongly inclined to explain the robot’s behaviour in terms of mental states rather than in mechanical terms (e.g., when describing the robot’s behaviour, preferring the description ‘iCub understood that the girl wants the ball’ over the equally possible description ‘iCub tracked the girl’s hand movements’; Marchesi et al. 2019). However, caution should be exercised here, given the risks of technology being used remotely to gain the trust of and manipulate vulnerable individuals. The wider discussion includes not only what is possible to achieve with such technology, but also how to use it responsibly, particularly for technology that is essentially designed to simulate conversations.

4. Bringing I to the foreground Reflecting on the earlier discussion about indexicals, and recalling Wittgenstein’s notions about everyday versus scientific understandings of the speaking event, we could consider what it might mean for a mobile form of AI such as a robotics platform, to converse with a human, while tracking time and location using UTC and GPS coordinates, respectively. Indeed, perhaps for designers of such platforms, using here or now might well be reduced to measuring time or location (as per Wittgenstein’s point). However, there are obvious drawbacks of doing this, including: (1) use of time and location tracking technology is completely different from what human language users are doing, and (2) we are no closer to working out what it means when such systems use something like the 1SG. Yet, something like this approach has been pursued in AI. For example, Lespérance and Levésque (1995), inspired by Perry’s idea that ‘indexicality is an essential feature of propositional attitudes’ (Lespérance and Levesque 1995: 76), claim that:

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[A]n agent [e.g. a robot] may have sufficient knowledge to be able to achieve his (sic, throughout quotation) goals even if he does not know: • where he is; • what time it is; • which objects are around him; • where these objects are located (in absolute terms); • who he is. (Lespérance and Levesque 1995: 71) Note the rather odd choice of pronoun here, effectively imputing both animacy and male gender to a robot agent, and how this relates directly to the discussion of Mayor (2018) in the last section. On this account, the various forms of objective knowledge listed in the above quote (i.e., where, what, who, etc.) are neither necessary nor sufficient for an agent to act to achieve its goals. Lespérance and Levesque (1995: 70–71) argue that an agent requires so-called indexical (or relative) knowledge for action, which is to say, knowledge about ‘how one is related to things in the environment or to events in one’s history’. Other accounts similarly suggest that the challenge of the essential indexical can be avoided for AI agents. For example, Teller (2011) makes a strong case for avoiding the seemingly insurmountable challenge of developing AI agents capable of expressing ‘first-person attitudes’ by providing robots with ways of processing the necessary information, such as its own location, its possessions, and the like, using models more familiar from physics, without requiring the machine to attach a first-person attribute to such information. Such approaches enable avoiding philosophical conundrums regarding whether artificial agents (e.g., robots) are capable of using the 1SG in a way comparable to humans. While approaches such as those of Lespérance and Levesque or Teller provide comprehensive, indeed mathematically explicit accounts of the knowledge required by an agent to act in the world, they are a bit like Perry’s (1979) messy shopper scenario except that the protagonist never discovers the identity of the messy shopper even after they have found this shopper (specifically, they never find out they are, in fact, the one making the mess). As Lespérance and Levesque (1995: 101) point out, the natural world provides plenty of good examples of ‘very simple agents, say insects; it would not seem all that unusual to have them not know who they are; in fact, one is hard pressed to come up with good reasons for them to need to know who they are’. Of course, at this point we are clearly a long way from accounts of what it means for a human agent to use the 1SG. Other researchers in this field are more direct in how to incorporate the challenge of the firstperson in AI systems such as robots. For example, Brody et al. (2016) have explicitly related symbol grounding to issues around indexicality in language, in particular, the essential indexical, in order to investigate what they term ‘grounded self-symbols’ (emphasis added). For Brody et al., self-symbols can be any linguistic items referring to the self, exemplified by the 1SG. They give a series of examples for why self-symbols need to be carefully handled, including the following, which is particularly relevant to this chapter (Brody et al. 2016: 17): [A]ny use of the term ‘I’ by our robots should be grounded in the robot’s actual experiences – rather than inferred through some correlate. One strong reason for this is that correlates tend to be imperfect and have a strong chance of being inadequate in a complex range of uncertain circumstances. Note the problematic language used here, where situations in which the robots are used to carry out some task are described as the basis for ‘actual experiences’, and ascribing anthropomorphic features to AI in this way, otherwise known as ‘wishful mnemonics’, is a long-standing issue (e.g. McDermott 1976). A major concern with developing an artificial agent capable of tracking physical correlates of

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itself is that suitable real-world scenarios require such correlates to be drawn from a dynamic environment. Yet, Brody et al. (2016) note possible challenges such an agent might face when tasked with recognising it is itself speaking, say if a change to physical correlates of its own voice (e.g., hardware malfunction) happens to occur, or even perhaps where confusion is caused by another robot in its vicinity with the same voice software and hardware installed. However, as Brody et al. point out, humans ‘are quite robust in the face of all kinds of such variance’ (2016: 17). Such examples illustrate a well-established point that grounding involves more than simply replacing indexicals with information representing aspects of the situation (e.g., Perry 1979). Indeed, reflexively thinking about oneself, becomes particularly important around how an awareness of one’s own actions is crucial for moral responsibility, and it is here that the nature and limits of artificial agents are revealed most clearly. For example, from a more theoretical consideration, Sebastián and Rudy‑Hiller (2021) pursue the connection between having awareness about one’s own actions in the first person, and the capacity for an agent to be responsible for such actions. One implication is that while Lespérance and Levesque’s (1995) agents might be capable of a kind of thirdperson agency, they would be stuck at an insect-level in terms of responsibility for their actions, given lack of first-person awareness, and there is a real sense of such agents being incapable of particularly critical roles, such as controlling an autonomous vehicle. Opening up the account to include first-person awareness of cultural norms and attitudes, as required by moral agency, presents a challenge to the formal accounts we have considered so far, with their much narrower focus on the kinds of de se attitudes expressed by the 1SG. Yet, moral reasoning requires a more tacit, everyday kind of knowledge, rather different from the formalisable, declarative sort of knowledge that Lespérance and Levesque (1995), Teller (2011), and also Brody et al. (2016) consider. These challenges have recently been exemplified by research into enabling moral reasoning in autonomous vehicles (Awad et al. 2018). Of particular relevance is the so-called trolley problem (first introduced in Foot 1978), which over the last decade or so has come to refer to a collection of moral dilemmas around the problem of distinguishing doing from allowing harm. On one example of this problem, a trolley driver must choose whether or not to turn a trolley from killing one innocent person tied to tracks to another path that would lead to five innocent people standing on tracks being killed. Yet, a variety of critiques have been raised about such efforts to design moral reasoning into autonomous vehicles. Of particular relevance here, it has been pointed out that efforts to replicate human moral decision-making in an autonomous vehicle is somewhat misaligned with what such a vehicle would actually be doing, which is calculating the situations to avoid given some set of pre-specified scenarios (Mirnig and Meschtscherjakov 2019: 8): ‘Instead of asking the vehicle who it would kill in case of an ethical dilemma, it seems much more sensible to ask whether it correctly switches between radar and lidar depending on weather conditions’. In other words, rather than replicating moral decision-making, such systems are better tasked with complementing human decision-making (thus the higher speed, accuracy and reliability of the calculations the system can achieve enhancing human contributions to the decision problem at issue). Note the similarity between Mirnig and Meschtscherjakov’s mechanical description and that from the discussion of example (4) at the end of the previous section. Taking into account decision-making required by moral agency means broadening the scope of the account of linguistic meaning being considered. Indeed, a better match for this would be the account proposed by Jaszczolt (2018) discussed in the previous section, which describes linguistic indexicality as a functional category, considering uses or roles to determine what counts as indexicals in a language, allowing a far greater range of linguistic resources than simply specific classes of pronouns and the like. Indeed, the perspective provided by Jaszczolt (2018) provides a formal proposal for broadening the scope of indexicality to incorporate the kinds of cultural knowledge required by moral agency.

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Taking stock: in an attempt to work out what an adult language user might understand by a computer’s use of the 1SG, we have relaxed linguistic constraints while still insisting on a central role for first-person attributions, in moral behaviour and the like. Yet, we are surely still at an impasse: just as an autonomous vehicle cannot be trusted to know what is right from wrong (regardless of its performance) when sharing the road with pedestrians, a chatbot cannot be trusted to make moral decisions despite its capacity to use I or any other pragmatic indexical. These are only machines after all, which at best augment our behaviour – but why does this obstacle remain? One possible answer arises from the work of Christiansen and Chater (2016, 2022), who have developed a rigorous case for improvisation as the basis for successful communication between humans, drawing on results from a wealth of scientific research. For them, evidence of the kinds of cognitive resources humans typically utilise to cope with the challenges of conversational interaction is better accounted for in terms of knowledge that is ‘ad hoc, provisional and invented on the spot’, than ‘pre-formed building blocks of knowledge’ (Chater 2018: 30). This latter ‘pre-formed’ knowledge is typically presumed by the sorts of symbolic AI approaches we have seen so far (e.g., Lespérance and Levesque 1995, Teller 2011, Brody et al. 2016), that aim to construct elaborate representations of the information linguistic items provide as input to formal reasoning processes. Interestingly, according to Christiansen and Chater, the evidence for complex human behaviour (such as conversational interaction) being driven by improvisation points to humans using fast, here-andnow processing in their everyday activities (versus richly elaborate reasoning presupposed by the formal accounts we have examined in this chapter) (Christiansen and Chater 2016: 112). Yet, replication of skilled improvisational performance is far beyond current AI, which at best might provide tools to complement human performance.

5.  Future directions Through bringing together ideas and perspectives that are perhaps not so often in contact, to consider what could be understood by a computer using the 1SG, we have arrived at conclusions pointing to the limits of such technology and, specifically, around responsible use of AI. In particular, insofar as such technology is unable to replicate a first-person perspective, then this rules out allowing it to be used in purely autonomous mode, for example, in vehicles or in settings involving sensitive or personally identifying information. It would seem that, at least for the foreseeable future, AI technology is destined to have far more impact as a means of complementing rather than replicating human behaviour. Regarding the shift from replication to complementarity, both opportunities and limitations are evident. On the one hand, the technology itself seems eminently useful as a means of augmenting human behaviour, and the benefits here are only beginning to be explored. On the other hand, given evidence that replicating human-level intelligence is likely to depend on the replication of improvisation, something that is still poorly understood, the likelihood that such technology will in the near future move beyond complementing human endeavour is highly doubtful.

References Acemoglu, D., Jordan, M.I. and Weyl, E.G. (2021). The Turing test is bad for business: Technology should focus on the complementarity game, not the imitation game. Wired Ideas. Available at https://www​.wired​.com​/story​ /artificial​-intelligence​-turing​-test​-economics​-business/ (accessed 20 April 2022). Atkin, A. (2013). Peirce's theory of signs. In E.N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition). Available at https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/sum2013​/entries​/peirce​-semiotics/ (accessed 20 April 2022). Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J.-F. and Rahwan, I. (2018). The moral machine experiment. Nature 563(7729): 59–64.

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What does it mean when a computer says I? Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. and Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 610–623. Bentley, P. (2022). Augmented intelligence: What it is and why it will be smarter than AI. Science Focus. Available at https://www​.sciencefocus​.com​/future​-technology​/augmented​-intelligence/ (accessed 20 April 2022). Bishop, J.M. (2021). Artificial intelligence is stupid and causal reasoning will not fix it. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 513474. Bisk, Y., Holtzman, A., Thomason, J., Andreas, J., Bengio, Y., Chai, J., Lapata, M., Lazaridou, A., May, J., Nisnevich, A., Pinto, N. and Turian, J. (2020). Experience grounds language. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 8718–8735. Blommaert, J., Smits, L. and Yacoubi, N. (2020). Context and its complications. In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–69. Braun, D. (2017). ‘Indexicals’. In E.N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition). Available at https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/sum2017​/entries​/indexicals/ (accessed 20 April 2022). Brody, J., Barham, S., Dai, Y., Maxey, C., Perlis, D., Sekora, D. and Shamwell, J. (2016). Reasoning with grounded self-symbols for human-robot interaction. In 2016  AAAI Fall Symposium Series, pp. 16–19. Chater, N. (2018). The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind. London: Penguin UK. Christiansen, M.H. and Chater, N. (2016). Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christiansen, M.H. and Chater, N. (2022). The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. Bantam Press. Clark, E.V. (2001). Emergent categories in first language acquisition. In M. Bowerman and S.C. Levinson (eds) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (No. 3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 379–405. Coeckelbergh, M. (2019). Skillful coping with and through technologies. AI and Society 34(2): 269–287. Copeland, B.J. (ed.) (2004). The Essential Turing. Clarendon Press. Corazza, E. and Genovesi, C. (2021). The ‘I’ in the monad: Leibniz and the essential indexical. JOLMA 2(2): 336–352. Dennett, D.C. (1989). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dennett, D.C. (1997). True, believers: The intentional strategy and why it works. In J. Haugeland (ed). Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (revised and enlarged edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 57–79. Fetzer, A. (2017). Context. In Y. Huang (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford University Press. Fillmore, C.J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.) Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company, pp. 111–137. Foot, P. (1978). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. In Virtues and Vices and Other Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 19–33. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Grice, H.P. (1991). Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press. Jackobson, R. ([1957] 1971). Shifter, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb: Selected Writings of Roman Jackobson. The Hague: Mouton. Jaszczolt, K. (2018). Pragmatic indexicals. In M. Huang and K.M. Jaszczolt (eds) Expressing the Self: Cultural Diversity and Cognitive Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 260–286. Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology of demonstratives and other indexicals. In J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein (eds) Themes From Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 481–563. Kratzer, A. (2021). Situations in natural language semantics. In E.N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Available at https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2021​/entries​/situations​ -semantics/ (accessed 20 April 2022). Lespérance, Y. and Levesque, H.J. (1995). Indexical knowledge and robot action—A logical account. Artificial Intelligence 73(1–2): 69–115. Levinson, S.C. (2004). Deixis. In L.R. Horn and G.L. Ward (eds) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 97–121. Lynch, M. (2019). Indexicality. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J.W. Sakshaug and R.A. Williams (eds) Sage Research Methods Foundations. doi: 10.4135/9781526421036818823.

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Andrew Gargett Marchesi, S., Ghiglino, D., Ciardo, F., Perez-Osorio, J., Baykara, E. and Wykowska, A. (2019). Do we adopt the intentional stance toward humanoid robots? Frontiers in Psychology 10: 450. Martin, T. and Hinzen, W. (2014). The grammar of the essential indexical. Lingua 148: 95–117. McDermott, D. (1976). Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity. ACM SIGART Bulletin (57): 4–9. Mirnig, A.G. and Meschtscherjakov, A. (2019). Trolled by the trolley problem: On what matters for ethical decision making in automated vehicles. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–10. Mitchell, M. (2020). On crashing the barrier of meaning in artificial intelligence. AI Magazine 41(2): 86–92. Moore, R. (2020). Registers, styles, indexicality. In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 9–31. Papagni, G. and Koeszegi, S. (2021). A pragmatic approach to the intentional stance semantic, empirical and ethical considerations for the design of artificial agents. Minds and Machines 31: 505–534. Partee, B.B., ter Meulen, A.G. and Wall, R. (1990). Mathematical methods in linguistics (Vol. 30). Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Press. Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs 13(1): 3–21. Pickering, M. and Garrod, S. (2021). Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierce, C.S. ([1867] 1982). On a new list of categories. Volume 2 of The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Volumes 1–6. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 49–58. Russell, S. (2023). AI has much to offer humanity. It could also wreak terrible harm. It must be controlled. The Guardian. Available at https://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​/2023​/apr​/02​/ai​-much​-to​-offer​-humanity​-could​-wreak​-terrible​-harm​-must​-be​-controlled (accessed 3 April 2023). Russell, S. and Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (fourth edition). London: Pearson. Russell, S. and Norvig, P. (2010). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (third edition). London: Pearson. Sebastián, M.Á. (2021). First-person representations and responsible agency in AI. Synthese 199(3): 7061–7079. Shahaf, D. and Amir, E. (2007, March). Towards a theory of AI completeness. In AAAI Spring Symposium: Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, pp. 150–155. Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. Basso and H. Selby (eds). Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. pp. 11–55. Teller, P. (2011). Robots, action, and the ‘essential indexical’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXXII(3): 763–771. Toews, R. (2022). A wave of billion-dollar language AI startups is coming. Available here https://www​.forbes​ .com​/sites​/robtoews​/2022​/03​/27​/a​-wave​-of​-billion​-dollar​-language​-ai​-startups​-is​-coming/ (accessed 24 March 2022). Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind LIX(236): 433–460. Valiant, L. (2013). Probably Approximately Correct. Basic Books. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford, Blackwell.

Further reading Mitchell, M. (n.d.). Why AI is harder than we think. Available at https://arxiv​.org​/abs​/2104​.12871 (accessed 20 April 2022). Perez-Osorio, J. and Wykowska, A. (2020). Adopting the intentional stance toward natural and artificial agents. Philosophical Psychology 33(3): 369–395. Smolik, F. and Chroma, A. (2022). About me, you and her: Personal pronouns are developmentally preceded by mental state language. Journal of Child Language 50(3): 1–18.

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PART 5

Power and politics

22 THE ROLE OF PRONOUNS IN THE RACE DEBATE: GEORGE FLOYD AND BLM PROTESTS Zeynep Cihan Koca-Helvacı 1. Introduction Previous research on social identity formation (Tajfel and Turner 1979, Hornsey 2008, Fiske 2012) suggests that social categorization with respect to gender, age, and ethnicity, which are defined to be primary classes in personal perception (Fiske 2012), is a fundamental constituent of human interaction. These social categories induce the formation of social hierarchies on the basis of power and status (Tajfel 1978, Turner and Giles 1981). Apart from having a great impact on interlocutors’ identification with social groups, these identity markers also assign them a social status. For instance, it is not surprising to see a pro-White individual feel proud of Confederate symbols and react against Black Lives Matter (henceforth BLM) protesters for ruining them. Social categories can be denoted straightforwardly through nominals like the Jews, Blacks, immigrants or rather indirectly through pronominals such as we and they. This chapter focuses on the role of pronouns in the construction of intergroup biases for several reasons. First, pronouns subtly penetrate the discourse and engrave ideological associations into the minds of the audience due to their frequent occurrence (Halmari 2005). Second, pronoun choice discloses the mental frames (Chung and Pennebaker 2007) and psychological states (Campbell and Pennebaker 2003) of the interlocutors. Third, pronominal preference and use in a discourse event say a lot about the interactional dynamics and power struggles between self and others (Pennycook 1994, Íñigo-Mora 2004) now that personal pronouns are ‘used to induce interpreters to conceptualize group identity, coalitions, parties and the like, as insiders or as outsiders’ (Chilton and Schäffner 2002: 30). The contextualization of plural pronouns us versus them, which is the focus of this chapter, is the best site to observe the means of group formation, identification, and polarization in the discourse built upon intergroup biases. To this end, this chapter investigates the role of we/our/us and they/their/ them in the construction of ingroups and outgroups in American extreme right’s coverage of the 2020 George Floyd protests. Race, which is a social construction rather than a biological fact (Jacquard 1996, Reisigl and Wodak 2001), has shaped the societal structure of the USA since the very first days of Colonialism. Despite the Reconstruction Era and Civil Rights Movement period, and even the election of the first Black president Barack Obama, social hierarchy based upon race continues to mark every aspect of life in the USA from unemployment figures to imprisonment rates (Desmond and Emirbayer 2016). With the election of Donald Trump, who explicitly expressed his depreciation of the non-White on

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-27

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various occasions, including refusing to criticize the deadly attacks by the White supremacists in the 2017 Unite the Right rally (Coaston 2019), speaking of Haiti and African countries as ‘a shithole’ (Beckwith 2018), the defense of Confederate symbols as ‘a proud symbol of US South’ (Chiacu 2020), or labelling the BLM movement as a ‘symbol of hate’ (Liptak and Holmes 2020), the racial strife in America became much more visible. Trump’s extremist views were enthusiastically supported by extreme right groups, which rebranded themselves as Alternative Right (henceforth Alt-Right) to make their White supremacist views more acceptable to mainstream audiences (Koulouris 2018). Racism, as the unifying principle of the AltRight movement, is an ideology and social practice that manifests itself through discourse. This chapter sits within the framework of critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA), which ‘primarily studies the way social power, abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Van Dijk 2001: 352). It aims to examine the discursive construction of an us versus them dichotomy through the use of plural pronouns in major Alt Right magazines’ coverage of the BLM protests subsequent to the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, 2020. Examining the linguistic tendencies around we/our/us in comparison to they/their/them in Alt-Right discourse is important for two major reasons. First, Alt-Right websites were reported to be the digital hubs of the perpetrators of mass violent attacks, such as happened in 2017’s Unite the Right rally (Fausset and Feuer 2017), the 2019 El Paso shooting (Beauchamp 2019), and the 2021 Capitol Hill riots (Wamsley 2021). Second, according to AP VoteCast 2020, the death of George Floyd became much more politicized as the incident and following protests were reported to widen the fault line between the supporters of presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden, respectively, in the run up to the 2020 presidential elections (NPR, 2021). As a White supremacist group, the Alt-Right discourse was hypothesized to provide the perfect ground to observe the tactical use of the discourse strategies glorifying the ingroup in comparison to the strategies vilifying the outgroup. For a thorough and objective investigation, the discourse-historical approach (henceforth DHA) (Wodak 2001) was blended with the quantitative corpus linguistic approach (see Baker 2006). For the purposes of the chapter, texts that were published by American Renaissance, VDARE, Daily Stormer, and Taki’s Magazine between May 26, 2020, and November 3, 2020, and that included the terms ‘George Floyd’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, or ‘BLM’ were collected. The sections below address the following: 1. What characteristics, features, and qualities were attributed to the social actors in the outgroup, as indexed through pronominal reference? What were the frequent topics and issues related to them? 2. What characteristics, features, and qualities were attributed to the social actors in the ingroup, as indexed through pronominal reference? What were the frequent topics and issues related to them? What sorts of argumentation and legitimation strategies were used to justify the ingroup attitude?

2.  Background to the George Floyd protests On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old African American George Floyd was arrested in Minneapolis for allegedly using counterfeit money to buy cigarettes. A video by an eyewitness captured the agonizing moments where Floyd was pinned to the ground while White police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for almost eight minutes, although Floyd repeatedly cried ‘I can’t breathe’. The release of the video on social media convulsed nationwide protests by a racially and ethnically diverse profile of activists who asked for immediate action to stop racial profiling, police brutality, and lack of police accountability. Like previous African American killings under police custody, Floyd’s murder was seen as another instance of a White supremacist mindset that has legitimized and normalized the 318

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degradation and dehumanization of African Americans since the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Jim Crow laws. However, social unrest following Floyd’s death was considerably more widespread and persistent in comparison to previous incidents because of several triggers related to the political and social context. First, Floyd’s death followed two high-profile African American murders by Whites in the same year: the killing of 26-year-old medical technician Breonna Taylor while sleeping in her house by a police officer in civilian clothes, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by three White men while he was jogging. Second, Floyd’s death happened in the middle of a pandemic that forced millions of people to stay at home, where they could contemplate more deeply social and economic adversities. Third, Trump’s hard-line reaction shaped by a pro-White stance and law and order motto escalated the tension. His stigmatization of BLM protesters as ‘thugs’, his use of the infamous quote ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’, and his threats to deploy the National Guard to quell violence only served to further enrage the crowds. Amidst deepening criticism of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump took advantage of the protests by identifying them with anarchy to gain electoral support by polarizing society over controversial portrayals of the race issues (Rothman 2020). Local unrest on May 26 quickly spiralled into nationwide demonstrations, marking a new phase of the BLM movement, which first emerged in July 2013 to protest the acquittal of George Zimmerman who fatally shot 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin. Despite being incited by Floyd’s death, the protests were also organized around other victims of police violence and racism, such as Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and Daniel Prude. There was a gradual decline in the number of protests since the peak in late May and early June. However, lenient legal response to the law enforcement officers who killed Breonna Taylor and new cases of police killings of unarmed African American men, such as Rayshard Brooks and Jacob Blake, gave fresh impetus to the protests to continue in the following summer and fall months. Contrary to the politically motivated Trump’s remarks, data by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) (Kishi and Jones 2020) reveals that the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, with more than 93% involving no serious harm to people or property. However, a poll by FiveThirtyEight (Skelly 2020) put forth that 42% of the respondents believed that most of the protesters were trying to incite violence or destroy property. A study by Washington University found that such disparity was due to political orientation; biased media attitude toward the protests, including disproportionate coverage of violent incidents (Radnitz and Hsiao 2020); and disinformation campaigns that portrayed protesters as criminals or claimed Antifa was a terrorist organization (ADL 2022). Despite the disproportionate focus on looting and violence by Trump and conservative media, it was found out that violence was generally spurred by counter protesters linked to extreme right groups such as the Aryan Cowboys or the Proud Boys (Kishi and Jones 2020).

3.  Us versus Them in CDA CDA, which presents a general framework for problem-oriented social research, views texts not only as a linguistic construction but also as products of historical, social, and political context. Discourse is defined as a social practice, which both reflects and (re)produces ideologies in a particular society. Taking into consideration, the active involvement of discourse in the formation and continuation of inequality (Wetherell 2003), discourse analysts are mainly interested in deciphering discursive strategies in the exercise of domination and discrimination through carefully selected and constructed linguistic units (Chilton 2004). One of the main concerns of CDA is racism, which is shaped by the belief in the innate and unquestionable superiority or inferiority of different racial groups to serve the interests of the dominant class. Racism was built upon the pseudo-scientific concept of race, which was developed by colonialists in the 18th century to legitimize the inhumane treatment of various social groups in the 319

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Americas (Reid-Merritt 2017). Reisigl and Wodak (2001) noted that racism draws pseudo-causal connections among biological, mental, and cultural traits of a particular social group to maintain the privileged position of the high-status group. Contrary to the overt racist practices of the past, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Indians and slavery of Africans, today’s racism is much more covert and exercised through discourse (van Dijk 1992). The pillar of racist discourse is the polarization between the superior and inferior group, which is instantiated through positive self-representation of us and negative representation of them. Van Dijk (2008) explains the linguistic realization of this binary opposition with ‘Ideological Square’, which is comprised of four strategic moves: emphasizing positive things and de-emphasizing negative things about the United States while emphasizing negative things and de-emphasizing positive things about them. Chilton (2004) puts emphasis on the importance of antonymous lexical choices, which lead the text decoders to perceive and evaluate the social actors and events in terms of dichotomies. As Matouschek et al. (1995) underlined, focusing on the linguistic construction of us versus them discourse is necessary to unearth deep-seated power patterns dictated by the ruling class. The linguistic preferences made in this dichotomization is critical as ‘Classification is an instrument of control in two directions: control over the flux of physical and social reality […] and society’s control over conceptions of that reality’ (Kress and Hodge 1979: 63). Research by Reisigl and Wodak (2001) on racist and discriminatory discourse underlines the key role of pronominals in the construction of ingroup and outgroup polarization. According to Klein et al. (2007), plural pronouns showing ingroup (we, our, us) communicate ingroup solidarity while outgroup pronouns (they, their, them) mark a distance from the outgroup to put emphasis on the superiority of the ingroup. Another motive behind the frequent use of pronouns in racist discourse is the ambiguity of their reference (Fetzer 2014). Plural pronouns can obscure the identity of the referenced actors, which enables the denial of responsibility on the side of the message sender (Szilágyi 2017).

4. Data The corpus used in this chapter was compiled of opinion texts that were published between May 26 and November 3 of 2020 on four leading Alt-Right websites: American Renaissance, VDARE, Daily Stormer, and Taki’s Magazine. The timespan covers the beginning of the George Floyd protests to the day before the presidential elections. As George Floyd’s case was highly politicized and became one of the determinant factors in voting behavior in the 2020 elections (NPR 2021), the Alt-Right corpus was hypothesized to be an ideal reserve to examine the linguistic means of us versus them dichotomy divided along race lines. Only texts including the search terms ‘George Floyd’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and ‘BLM’ were collected. The selection criteria for the Alt-Right magazines were their ideological standing and influence (Miller and Graves 2020). As seen in Table 22.1, the total wordcount of the Alt-Right corpus is 948,419 whilst the size of each sub-corpus is nearly similar. American Renaissance was founded in 1990 by Jared Taylor with a dedication to prove the superiority of Whites over Blacks through pseudoscientific texts (Media Bias Fact Check 2022). VDARE, named after the first White-born child, Virginia Dare, in the United States was founded in 1999 Table 22.1 The Alt-Right corpus Alt-Right websites

Number of words

American Renaissance VDARE Daily Stormer Taki’s Magazine Total

225,037 279,892 228,755 214,735 948,419

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by Peter Brimelow, who is one of the eminent proponents of the White Genocide Theory (Media Bias Fact Check 2020). It is the largest sub-corpus with 279,892 words. The third magazine Daily Stormer, was founded by controversial Alt-Right figure Andrew Anglin in 2013 to spread Neo-Nazi propaganda to stop alleged Jewish domination and black-on-white crime (Media Bias Fact Check 2021a). The final data source, Taki’s Magazine, was established in 2007 to defend extreme right ideology through influential figures like renowned White separationist Richard Spencer and Proud Boys’ founder Gavin McInnes (Media Bias Fact Check 2021b).

5. Methodology Richardson (2017) notes that language can be used as a medium of power to normalize, legitimize, and reinforce systemic inequalities. Seeing that discriminatory rhetoric is an outcome of deep-seated attitudes and ideas about a minority group, the historical, social, and political contexts backgrounding the discourse event must be examined. To this end, I utilized the DHA (Wodak 2001), which prioritizes the investigation of the sociopolitical and historical background, to find out characteristics, topics, and argumentation strategies associated with the ingroup and outgroup in terms of pronominals we/our/us and they/their/them. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) suggest a list of strategies to analyze discriminatory rhetoric toward outgroups. Only two of the strategies, which are relevant to this chapter, were used for the analysis of the alt-right discourse. The first is predicational strategies, which are concerned with linguistic attributions of positive or negative qualities to social actors and their actions. Text producers can use adjectives, relative clauses, numbers, verbs, and nouns to assign qualities to social groups or events. For instance, the Alt-Right tends to characterize BLM protesters as animals to dehumanize them as in ‘A recent videotaped scrape between police and escaped zoo animals in the Bronx’ (Taki’s Magazine 24/05/2020, emphasis added). Such a move seeks to legitimize the unfair treatment of the outgroup. The second category is argumentation strategies, which includes a list of argumentative schemes such as topoi and fallacies used in the legitimation of exclusion, discrimination, suppression, and exploitation of the outgroup. Topoi are ‘the consensual, self-evident issues of a community, laws of life at any one time’ (Van der Valk 2003: 319). In other words, they are persuasive frames based upon collective reasoning. Instead of representing the BLM protests as a public outcry for social justice, for example, identifying the BLM movement as a deep state plot to overthrow Trump and ruin White America constitutes a perfect example of the topos of Danger/Threat. Through this topos, the message sender obscures the real motives underlying the BLM protests and frames them as an intergroup threat to suppress any form of criticism and disintegration within the ingroup. Fallacies, which are deliberately created cases of faulty and flawed reasoning (Powers 1995), aim at winning an argument. A very common fallacy in the corpus is argumentum ad hominem, which can be described as a ‘verbal attack on the antagonist’s personality and character (of her/his [sic] credibility, integrity, honesty, expertise, competence) instead of argumentatively trying to refute the antagonist’s arguments’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001:72). For example, in ‘black looters and the usual smattering of mentally ill white anarchists have smashed Chicago’s fabled ‘Miracle Mile’ into oblivion’ (Taki’s Magazine 16/08/2020, emphasis added). The text producer attacked the credibility of the protesters with accusations of criminality and insanity. Apart from the logical dimension, both predicational and argumentative strategies have emotional aspects to influence people’s feelings, beliefs, and decisions of the hearers or readers in a way that suits the message sender’s needs. Considering the size of the corpus, a detailed and objective manual analysis of each text was not possible. Thus, the qualitative analytical framework of DHA (Wodak 2001) was blended with the primarily quantitative analytical tools of corpus linguistics to obtain automatically generated statistical data about linguistic patterns surrounding ingroup and outgroup social actors in the Alt-Right corpus. To gain an overview of the Alt-Right discourse, I began with the generation of semantic categories 321

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using the corpus tool Wmatrix (Rayson 2009). The USAS semantic tagging of Wmatrix groups thematically related words together with respect to a list of 21 major discourse fields, such as A (General and Abstract Terms) and E (Emotion) based upon the Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur 1981). Considering discourse topics as repetitive patterns of word co-occurrence (Brett 2012), this tool enabled me to discover salient semantic categories within the corpus. The second step was to analyze recurrent lexical patterns in the co-text around ingroup (we/our/ us) and outgroup (they/their/them) pronouns, as ‘Repeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a discourse community. A word, phrase or construction may trigger a cultural stereotype’ (Stubbs 2001: 215). To this end, collocation lists of each search term were generated with the help of corpus software AntConc 4.0.5 (Anthony 2022). Baker (2006) defined collocation as systematic co-occurrence of words in use, realized here as the co-occurrence of Black and violent in the Alt-Right discourse. As Stubbs (1996: 195) noted ‘if collocations and fixed phrases are repeatedly used as unanalysed units in media discussion and elsewhere, then it is very plausible that people will come to think about things in such terms’. Thus, it is important to study the collocations of the different pronouns in the Alt-Right corpus since they could reveal a lot about underlying ideologies. In addition to the collocational analysis, I also focused on the concordances of the search terms to observe statistically less significant linguistic regularities (Hunston 2002). According to Baker (2006: 71), concordances are ‘a list of all of the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented within the context that they occur in; usually a few words to the left and right of the search term’. By means of concordances, it is possible to find a range of noteworthy lexical associations, which might not appear on the statistically based collocations list, as it is possible for similar sentiment to be expressed in different ways and, as such, concordance analysis foregrounds semantically related yet statistically less significant words.

6. Analysis To find out prevailing discourse topics in the Alt-Right’s coverage of the George Floyd protests, I started the analysis by generating frequent semantic categories with the help of the USAS Semantic Tagging tool, which is a part of Wmatrix corpus software (Rayson 2009). As can be seen from the top 10 semantic categories and associated lexis in Table 22.2, the discourse was negatively constructed around panic-inducing themes like violence, death, and social unrest. Unsurprisingly, the most prevalent category is Colour and Colour Patterns, namely, Black and White dualism, which is in line with the racist ideology of the Alt-Right. While Black has a frequency of 2,459, White was used 1,854 times. The markedness of Blackness in comparison to Whiteness can be sourced from the Alt-Right’s perspective of seeing Whiteness as the accepted norm while Blackness is considered a deviation. After an in-depth reading of the concordance lines of the other semantic categories, a consistent pattern was observed, seeing that Alt-Right discourse was highly polarized around being White or Black. In other words, the maintenance of law and order, social peace, civilization, and justice were identified with the Whites, whereas violence, primitivity, barbarism, and dishonesty were equated with the Blacks. For instance, in (1) the bystanders were represented as hostile and violent although they did nothing more than warn Derek Chauvin about the medical status of Floyd (McLaughlin 2020). (1) Secondly, Chauvin and his fellow officers were surrounded by a hostile mob of blacks who by their proximity and common black behavior were likely to attack the officers and help Floyd escape. Chauvin had to keep his knee on Floyd, so he could maintain situational awareness of the growing, hostile, and potentially violent crowd. (VDARE 30/05/2020)

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The role of pronouns in the race debate Table 22.2 Top 10 semantic categories in the Alt-Right corpus No. Semantic category

Associated lexis

Frequency Log likelihood

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

black, white court, level, police, judge, arrest, security conservative, leftist, voting, voters, demonstrations crime(s), injustice, illegal, looting, vandalism, outlawed rebellion, violent, riot, attack, hitting, assault, barbaric death, homicides, killing, murder, die, genocide, murder(s) warfare, bullets, teargas, uprising, battleground, shot

4228 4389 3557 1970 2774 1598 2131

Color and color patterns Law and order Politics Crime Violent/angry Dead Warfare, defense and the army, weapons 8 Dislike 9 Damaging and destroying 10 Evaluation: False

480 hate, despise, hatred, disgust, animosity breaking, destroyed, victim(s), defaced, destruction, collapse 1008 rot, hoaxes, false, lied, concocted, imaginary, falsely, baseless 449

3602.09 2783.13 2481.88 1875.27 1689.53 899.64 514.17 376.15 312.66 172.22

Here, not only do we see the victim-perpetrator reversal as Chauvin was cast into the role of a victim who had been oppressed by the Black mob, but also, we observe the fallacy of secundum quid, which typified violence as ‘common black behavior’ on the basis of a small sample that could not be representative of all African Americans. This stereotyping can also be explained in terms of the topos of culture, which states that ‘because the culture of a specific group of people is as it is, specific problems arise in specific situations’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 107). Through this argumentative scheme, there was an attempt to marginalize the outgroup and justify the ingroup behavior. The text producer also took advantage of the argumentum ad misericordiam fallacy to appeal to compassion and empathy for the police officer Chauvin by representing him as being forced to do a chokehold amidst bystanders, which resulted in Floyd’s death. Another noteworthy pattern was the politicization of BLM protests, as can be seen from the concordances of the third top semantic category Politics. It was noted that the Alt-Right magazines deliberately provided a radicalized coverage of the protests to gain electoral support for Trump, whose popularity was sharply in decline due to the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. They embraced the law-and-order theme to consolidate ingroup position. The BLM protests were portrayed either as a clash between savagery and civilization or as a devious plot against Trump. In the following excerpt, a variety of subjects, such as the press, Antifa, BLM protesters, Biden, and the deep state, were amalgamated and positioned as the enemy of the ingroup. While the supporters of the anti-fascist movement were described in terms of degeneration and lack of morality through lowlife and thugs, the other members of the outgroup, which were the press, Biden, and the deep state, were represented as an axis of evil that was eager for another death to exploit for its own purposes. (2) On the other hand, the press is positively salivating over the prospect of getting some Horst Wessel-type Antifa lowlife, or, ideally, some angelic black youth killed so they can blame it on Trump. If Biden can’t get the job done, the deep state very much wants a Color Revolution in Washington this November, and it will gladly sacrifice a few BLM or Antifa thugs to accomplish its ends. (Taki’s Magazine 9/09/2020)

6.1  Analysis of the ingroup and outgroup pronouns This section examines the discourse surrounding the ingroup (we/our/us) and outgroup (they/their/ them) pronouns. Table 22.3 shows the frequency of each pronoun in the alt-right corpus. The prevalence of the outgroup pronouns with a total number of 11,711 over ingroup pronouns with the fre323

Zeynep Cihan Koca-Helvacı Table 22.3 The frequency of ingroup and outgroup pronouns Ingroup

Frequency

Outgroup

Frequency

We our us Total

4311 1951 1057 7,319

They Their Them Total

6343 3271 2097 11,711

Table 22.4 Concordances of ‘we need to’ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Rather than waiting for the Trump DOJ to arrest antifa, our country. Everywhere we look we are losing, big time blacks I’ve ever seen. They’re also going to be slaughtering us. these feds to black crack dens is a step in the right direction, but While these murders of white children are particularly outrageous, white men are so degraded by white women that they’re marrying black women. beaten on the ground by a mob in my hometown of Charleston, SC. This is disgusting.

we need to We need to We need to we need to we need to We need to We need to

Be the ones launching court battles, ensuring legal defenses, and building our own be aware of that fact. get Donald Trump reelected and if that doesn’t happen then we need to figure out cleanse these organizations of the traitors and Jewish spies. remember that blacks will white people all the time. They do it every day. The hire these BLM bitches to beat white women until they get in line. restore law and order NOW

quency of 7,319 was interesting. However, it should be noted that these pronouns did not refer to the ingroup and outgroups members in every instance; sometimes they were used to make reference to other subjects or groups. For the purposes of this chapter, only the instances that referred to the ingroup and outgroup members were taken into consideration. Ingroup Pronouns: Analysis of the collocations and concordances of the subject pronoun we, which has the largest share among the ingroup pronouns, has shown that the pronoun was frequently associated with the verbs showing existence (to be), modals showing ability and necessity (can, need, should, must), nouns concerned with territory and community (country, nation, city, neighborhood), lexis of war (win, lose, battle, dealing, enemy), verbs showing construction (build, rebuild, set up, establish), lexis concerned with spirituality (hope, soul, faith) and lexis related to heritage (inherit, ancestors, history, civilization). The text surrounding we was woven with comparisons between the status of the Whites in the past and present. While there was a yearning for the pre-1960s, the Whites of the current day were described as repressed and enervated. A shared vision to restore White supremacy was also communicated. The sentiment of collective victimhood is perfectly exemplified in (3): (3) Despised in popular media, discriminated against in law, victimized by crime, and dispossessed by non-white immigration, we are becoming a hated minority in the country we built. (American Renaissance 5/06/2020) As can be seen from the concordances of we need to in Table 22.4, the tone was rather alarmist and provocative. The threat identified was the BLM protests, which were deemed as a cloak to erase 324

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White history. The emphasis on time in lines 2 and 7 can be interpreted with regard to temporal proximization, which frames an ‘envisaged conflict as not only imminent, but also momentous, historic and thus needing immediate response and unique preventive measures’ (Cap 2014: 17). As per lines 1, 4, and 7, the preventive measure against the enemy is to cleanse them, take legal action, and restore law and order. The enemy was many faced, including Antifa, Blacks, Jews, and White women, and were all positioned as opponents of the White race, which was degraded, killed, or to be slaughtered. Victim-perpetrator reversal, which cast Whites, especially White men, into the victim role was dominant. This sort of hijacking not only denigrates the past sufferings of and injustices against African Americans but also diverts attention from the real motives of the BLM protests. A close examination of the collocations and concordances of the possessive pronoun our reveals a similar pattern as it was frequently collocated with the lexis showing community and territory (country, nation, borders, neighborhood, communities, homes), heritage (culture, ancestors, past, heroes, civilization, symbols, sacred, statues, monuments, history, values) and war lexis (destroy, enemies, erase, protect, deface, opponents). As Brindle (2016) observes, our plays an important role in denying the rights of the non-White by labelling collective assets like country, nation, and flag as possessions of Whites, as in (4): (4) In Weatherford, county seat of Parker County, Texas, a group of that fair city’s residents have had enough of Leftist terrorists defacing and destroying monuments that honor our ancestors and the treasured history of our native land. (VDare 30/07/2020) The salience of the lexis showing community and territory can be explained in terms of ethnonationalism, which considers ethnicity and ethnic ties as the foundation of the ‘nation’ (Rydgren 2018, Le Bossé 2021). Like other extreme right movements, the American Alt-Right puts an emphasis on ethnonationalism by identifying the United States as the territory of the White race. As Mudde (2007) puts forth, ‘nativeness’ has a cultural component, and the cultural heritage was labelled as an achievement of the Whites, which totally excluded the non-White from the collective story. Unsurprisingly, the past was idealized, and there was a strong demand to return to those mighty days when White hegemony was unquestionable. The concordances of our own country in Table 22.5 exemplify the instances of ethnoterritoriality and White victimization anxiety. To fend off blame and shirk responsibility for the abusive behavior of the ingroup actors against the outgroup (see Harsey and Freyd 2020), the alt-righters opted for denying their wrongdoings, attacking the credibility of the outgroup, and reversing victim-offender roles. In contrast, the outgroup was accused of marginalizing, stigmatizing, and expelling the ingroup.

Table 22.5 Concordances of ‘our own country’ 1 2 3 4 5

the claim didn’t ever make sense, but okay). But we don’t control to politically marginalize us and stigmatize us as evil and drive us underground in could forge a new people. Many of us have become de facto refugees in American leader util after 1965. If whites are to be written out of the history of it’s frustrating that we have to operate like conquered peasants in what was once

our own country our own country our own country our own country our own country

325

now anyway. Go ahead and ask yourself: are the people who control while pursuing its own agenda. The whole point of participating in , fleeing non white cities for the suburbs. We may already have to , what stake do we have in it? What possible connection does the . Living amidst the hypocrisy, repression, and sanctimonious lying

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Finally, the object pronoun us is frequently correlated with the lexis showing threat by an external force (attack, threaten, assault, force, urge, demand) as in (5): (5) Hostile authorities, academics, corporations, and media constantly define us by race […] It is forcing us to do what we should have done a long time ago and band together. (American Renaissance 4/07/2020). Here, a variety of external forces were criticized for categorizing the ingroup with respect to race. The text producers, who were indeed ardent supporters of White supremacy, projected their own unacceptable thoughts and aggression to the outgroup. The excerpt below illustrates the contextualization of the common collocates of we, our, and us. Through a Manichean perspective, the BLM protests were depicted as the trigger of an epic battle between good and evil. The ingroup was represented as a warrior who fought against the dark and diabolic forces to achieve its divine goal. The ‘racial rebirth of the White race’ was framed as an obligation for the continuation of humanity and civilization on Earth. (6) We must act with faith in victory, in service to a great ideal. Our Western tradition tells us to do our duty to uphold the cosmic order. This chaotic time will be an opportunity for racial rebirth. Steel yourself against this death cult that has hijacked our civilization. Reject BLMania. We were meant for something great. We shouldn’t fear this time of struggle, which is demonstrating what we’ve been warning of all along. We should welcome it. (VDARE 29/07/2020) Outgroup Pronouns: The analysis of the collocations and concordance lines of the subject pronoun they has revealed consistent linguistic tendencies, including vocabulary concerning existence (to be), intention (want, demand, will), aggression (hate, destroy, deface, threaten), belief (believe, illusion), and modals showing capacity (can, could). As expected, the co-text surrounding they was heavily loaded with negativity and the outgroup members were represented as a threatening force that sought to demolish the country and exterminate the ingroup to achieve their hidden agenda. Another noteworthy pattern is the frequent use of if clauses, which presented hypothetical examples about the gloomy future awaiting the White race if the rise of the non-White could not be stopped. (7) The ruling powers will try to hold the system together, with increasing brutality. If they don’t manage to just wipe us out completely, however, the country is going to split apart.’ (Daily Stormer 26/06/2020). Here, a hypothetical scenario was constructed to call for ingroup reaction against an assumed severe threat constituted by the ruling powers (see Reyes 2011). The further trend is the frequency of they in cause-effect structures as (8): (8) Some blacks are hell bent on destroying themselves and everyone around them because they feel like victims, and they will never take any personal responsibility’. (American Renaissance 13/06/2020) This sort of causality perfectly exemplifies the fallacy of oversimplification, which occurs when it is assured that there is a single and simple cause behind a problem, although it may have been caused by a variety of complex triggers (Burkett 2019). Rather than historical and current injustices, the problems of the African Americans in the United States were framed as an outcome of their irresponsibility and laziness.

326

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Table 22.6 shows the contextualization of they want. The outgroup members were sketched as violent and hostile through negatively loaded vocabulary like destroy, burn down, attack, hurt, riots, slaughter, demolish, tear down, and oppressive. Here, the fallacy of appeal to fear was observed. Wrisley (2019: 98) notes that ‘Fear of negative consequences is a great motivator’. The possibility of harm by the outgroup was manipulated to compel the mainstream Whites to accept the views of the Alt-Right. In the first line, the reliability and reputation of the BLM supporters was tarnished by the claims of cooperation with neo-Nazis. With the fallacy of ad hominem, which attacks the credibility of the opponent, there was an attempt to discredit the outgroup. The same fallacy occurs in line 3, with the accusation that African Americans use the BLM protests to maintain their wealthy lifestyles. In line 4, with a comparison from Russian history, we can see the topos of history, which is based on the idea that ‘because history teaches that specific actions have specific consequences, one should perform or omit a specific action in a specific situation that is (allegedly) comparable with the historical example referred to (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 106). The White people were cautioned that the history could repeat itself in the very near future. In lines 4 and 6, we and our were used before and after they to highlight us versus them distinction (Bramley 2001). The possessive pronoun their was frequently accompanied with vocabulary relating to the body (skin, color, face, head), hostility (violence, crime, hatred, looting, anger, victims), and lower mental capacity (incompetence, stupidity). Apart from a tendency to discredit the outgroup with an attack against its credibility through lexis concerned with hostility and lower mental capacity, their physical characteristics were consistently emphasized. Representation of social actors in respect of physical traits such as skin color, hair, height, or weight is important since ‘physical attributes tend to have connotations, and these can be used to obliquely classify or functionalize social actors’ (van Leeuwen 2008:45). For instance, the Alt-Righters tended to depict the White female protesters in terms of excessive fat (white fatties), while white male protesters were attacked for being overthin (scrawny beta males). With respect to the idealized White body image and correlated behavioral pattern, the Alt-Righters deemed these physical traits as flawed while the protesters were portrayed as aberrant. As the concordances of their hatred in Table 22.6 illustrate, there were different social actors in the outgroup, from Blacks and Liberals to Marxist radicals who were all unified by their strong animosTable 22.6 Concordances of ‘they want’ seen is that some neo Nazis support Black Lives Matter because They are Maoists, and they will attack you, they will hurt you, Blacks live on much of the best real estate and

they want

4

They want to repeat what they did in Russia,

they want

5

Western empires not with pride but with shame and guilt. And

they want

6

and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. being revealed upfront, but which is simply obvious. Jews saying

They want

1 2 3

7

they want they want

they want

327

to destroy Western Civilization. Richard Spencer to burn down this United States.’ to keep it, by hook or by crook. The current riots have done much to fortify black control of their neighbourhoods. to slaughter white Christians. We are truly on the precipice here. What happens in the next two months will determine to make expiation by cancelling out all the honors accorded such men, be it in statues or the names of cities, towns to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive regime in its place. to tear down these monuments because they hurt the feelings of black people and contribute to their continual failure

Zeynep Cihan Koca-Helvacı Table 22.7 Concordances of ‘their hatred’ 1 2 3 4 5

very visible. Moderates and socialists are largely, albeit uneasily, united by just totally unhinged. They do nothing but hate. Service, today. One thing that these mobs indisputably have in common:

their hatred

Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show Trump liberals can’t help themselves. They’d be better off being fairer to him, but

their hatred

Their hatred their hatred

their hatred

For Donald Trump, and no charismatic third party option for socialists is on the ballot. for Donald Trump and the white people has now made a Vegeta like transformation for white Americans and our history. If they have it their way, every statue of our ancestors of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their makes that impossible.

ity toward Donald Trump and White people, whose fates seemed to be sealed together. The outgroup actors were defined as hateful, deranged, and irrespectful of values. In line 3, the word mob was used to delegitimize the protests through topos of danger/threat.​ Finally, the object pronoun them was associated with definition (see, frame, define, refer, view), caution (remind, warn), permission (allow, let, permit, stop), violence (kill, loot, police, crime, burn, oppress), and dictation (tell, order, get, command). The concordances show that the ingroup maintains social peace by controlling the actions of the outgroup, such as ‘trying to keep them from killing each other’ or ‘stop them from looting’. In addition to the abovementioned enemies, corporations such as Pepsi were also classified as opponents of the ingroup for supporting the African American community (9). (9) Earlier this week, Pepsi announced a $400 million set of initiatives to support the black community. So, they are telling us that this is racist, because it reminds everyone of a time when white southerners affectionately called their black slaves ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ and had them engaged in cooking and looking after children while dressed up nicely. As opposed to now, where the men run around shooting each other in jungle tribe drug wars, and the women are addicted to drugs and infected with herpes, while each of their kids has a different jungle warrior father and none of them are around. Through topos of comparison (Wodak 2016), the past and present of African Americans was contrasted. Slavery was described as a desirable status with reference to household jobs, nice clothes, and kinship terms, and it was even praised for establishing an affectionate bond between the Whites and African Americans. On the other hand, their current status was described negatively with the phrases shooting each other, jungle tribe drug wars, addicted to drugs, infected with herpes, and different jungle warrior father. Here jungle, which came to English from the Hindi word ‘jangali’ in 1776 as a result of English colonialism, has racist connotations of being uncivilized, primitive, and unruly (Lundblad 2013). According to the alt-righters, the African Americans would turn back to these presupposed roots when they were given liberty. The topos of advantage or usefulness, which is ‘if an action under a specific relevant point of view will be useful, then one should perform it’ (Wodak 2001: 102), clearly explains this alt-right reasoning. The Blacks were not capable of sustaining a decent life on their own. For that reason, White hegemony was pro bono eorum (to the advantage of them). 328

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7. Conclusion This chapter aimed to determine the role of pronouns in the American Alt-Right’s coverage of the BLM protests sparked by the death of George Floyd while in police custody in 2020. One of the clearest findings is that pronominal choice is highly concerned with the formation of group identities and boundaries. Rather than functioning as deictic or anaphoric grammatical words, pronouns reveal a lot about group solidarity, intergroup conflicts, and power struggles (Bramley 2001). It was seen that the ingroup actors were represented in a favorable way as builders of the nation and civilization, while the outgroup actors were framed as a destructive force. The narrative was heavily built upon negative representation of the outgroup rather than positive self-presentation. Considering the public reaction against police brutality in the George Floyd case, it seemed that even the Alt-Right refrained from openly defending their racist ideologies in the coverage of Floyd’s death and following protests for fear of frightening potential White supporters in the forthcoming elections. The pronouns we/our/us refer to the ingroup as a block, cemented by being White and upholding the views of White supremacy. Although we/our/us are plural, the referred subject was the singularized concept of White Americans. Moreover, these ingroup pronouns were used to establish solidarity between the text producer and reader. The reader was included in the Alt-Right narrative with references to shared territory (USA is our land), collective cultural assets (our flag, we are the founders of the civilization), common threat to identity (they marginalize us in our own country), and a mutual goal (we need to restore law and order). On the other hand, the analysis of the discourse surrounding they/their/them showed that the outgroup was an amalgamation of various and sometimes contradictory actors, such as Marxists and corporations, which were united by their hostility against the real Whites. Apart from their common will to attack the legacy of the White race, this group was framed as having nothing in common. Characterizing the outgroup as a mob of multifarious, hateful, conflicting actors was a means to weaken the legitimacy of the antagonist. In contrast to the past achievements and shared future vision of the ingroup, the outgroup was depicted as instinctive and inferior. This medley of destructive forces ‘are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, prosperity, identity, and voice’ (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008: 5). Another interesting finding is the narrative of White victimhood. Marcks and Pawelz (2020: 3) put forth that ‘far-right propaganda centres on depicting threats and orchestrating myths of victimhood while simultaneously promoting slogans of cultural superiority and physical strength’. With the help of this narrative, the Whites were portrayed as culturally superior but socially oppressed, a framing that is designed to prompt feelings of pity toward them and leads to a reasoning that it is the right of the Whites to be in charge. Moreover, this victimhood narrative is a means of silencing criticism about White racism in the past and present (Rhodes and Hall 2020).

8.  Future research In view of the growing public support for extreme right political parties in Europe, as happened in recent elections in Italy, Sweden, and France, future research might focus on the pronoun use in the political speeches by the leaders of these parties. A cross-national study in a European context can compare the use of personal pronouns in speeches of the political leaders of extreme right parties to see if the linguistic patterns around the us versus them dichotomy overlap. As it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the power of the extreme right in Europe, it is necessary to decipher the discursive means behind the construction of intergroup boundaries by examining pronominal use. A focus on the use and co-text of specific pronouns could help in determining whether there is an overarching trend in the practices of the extreme right in different countries. 329

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Further reading Brindle, A. (2016). The Language of Hate: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of White Supremacist Language. New York/London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (1994). The politics of pronouns. ELT Journal 48(2): 173–178. Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear: What Right Wing Populist Discourses Mean? London: Sage Publications.

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23 ‘THEY REALLY EAT ANYTHING DON’T THEY?’: PRONOUN USE IN COVID-19-RELATED ANTI-ASIAN RACISM Ursula Kania 1. Introduction Many chapters in this volume have focused on the role of pronouns in establishing and maintaining shared goals and social norms. While this chapter will also explore the importance of pronouns in constructing and expressing someone’s sense of belonging to a particular social group sharing values and beliefs, the focus is on the drawing of boundaries and the highlighting of differences to individuals and groups construed as ‘the other’. This chapter draws on van Dijk’s (e.g. 1991, 1993, 2006, 2015) work on the reproduction of racism in discourse as well as van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2008) concept of social actors and is situated within corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker and McEnery 2015). It focuses on pronoun use in the online reader comments on a DailyMail article covering the so-called bat soup videos, a substantial number of which are sinophobic. The videos, which were widely shared on several social media platforms and online news outlets in early 2020, allegedly show Chinese people eating bats in various restaurant or food-court settings, with coverage often drawing on and reproducing the ‘Western fear and disgust over Chinese foodways […] both real and imagined’ (King 2020: 239). While the focus of this chapter is on Sinophobia specifically, it should be noted that there are often no clear boundaries between Sinophobia in particular and anti-Asian racism more broadly conceived, since a prevalent feature of racist discourse is the homogenisation across and within different (racial and/or ethnic) groups (e.g., van Leeuwen 2000, Yeh 2020). This is reflected in use of ‘anti-Asian racism’ in the title of this chapter (also see example (34) below). The following section provides some background on corpus-assisted critical discourse studies, previous research on racism in discourse, and the role of pronouns for the discursive construction of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ (including concepts used in this study), before introducing the case study proper. After a summary of the underlying methodological decisions, the analyses and results are discussed before concluding with suggestions for further research and reading around this topic.

2.  Background and previous research While racism is, unfortunately, a very pervasive phenomenon and, hence, the focus of research across various disciplines within the social sciences, one interdisciplinary approach that is particularly

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-28

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suited for the study of racism with a focus on the ways in which it manifests in language is critical discourse analysis (CDA). Within CDA, which views language as a social practice, there are many different definitions of discourse (see, e.g., van Dijk 2018, for a more in-depth discussion of the term). Broadly speaking, we can define discourse (used as a count noun) as ‘ways of signifying areas of experience from a particular perspective (e.g., patriarchal vs. feminist discourses of sexuality)’ (Fairclough 2010: 93), and it is generally acknowledged that there are different genres (e.g., academic or literary), each of which is ‘associated with particular socially ratified activity types’ (ibid.). In this study, the focus is on the genre of (online) news media (including user-generated content), to which CDA can be applied to expose and examine the different discourses, viewed as ‘sets of propositions in circulation about a particular phenomenon, which constitute what people take to be the reality of the phenomenon’ (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 16). Since CDA is concerned with ‘opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language’ (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 10), it is often focused on issues inherently linked to an imbalance of power (such as racism, but also other forms of systemic discrimination like sexism, homophobia, or transphobia). The discursive construction of identities, often involving a demarcation against ‘the other’, has been widely explored (e.g., Wodak et al. 2009, Ladegaard 2012), and there are studies explicitly addressing the role played by personal pronouns, whose referents are often found to be ambiguous (see, e.g., Bull and Fetzer 2006). Ingroup vs. outgroup dynamics have also been explored in the analysis of various genres of migration discourse (e.g., De Fina 2003, who has a whole chapter on ‘pronominal choice’; Prieto Ramos 2004, Korkut 2013, Hart 2015), with racism often being a primary concern (e.g., Henry and Tator 2002). There are also studies on Sinophobia specifically (Kil 2012, Burkhanov and Chen 2016; also see Wang and Catalano 2022, for a very recent COVID-19related study focused on reactions to the ‘Chinese virus’ discourse). This chapter subscribes to van Dijk’s notion that CDA is situated at the ‘micro level of social practices involved in the enactment and reproduction of racism’ (van Dijk 1993: 93) while acknowledging that these social practices interact with macro-level structures like social groups and institutions such as governments. Van Dijk has done extensive research on racism, exploring the role discourses about minorities ‘play in the development, reinforcement, legitimation, and hence reproduction of white group dominance’ (1993: 92–93; also see van Dijk 2015). In particular, he has looked extensively into different strategies for creating an opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (often involving these and other self- and other-referential pronouns), e.g., assigning people to either the ‘ingroup’ or the ‘outgroup’ (polarization), with positive attributes assigned to the former and negative ones to the latter (positive self-representation, negative other-representation), using vague expressions to refer to (characteristics of) the outgroup in order to avoid accountability (vagueness), and portraying the self/the ingroup as victims negatively affected by the actions of the outgroup (victimisation; van Dijk 2006). The current analysis employs tools and concepts associated with corpus-assisted critical discourse studies (Baker 2006, Baker and McEnery 2015), which aims at combining quantitative, corpus-linguistics methods, such as keywords, frequency counts, and collocates, with qualitative analysis. In this chapter, the use of quantitative methods consists of the compilation of the specialised corpus itself as well as absolute frequency counts and collocates, the latter of which allow for a more robust analysis of the immediate discourse context of selected pronouns and determiners. Apart from work by van Dijk and others in discourse approaches studying racism, the chapter draws on the concept of ‘social actors’ as established by van Leeuwen (1996). Social actors can be defined as ’the textual instantiations of models of the self and others, both individual and collective’ (Koller 2009). Van Leeuwen’s descriptive framework aims ‘to draw up a sociosemantic inventory of the ways in which social actors can be represented’ (van Leeuwen 1996: 32), meaning that his starting point are the social actors rather than the individual linguistic forms that may be used to refer to the self or others. 334

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Running counter to this, this chapter does use pronouns as formal entry points for the analysis, viewing them as prevalent ‘textual instantiations’ in online reader comments, as it has indeed been noted that ‘expressions that are most revealing of the boundaries separating Self and Other are inclusive and exclusive pronouns and possessives such as we and they, us and them, and ours and theirs’ (Riggins 1997: 8). However, subscribing to van Leeuwen’s view that when the analysis ‘ties itself in too closely to specific linguistic operations or categories, many relevant instances of agency might be overlooked’ (van Leeuwen 1996: 32), other ways of referring to social actors will be brought in where relevant. This focused yet flexible approach also makes it possible to take into account the specific characteristics of pronouns (in particular, their reliance on an implicit or explicit antecedent, in some cases ‘linking’ the pronoun to a preceding linguistic structure such as a noun phrase). Based on previous findings on racist discourse, it is to be expected that certain strategies identified by van Dijk are going to be particularly prevalent (e.g., individualisation of the self vs. collectivisation of the other). Relevant descriptors for representations of social actors (such as collectivisation and impersonalisation) will be brought into the analysis where appropriate (a full overview of the framework can be found in van Leeuwen 1996: 66).

3.  Data and methods Since January 2020, there has been an increase in hate crimes against Chinese people in the United Kingdom (Gray and Hansen 2021). This rise has been partially driven by the widely reported claim that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood and Wildlife Market, which is located in Hubei Province in central China. An early manifestation of Sinophobia in the language around COVID-19 are terms such as ‘Wuhan virus’ or ‘Chinese virus’, which have been used across various media. ‘Chinese virus’, in particular, was taken up, e.g., by then-US president Donald Trump. While it can be argued that these terms are merely descriptive and not inherently problematic, the World Health Organization best practices for the naming of new human infectious diseases (WHO 2015) states that diseases names should not include geographic terms (nor cultural/occupational references) in order to ‘avoid causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups’. There is also growing evidence that ‘amongst a host of other variables, media framing has an effect on the public’s attitudes and feelings of blame for the pandemic’ (Holt, Kjærvik and Bushman 2022: 1) and that the use of terms such as ‘Chinese virus’, in particular, is associated with a reinforcement of negative stereotypes of China and Chinese culture (see, e.g., Lampropoulou et al. 2023). Apart from potentially inflammatory and racist lexical choices around both the disease and the virus, (not just) early coverage contains much speculation on the potential origins of COVID-19, drawing on and reproducing stereotypes about the Chinese and their foodways. The current chapter focuses on one example, published in the tabloid The Daily Mail, which ‘is centre-right in politics and conservative in values generally’ (Toolan 2018). In 2022, it was the top UK news brand in terms of overall engagement across both print and online (including the highest number of page views for the online version; Majid 2022). The article, published on January 23, 2020, is entitled ‘Revolting footage shows Chinese woman eating a whole bat at fancy restaurant as scientists link the deadly coronavirus to the flying mammals’ (Thomson 2022). In it, the author reports: Footage purporting to show a Chinese woman eating a whole bat at a fancy restaurant has gone viral as the country is ravaged by a new deadly virus believed to have come from the flying mammals. A separate trending video purports to show Cantonese-speaking diners preparing to eat soup made with the nocturnal animal. […] [B]oth videos remain unverified. 335

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Within the article itself, there is explicit mention of a few social actors such as (1) the ‘Chinese woman eating a whole bat’ (also referred to as ‘a fashionably dressed young woman holding a bat with chopsticks’), (2) the ‘Cantonese-speaking diners preparing to eat soup made with the nocturnal animal’, (3) ‘influential Chinese blogger Chen Qiushi’ (who shared the second video), and (4) ‘A leading Chinese virologist’ warning about the spread of the new coronavirus, so these are available as potential referents for pronouns used in the reader comments. Throughout the piece, coronavirus is also referred to as ‘Chinese coronavirus’, ‘Wuhan coronavirus’, ‘new (deadly) coronavirus’, ‘deadly SARS-like virus’, and ‘killer coronavirus’ (for a comprehensive study on these lexical choices in UK tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, see Kania 2022). Neither of the videos has since been confirmed to have been recorded in Wuhan specifically, or even in China. Instead, these and similar clips (like the one confirmed to have been recorded in 2016 by Chinese presenter Wang Mengyun for an online travel programme) have been linked to restaurants in the Republic of Palau, an island country in the western Pacific, where bat features as part of the local cuisine (for a more detailed exploration of this illegitimate COVID-19 origin story, see Scheirer 2020). Despite the Daily Mail’s own admission that ‘both videos remain unverified’, the article moves on to make a more general claim, according to which the consumption of bat meat is ‘traditional’ and prevalent in China: Bats are used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a series of illnesses, including coughing, malaria and gonorrhea. […] '[After] experiencing this matter, can Chinese people give up eating wildlife?' the blogger [Chen Qiushi] asked in a post. The inclusion of the quote by Chen Qiushi is an example of the legitimisation strategy of ‘voices of expertise’ (see van Leeuwen 2007) and lends authority to the claim that this is a widespread (and inherently dangerous) practice in China (regardless of the authenticity of the two specific videos in question). While there are numerous other newspaper articles covering these (and related) videos, published primarily in tabloids, and also a great number of articles (primarily in broadsheet newspapers) explicitly ‘debunking’ bat soup stories and the alleged link between the consumption of bat meat and COVID-19 (see González-Díaz and Kania, in preparation), this article has been chosen as the starting point for the current analysis since it generated over 350,000 shares and 1,049 reader comments, all of which the Daily Mail states ‘have been moderated in advance’. The number of shares and comments shows that the coverage has generated a lot of engagement by readers, many of whom seem to take the claims made in the article at face value, while others take a more critical stance (which is one of the reasons why these online spaces are such a significant site for CDA; see Catalano and Fielder 2018 for a more in-depth discussion of the importance of analysing mediated public spheres). While upvoting/downvoting is still possible at the time of writing (i.e., in March 2023), the comments section itself has been closed. The website allows readers to sort comments by ‘newest’, ‘oldest’, as well as ‘best rated’ and ‘worst rated’. The comments were extracted using the free version of Data Miner (2022) and the resulting csv-file was checked and cleaned up manually by Yiming Cao (as part of her placement within the Undergraduate Research Scheme at the University of Liverpool). The dataset contains the 1,049 comments (totalling 12,953 words), as well as some metadata about each comment: username, (selfreported) user location, number of upvotes/downvotes, status of comment (original, n = 760; or reply, n = 289) and (for original comments) the number of replies (ranging from none to 19). All comments included in this chapter feature the original spelling and punctuation. However, for the analysis, spelling was standardised, e.g., ‘Its scary’ = ‘It’s scary’ to assist with the corpus analysis. Usernames are part of the dataset but have not been included here. All comments were assigned a unique number, 336

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ranging from oldest to newest. For this chapter, the functionality provided by MS Excel was sufficient for displaying and annotating the data (for the purpose of further qualitative or mixed methods research, such a dataset could be imported to, e.g., NVivo). The comments themselves were also POS[=part-of-speech]-tagged using the Free CLAWS web tagger (2022), to ease quantitative analyses that were conducted using the freeware AntConc (Antony 2020; this also allows for follow-up analyses requiring POS-tagging). During the tagging process, each item in a corpus is assigned to a part-of-speech category, and this information can be used for corpus linguistic analyses (e.g., looking into frequency information on particular word-classes). The C7 tag set was chosen since its categorisation of pronouns is more fine-grained than the C5 tag set (for more information on the tag sets, see CLAWS part-of-speech tagger 2022). Table 23.1 shows an example from the dataset (comment nr. 986, Sydney, Australia 171 upvotes, 4 downvotes). Frequency counts of pronouns were used as an entry point for the analysis, which focused on the most prevalent forms used to refer to the self and others. In cases where the pronoun in question was sufficiently frequent (n>50) and the form-function mapping was straightforward, the top collocates were identified, using AntConc (this was the case for the subject pronouns I, we, and they). Collocates are lexical items that co-occur with another lexical item (e.g., a particular pronoun) ‘with greater than random probability in its (textual) context’ (Hoey 1991: 6–7; see Xiao 2015, for a more in-depth discussion). Collocations thus make it possible to identify strong lexical associations in a statistically sound way, and these associations can be used as an entry point for the exploration of contextual patterns. Since subject pronouns often occur utterance-initial, the three items following the relevant pronoun were focused on [+R3], and a combination of ‘mutual information’ [MI] and ‘log-ratio’ was used as a statistical measure of collocational strength, while the threshold for statistical significance was set at p touch the paper↑ , so jump to [next.] 14: Georgian-1:

[Georgian airport.↑]

15: Japanese-1: =Jump to the Georgia Airport. [So:::] 16: Georgian-1: =Yes     [Good idea, Yes.] 17: Japanese-1: So:: person, person is working everyday ( 1.2) so he is not he’s, very boring (1.2) so, nante iun daro (smiling with rhythm) [uhuu, uhhn.] 18: Georgian-1:   [Yeah, I think it’s] good idea. 19: Georgian-1: Then, uman, he goes to vineyard 20: Japanese-1: =un un un (yes yes yes) 21: Georgian-1: S  ees grapes. Ah then , z, he sees like na, process of picking grape, and then, the process of wine making. Right? 22: Japanese-1: =Yes. 23: Georgian-1: Yes. Then we will have like (2.2) and where should we put the story↑ of this wine. No? (2.6) 24: Japanese-1: Umm, un::: (2.5) 25: Georgian-1: We have to like (2.1) we record the video someone talking about .↑ Am I right? (3.1) 26: Unidentified: un::: 27: Georgian-1: Like ah , history of Georgian wine. (.) we need that right? (2.5) Japanese-1 took time to move the conversation forward, a similar tendency as was shown in Excerpt 4, as when her code switch occurred in turn 1 she looked for a way to continue the story. Georgian-1 encouraged and tried to support her dialogue, until she was ready to continue in turn 5. After Japanese-1 started to use the person and main character as the subject, she also used he twice in turns 9 and 17. After Japanese-1 finished her explanation, Georgian-1 repeated what he understood, also using he to describe the character in the video. Excerpt 5 also showed how, when compared with excerpt 4, the participants could reduce long pauses within and between turns. In turns 12 to 22 Georgian-1 and Japanese-1 overlapped some utterances. We believe that the smoothness of this 388

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exchange has a relational component, further evidenced by paralinguistic elements, such as the smile in turn 17. Thus, there was consistency between speakers, inclusive we in turns 23 and 25, and paralinguistic evidence to suggest that the team members had bonded over the course of the workshop and shared a common goal.

4.4  Formulaic and relational you in the IRF sequence The final part of the analysis considers how conversation patterns are influenced by the experience of a foreign language classroom (Tsui 2008). The AR team participants used a larger number of first- and second-person pronouns in the introductory meeting compared to the other two teams. The AR team maintained a conversation style that drew on IRF throughout the three-day workshop, thus reflecting classroom discourse. In the programme, participants worked in a semi-business situation, but when Japanese participants wished to behave in a more natural way, they felt less confident. Participants often expressed variations of I cannot speak English, which could be interpreted as them not feeling confident to speak informally in English. Before Excerpt 6 began, Japanese participants had a chance to make small talk while they waited for Georgian participants to come in the smaller session of Zoom. In their small talk, they wondered how old a Georgian participant was. They presumed he must be of legal drinking age to be involved in wine marketing and came up with a question about this topic. They also wondered how old people have to be to drive a car in Georgia. The following conversation does not have a naturalistic flow, but the participants’ use of the IRF pattern served the purpose of getting information. Excerpt 6 1: Japanese-1: ah, ok (1.1) Hi, I’m Hana.(1.0) I’m 19 years old.↑(.) My favourite food is Shabu shabu.↑(0.8) So, (0.6) what’s your favourite food? (2.2) 2: Georgian-1: Umm, my favourite food is mma, Georgian dishes called hinkari (1.3) [and ] yeah. (1.6) 3: Japanese-1:

[Hinkari?]

4: Georgian-1: Yes, which also may everything good with wine↑[1.8] and I think (.) you will see it and I will show you (.) later. (0.8) 5: Japanese-1: Ok thank you. (2.7) 6: Japanese-2: Ok so, Hi, I’m Kenji. (0.9) I’m also 19 years olds.↑(1.4) Yeah, yes (. ) so just enjoy (. ) this three years yeh, three days (1.0) and yeah. (0.8) I just ask you. What is err (1.3) your favourite food in Japan and in Georgia? .h .h .h .hhhhh (laugh) (0.7) 7: Georgian-1: Yeah. Like I said, it’s hinkari. I will show you later. I think you would like it. It tastes good (0.8) Yeah (0.4) that’s all (1.2) 8: Japanese-2: Thank you. 9: Japanese-4: Are you hungry now? 10: Georgian-1: No. 11: Japanese-4: No? oh. You ate? 12: Georgian-1: I ate. Oh. 13: Japanese-4: Oh, what did you eat? 14: Georgian-1: Nah, I ate eggs. It’s like a french ah nah, toast, with milk. 15: Japanese-4: French toast? 389

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In turns 5 and 8, thank you is a formulaic phrase that functions as a topic closer rather than showing gratitude. However, as the participants began to get to know each other, the use of you changed and became less associated with formulaic structures. Participants became more interested in you and, despite keeping the same IRF pattern, each token of you in turns 9 to 15 was used to ask another question. This use of you is relational. Thus, we can see the pronoun used here in both transactional (in the formalities of initial introductions) and relational utterances (when participants actually become interested in the speaker). After several similar interactions the participants reached the point of rapport; they asked the Georgian participant’s age and the legal drinking and driving age in Georgia since the Georgian participant and one of the Japanese team members were fond of motor vehicles. Finally, the conversation became lively and the participants got on well.

5.  Discussion and conclusion In this study, we examined the pronoun production of Japanese and Georgian speakers of LFE. Despite their different L1s, the frequency of first- and second-person pronoun production by Japanese and Georgian participants was statistically similar. To analyse pronoun use further, we turned to qualitative analysis that considered speakers’ L1s, relational and transactional orientations, and learning experience. The findings provided a picture of how the Japanese speakers’ use of personal pronouns in LFE was informed by (pro)noun norms in their L1. There were instances of pro-drop and, when they wanted to be polite and/or build relationships, they used inclusive we or relational you. Given the transactional and relational orientations of the semi-business discussions, participants tended to focus on a goal-oriented talk by conveying messages in transactional ways (see Excerpt 5). Compared to face-to-face meetings, video conferences like those analysed here are reported to be shorter and concise (Denstadli et al. 2012), and this shorter duration may be a result of less time spent on relational talk. However, our analyses suggest that relational goals can be accomplished through transactional interactions if we pay attention to the pronouns used in goal-oriented talk. Thus, transactional and relational communication do not have to be separate components of an interaction. Pronoun use, and conversational structure more widely, was shown to be influenced by contextual factors such as foreign language learning experience. While Georgian participants learned naturalistic English in their learning environment, Japanese participants were influenced by the classroombased discourse practices. When using English, we think the participants subconsciously react in the same way they were disciplined to do so in their English-language classrooms. This default behaviour results in participants asking formulaic questions. However, in the IRF sequence, you could be changed from the expected formulaic you into relational you when speakers became more interested in their counterparts. This interpretation was reinforced by the paralinguistic elements of the conversations analysed, such as behaviour, overlaps, or length of pauses. Throughout this chapter, we documented differences in knowledge and linguistic competence, instances where participants overcame difficulty and collaborated to achieve communicative goals. The examination of pronouns was, for example, just one way to establish the presence of invisible knowledge differences. Awareness of how pronouns may signal such knowledge gaps might be helpful for participants navigating business discussions, co-constructing meaning, and developing solidarity among team members in LFE contexts. Furthermore, meta-teaching of personal pronoun use in meetings may help learners to increase their capacity to act in ways that achieve particular performance outcomes in business meetings (Bandura 1990).

6.  Future directions We explored how pronoun use affects the participants’ collaboration in an LFE context using quantitative methods and tools from conversation analysis (CA). Pronouns choice in this study exemplified sequential transitions from incident to solution (Handford 2010), separatism to solidarity 390

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(Poncini 2004), or a distancing stance to an alignment stance (Du Bois 2007) of the Georgian and Japanese participants in spoken interaction. Having established a method of analysing pronoun choice in intercultural contexts, we would encourage researchers to examine pronoun choice in interactions where different L1s are present. Our close analysis also showed the importance of paralinguistic elements in LFE interactions. Therefore, we believe future studies need to explore the connection between personal pronoun use and paralinguistic features in more detail.

Appendix A: Transcription Conventions As commonly used transcript symbols for CA have minor individual variations (Ten Have 2007), we have created our own by integrating transcription systems produced by Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Psathas and Anderson (1990), and Jefferson (2004). Time intervals [ ] (.) (1.6) =

point of overlap onset point at which an utterance terminates another tiny ‘gap’ within or between utterances elapsed time in silence by tenth of seconds, so (1.6) is a pause of 1 second and six-tenth of a second latching, one at the end of one line and one at the beginning of a next, indicates ‘no gap between’ the two lines

Characteristics of speech production : >word
animate > inanimate > abstract (Siewierska 2004: 149). This hierarchy has been found to affect categories such as ergativity, number, case, person, syncretism or gender, and occasionally word order (see Gardelle and Sorlin 2018 for an overview). For instance, in Georgian, the verb takes plural agreement if the subject is animate, but not if it denotes an inanimate (Smith-Stark 1974: 657). Animacy also interacts with other scales, especially the scales of empathy, person, and definiteness (Siewierska 2004: 149). An animacy effect such as the Georgian number split has never been perceived as a problem – so far at least. What activists target, rather, are cases in which the divide established by the Animacy Hierarchy runs directly counter to the world view they try to promote. This chapter will focus on three cases for which pronouns are regularly mentioned. They concern the English language. First, some animal rights activists and ecolinguists reject the default use of it for animals, because it singles out humans at the top of a hierarchy. Second, in the abortion debate, pro-lifers challenge the use of the neuter for fetuses, because to them they are persons. Finally, among inanimates, feminists criticize

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the use of she for ships, hurricanes, and the like, because of the associated connotations of the feminine gender, which they view as a remnant of male domination; they argue for a generalization of it instead. As with ‘gender pronoun activism’ mentioned earlier, these issues have to do with the linguistic gender system, but they concern the he/she vs. it component, rather than the distinction between he and she. The rationale behind pronoun activism is that language influences the way we think, without our being aware of it. Linguistic gender itself is ‘a repository of beliefs’ that ‘tends to mirror social stereotypes and patterns of human perception’ (Aikhenvald 2016: 4). As such, it does not reflect reality so much as construct a view of it, so that conventions ought to be challenged when they convey inadequate worldviews (Heuberger 2017). Pronouns, and more generally language, are, of course, just one of several dimensions that require action, so that no one is merely a pronoun (or language) activist. But as language itself is ‘a form of social practice’, with speakers perpetuating conventions and their asymmetries (Fairclough 2013), pronoun activists feel that changes in pronoun use are one way to make semantically motivated categories more transparent reflections of (adequate) worldviews. Pronoun activism for animacy-related causes, as found among animal rights activists or ecolinguists, pro-lifers, and feminists, differs from activism against the binary masculine/feminine contrast for humans in two respects. First, there are no calls for changes to the pronominal paradigm itself (pronoun coinages), only for changes to conventions of use. Second, pronouns are not always as central: as we will see, the abortion debate, in particular, primarily involves categorization by nouns (preborn child vs. fetus). This does not make animacy-related pronoun activism any less important to study because it calls for a fine understanding of the relationship between worldviews and grammatical categories, and of what altering usage entails.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics A key initial question is what exactly it takes for a conventional pronoun use to pose problems for activists. Because pronouns are grammatical words (as opposed to lexical), their primary contribution to discourse is functional – and, as such, is not viewed as problematic. The feature of definiteness, for instance, merely gives instructions to access the referent in context, based on whether this referent is identifiable. A pronominal feature may become a locus of political activism if it has a further categorizing role – like gender in English. Even then, not all categorizations are considered problematic. For example, there are no societal issues about spatial deixis as encoded in English this vs. that (proximity to the speaker vs. distance). For a pronominal feature to become a problem, the categorization it establishes (or conventionally licenses) has to run counter to a worldview. Pronoun activists have targeted two such features for animacy-related issues: person (on a single occasion, to my knowledge) and gender (especially in English). The person feature, in most languages at least, establishes a distinction between the discourse roles of speaker (or a group that includes the speaker), adressee(s), and third parties (Siewierska 2004). As such, the referent of the first-person pronoun we is a plurality that has to include the speaker, but it may be augmented with any other entities. The New Nature Writers, an organization that brings together scientists, travel writers, concerned citizens, and others, noticed that in nature writing, these other referents were typically human. This use is a problem to them because it runs counter to the view of nature that they promote (‘New Nature’), which is that ‘all plants, animals, and people, all rivers, oceans, mountains, deserts, and forests, are connected’, so that humans are not the only perceivers or living beings in their environment (New Nature Writers 2022). As a result, New Nature Writers advocate the use of an inclusive we that brings together the narrator (or author) and nonhuman participants in order to establish temporary relations of equivalence and bridge the default human/animal divide (Fairclough 2003, Stibbe 2015). For example, in (1), we and our bring

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the author and a bird together, which makes them members of a single category – identified later on as creatures on earth (Stibbe 2015: 116). (1) Together, in spite of our obvious differences, we were as bound as any two creatures on earth by something immeasurable – life itself (Woolfson 2013: 8). Aside from this very restricted criticism against some uses of we, the most commonly targeted feature for animacy-related pronoun activism is by far gender. Beyond its major reference tracking function (gender signals co-reference or syntactic dependence through agreement, Corbett 1991: 322, Aikhenvald 2016: 52), gender has a categorizing role: all gender systems have a semantic core, based on animacy, humanness, or sex (Aikhenvald 2016: 65). Not all gender systems encode animacyrelated contrasts. For instance, in Dizi, an Omotic language of Ethiopia, the feminine gender groups together nouns for females and diminutives, and the masculine is used for all other nouns, whether they denote animates or inanimates (Allan 1976, Corbett 1991: 11). A further distinction must be made between predominantly semantic systems, such as Dizi or English, and mainly formal systems, such as French or German (Corbett 1991). In formal systems, gender is much more highly grammaticalized, so that the gender of individual nouns is not meaningful outside references to humans, deities, and a minority of animals. For instance, in French, fauteuil ‘armchairMASC’ does not entail that the referent is viewed as male-like, or girafe ‘giraffeFEM’ that it is female or female-like. Gender for these nouns is largely assigned on phonological or morphological grounds; in that sense, it is arbitrary, despite occasional groupings (e.g., in German, nouns for cars are masculine, hyperonyms such as Tier ‘animal’ tend to be neuter, Kürschner 2020) or remotivation in cases of personification – personifications follow the gender of the noun, so that a roseFEM, for instance, will be endowed with what is perceived as feminine qualities in poetry. As a consequence, French pronouns are not targeted by activists for animacy-related issues. Conversely, the pronominal gender system of English undergoes criticism because gender selection depends on the conceptualization of the referent (hence the concept of ‘referential gender’), and because the primary distinction in the English gender system (he/she vs. it) follows the Animacy Hierarchy. It establishes a divide between humans, at one end, referred to as he or she (more specifically humans viewed as persons, hence the possibility of it for babies in some contexts), and inanimates, at the other end (the noun thing used non-metaphorically, for instance, is only compatible with it). This primary distinction is also reflected in relative pronouns (who/which) and, outside the gender system, in interrogative pronouns (who/what) and indefinite pronouns (somebody/something). This binary distinction, as we can see, does not cater specifically for animals. For them, there is ‘a high degree of variability’ (Corbett 1991: 12). By default, as they are non-human, it is more common: even when the sex is specified in the antecedent noun (e.g., doe), the neuter is still used in over one-sixth of cases (Gardelle 2012). But an ‘upgrading principle’ (Mathiot and Roberts 1979) may trigger the use of he or she, either because the animal is perceived as person-like (a proper name excludes it) or out of interest or empathy (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 489). This upgrading principle is also at work for inanimates, for allegories or personifications but also, for a minority of speakers only, to emphasize interest or emotional involvement (such as familiarity, exasperation, or enthusiasm). Examples include She’s a beauty! for a motorbike or a satellite dish, Is he washable? about a bedspread in a shop, or even She’s snowing pretty good to enthuse about the weather and prospects of great skiing (Svartengren 1927, Mathiot and Roberts 1979, Pawley 2002, Gardelle 2006, 2015a). Such uses are sometimes regional or dialectal (Pawley 2002, Siemund 2008), but the boundary with so-called standard English is by no means watertight. There are also a few cases of conventionalized upgrading: grammars regularly record the use of she for ships, hurricanes, or countries. For these, there is ‘considerable variation among speakers’, with many using it (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 488); but in some communities of practice in particular,

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the neuter is less common. Examples are the Navy and maritime circles for ships or historians for countries until the 1970s. This animacy-based component constitutes the core of the English gender system, so that the masculine and feminine are sometimes grouped together under the umbrella term ‘animate genders’ (e.g. Siemund 2008). It is only once the choice to use an animate gender (rather than the neuter) has been made that the distinction between he and she comes in. This distinction is based on a contrast between male and female and, by extension, between supposedly male-like and female-like qualities. In addition, there are a few conventions for which speakers do not actually choose which gender they will go for. For example, a ship, a hurricane, or a country is conventionally referred to with she and not he; among allegories, Justice is conventionally a she, Death a he, with corresponding female and male figures. As this brief description shows, a key element in the English gender system is that many antecedent nouns license agreement with not just one, but two or sometimes three genders (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). For instance, a bull may be referred to with it or he; a fish with it, he, or she, regardless of sex, and so on. For all these referents, pronominal gender therefore carries contextual categorization, and it is a matter of choice. Shared cultural representations lead to default choices; it is some of these defaults that pronoun activists challenge. We now turn to three case studies, to understand how pronoun activism fits in a broader fight for a cause.

3.  Current contributions and research 3.1  Animal rights activists and ecolinguists Animal rights activists and ecolinguists will be considered first because they challenge the top of the animacy scale (humans > animals), which, as we saw, is a cultural foundation in Western societies and underlies some components of grammar. Animal rights activists come from all walks of life; they promote a view of animals as sentient beings that have a right to be free of human exploitation. Ecolinguists are mostly academics, whose first aim, as described by the International Ecolinguistics Association, is ‘to develop linguistic theories which see humans not only as part of society, but also as part of the larger ecosystems that life depends on’ (IEA 2022). The fight of both groups is part of a broader environmentalist movement, which calls for a reassessment of humanity’s destructive relationship with nature and the environment (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2015). To them, the idea that humans rank above animals, plants, and minerals is an outdated anthropocentric view that leads people to consider nature primarily in terms of its usefulness to human beings (Heuberger 2017) and results in discrimination against other species (‘speciesism’). Language reflects this utilitarian anthropocentrism for animals, for instance, when it categorizes animals as ‘pets’, ‘livestock’, or ‘game’; when it has different terms for similar elements in humans and nonhumans (such as eat/ feed or corpse/carcass); when it fails to individuate animals, either through non-count grammar (e.g. chicken, lamb), possibly with a different word for the food and the living animal (pork/pig), or through lack of morphological variation (grammatically compulsory for deer; a common alternative to -s for elk; or an alternative chiefly restricted to contexts of hunting, shooting, and conservation for elephant, as in a herd of elephant or three elephant – see Allan 1976: 103, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1588). It is as though each animal was just an easily replaceable specimen (Heuberger 2017, Sealey 2018). Crucially for the present chapter, anthropocentrism is also manifest in the use of it, which erases sex distinctions and groups animals together with inanimates rather than humans (Heuberger 2017). As a result, some animal rights organizations, such as the Humane Society of the United States, propose to use the same pronouns for animals and humans, restricting the use of it to inanimates. When the sex is unknown, they advocate the same solutions as for humans (see 2): they, he or she, avoiding third-person singular pronouns or other gender-inclusive forms. 397

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(2) Bats in houses can go unnoticed for years. Occasionally, a bat may accidentally find himself inside a home, flying around and landing on curtains or furniture. If you find one in your house, don’t panic. Most likely, you can send the bat on his or her way safely and humanely (Humane Society of the United States 2021). Similarly, when the New International Version of the Christian Bible was revised to use gender-inclusive language (such as people instead of men), PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) asked the Committee on Bible Translation to use he or she instead of it for animals in their following edition (Sherrow 2013). More recently, PETA has merged the fight for animal rights with fights against discriminations among humans, including the fight for gender equality: in 2021, the catchphrase on their welcome page (peta​.o​rg) read: ‘Bigotry begins when categories such as race, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or species are used to justify discrimination’. The quest for continuity across species is sometimes also reflected in the extension of the word ‘animal’ to include humans, with the corresponding subclass of ‘nonhuman animals’. This is controversial because nonhuman defines animals as what they are not (Moe 2014: ix). PETA, for instance, retains animals and humans on most of its website (e.g., ‘The abuse that animals suffer at human hands […]’ on its ‘Animal Rights Issues’ page), although one of its Teachkind resources takes animal as a hyperonym: ‘humans (boy, girl, teacher, etc.) as well as other animals’, ‘we use [he/she] when talking about living beings who are animals’ (PETA 2022). How would the suggested elimination of it for animals affect the grammatical gender system? It would require a major conscious effort on the part of speakers because it would change the prototypes at the very core of an internalized grammatical category: the prototypes for the animate gender classes would have to shift from humans alone (more specifically persons) to humans and animals. Still, the proposed change would not alter the broadest animacy-based criterion for gender assignment: the animate genders would continue to reflect some form of upgrading, in contrast to the neuter, which retains things as its prototypes. In this respect, the proposed change is potentially more easily acquirable than, for instance, the use of it as an epicene pronoun for human adults in sex-indefinite references. This was proposed by the Woman’s New World Dictionary in 1973 in an attempt to replace the male-biased generic he. The idea was that it was used for some humans – as in the baby was happy with its rattle – and so could be extended to adults, with sentences such as the applicant signed its name (Baron 1986: 192). This proposal was too radical because it would have downgraded human adults in sex-indefinite references (going against the whole logic of the persons/things divide, which automatically upgrades persons), while retaining the principle of upgraded persons in sex-specified references (e.g., Mary was proud of her/*its promotion). Could the proposed systematic use of he and she for animals become standard English? Some ecolinguists and activists consider it misleading to regard ‘animals’ as a single step in the current animacy scale (Dahl 2000: 100). Permanent upgrading is relatively easy to achieve in animal rights discourse because it describes victims of human action (cases of cruelty, of animals killed for food, for scientific experiments, by pesticides), which favors individuation and feelings of empathy – besides, even a website such as peta​.o​rg shows very few gendered pronouns, because its nonspecific statements are usually in the plural (e.g., cows…they…). But ecologist author Carl Safina (2017), for instance, suggests a distinction between what he calls ‘who animals’, such as elephants, which he defines as those animals that have social structures and aspire to higher rank, and others, like herrings, which he thinks of as ‘it’. On a more theoretical level, Heuberger (2017) identifies not one, but three possible stages for an egalitarian approach to nature, which he brings under the umbrella term ‘physiocentrism’. Animal rights discourse may be seen to correspond to the first stage: pathocentrism, which recognizes moral value only to beings that have a capacity to suffer (such as mammals, reptiles, fish, birds). One stage further, biocentrism extends moral value to all living 398

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beings, including amoebae and even plants – which undergo the same anthropocentrism as animals, from utilitarian categories (weeds) to non-count grammar (clover) (Heuberger 2017). The broadest approach, holism, includes nature as a whole, making existence the morally relevant criterion. The broader the criterion, though, the less ‘people’s willingness to accept these philosophical views as the basis for a reform of language usage’, and there is no consensus among ecolinguists to date (Heuberger 2017). Stibbe (2012) even rejects the systematic proscription of it as political correctness. Adopting a global discourse analysis approach (after Fairclough 2003), he argues that it takes a whole combination of features to objectify animals. In (3), for instance, it is part of ‘a discourse of empathy and respectful distance’, and therefore does not in itself convey discrimination (Stibbe 2012: 5). (3) I stepped out from a clutch of trees and found myself looking into the face of one of the rare and beautiful bison that exist only on that island. Our eyes locked. When it snorted, I snorted back; when it lifted its shoulders, I shifted my stance; when I tossed my head, it tossed its head in reply. I found myself caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other. (Abram 1996: 21) Systematic upgrading by labelling the bison as he or she might even be regarded as a form of anthropomorphism – projecting human norms and patterns rather than seeing animals for what they are, and possibly denying them their differences in the process. The issue of the best use of pronouns also echoes discussions as to the boundaries of the category of ‘persons’ in the philosophical sense, defined as ‘entities who possess a particular moral status’ (Chan and Harris 2011: 304). Chan and Harris (2011: 322), for instance, consider that paramecia and nematodes are ‘clearly not persons’ because they show no evidence of a capacity to value their own existence. A speaker who considers that a paramecia is not a person (philosophically speaking) is hardly likely to opt for systematic upgrading with he or she because rejecting a sense of self in the animal goes against the semantic values of the animate genders. The definition of what a ‘person’ is concerns entities beyond humans – animals, also transhumans, chimeras, and animate machines, although there is no pronoun activism there (yet?), but it also concerns humans before birth (embryos, fetuses), which brings us to another case of pronoun activism: the abortion debate.

3.2  The abortion debate The main linguistic issue in the abortion debate is how to name the embryo or, later on, the fetus, before birth. To pro-life activists, ‘embryo’ and ‘fetus’ are misnomers because life begins at fertilization, and birth is only a ‘change in location’ (Live Action 2021). What others call an embryo or a fetus is an ‘unborn child’ or, as advocated by some more recently, a ‘preborn child’, a term that makes the coming birth more salient (Voice for Life 2014). In this perspective, unborn children are ‘the youngest among us’ (Live Action 2021), and ‘an unborn child is in fact a human person at conception’ (Illinois Right to Life 2021). This central naming issue has consequences for pronouns: whereas the standard pronoun for embryo and fetus is it, some pro-lifers argue against the use of it. Voice for Life (2014), for instance, advocates ‘Giv[ing] the preborn child a gender’ (more accurately, using an animate gender rather than it) as one of ‘ten ways you can reclaim language for LIFE’, that is, challenge conventions in language to ‘reinforce the humanity of the preborn child’ and thus promote a pro-life attitude. This suggestion exploits the animacy-based component of the gender system, not the sex distinction: (4) Of course you don’t know which gender the child is, however referring to the child as ‘him’ or ‘her’ validates the humanity of the child more than referring to the child as ‘it.’ For instance, 399

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instead of ‘the abortionist rips the preborn child from out of its mother and throws it in the medical waste container’, try ‘the abortionist rips the preborn child from out of her mother and throws her in the medical waste container’. (Voice for Life 2014) This arbitrary ascription of a single gender runs counter to the values of he (male) and she (female) for humans, and it is grammatically unrealistic. Another option, put forward for instance by O’Keefe (2004), is to follow the principles of sex-indefinite references to adults. Her example is he/she (‘inserting a device into his/her head to suction the brain out, killing the child and collapsing his/her head…’), and other options include genderless solutions, such as repetition of the nominal group the child in the first sentence of extract (4) above. Note, however, that this sentence requires an effort because the repetition disrupts anaphora processing mechanisms: only a personal pronoun can indicate ‘referential and attentional continuity’ (Cornish 1999: 63, see also Gardelle 2015b). Advocating the same pronoun uses as for human adults indirectly requires a change in references to (born) babies, where it is still found, especially in contexts of undifferentiation, such as maternity hospitals (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 489). For instance, in its non-specific references, the website of the national Australian Government service ‘Pregnancy Birth and Baby’ (2021) reads ‘your baby may have little hair on its head, but lots of soft body hair’ besides ‘Once your baby is stable, they may be transferred to the NICU or SCN.’ The conventional use of it for babies does not mean that they are not viewed as human beings, of course, but probably derives from the idea that their ability to think and communicate, and perhaps their status as persons with moral rights and duties, are not fully fledged yet. This would be incompatible with pro-life arguments. Conversely, pro-choicers focus on abortion as a human right for women (and sometimes, more recently, for any other pregnant parent, whether transgender or non-binary) because it involves issues of physical integrity, gender equality, health (access to safe, as opposed to clandestine, abortion), and the right to reproductive self-determination (e.g., Center for Reproductive Rights 2004). Even though the fetus is alive, early on it is not viable outside the parent’s body. The difference in conceptualization between pro-choicers and pro-lifers is particularly obvious in descriptions of the medical termination procedure. Where pro-lifers use ‘the baby’, pro-choicers and publicly funded institutions tend to reduce the fetus to inanimate matter with references to ‘the pregnancy’ (NHS 2021), ‘the contents of the uterus’ (Family Planning NSW 2021), or ‘the uterine contents’ (Our Bodies Our Selves 2014), even when they use ‘the baby’ elsewhere in articles on abortion. Any pronouns used to refer back to ‘the pregnancy’, for example, as a result of agreement, have to be it. Similarly, anaphoric pronouns for embryo and fetus are it, which is standard in English. The two cases studied so far – animal rights and abortion – have one point in common: activists seek to shift the lines for third parties (animals, preborn children) that are viewed as voiceless victims. The final case of animacy-related activism in this chapter is different: feminist activists (mostly women) opposing the use of she for inanimate objects/concepts are part of the group that stands to be discriminated against. Here again, language is just one target for activism and animacy-related issues may be only of minor concern.

3.3  Feminism and women as objects The conventionalized use of she for inanimates such as ships, cars, and hurricanes is rejected by pronoun activists as derogatory and patronizing to women. To Thomson (2017), for instance, ‘[r]eferring to cars as ‘she’ promotes the ideology that women are objects; things to be seen as property owned by men. For many, this notion is subconscious. However, subconscious or conscious, it’s detrimental’. Pronoun activists advocate the use of it instead. What is at stake here is not the status of cars, or ships, or hurricanes, but that of women: what seems to be a she/it issue is, in fact, an attack on the connotations of the feminine gender. Thomson’s (2017) idea is that upgrading a car stems from 400

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a relationship of dominance that echoes, and perpetuates, the patriarchal relationship that some men have to women. Cars, ships, and hurricanes might seem anecdotal, but, in fact, they are illustrations of a more general pattern. A number of gender scholars have concluded that the choice of he or she when upgrading inanimates follows representations of men and women, and that it is partly sexist because it reproduces an asymmetric relationship in which men are the norm (Romaine 1997: 52). Looking at gender selection (he vs. she) for inanimates in informal American English, by both men and women, Mathiot and Roberts (1979) conclude that men tend to picture themselves as conquerors, to view other men as equals (buddies or opponents), but to stand in a relationship of dominance toward women – who are viewed as either challenges (difficult to conquer, possibly uncontrollable; a source of eagerness or resentment) or rewards (beautiful, precious, prized possessions). Women, on the other hand, seem to define themselves only in relation to men. They regard themselves as emotionally superior and more mature than men, whom they tend to picture as infantile, but they also picture themselves as challenges and rewards, with potentially negative connotations. Subsequent feminist research on gender use for inanimates has focused more specifically on the general feminist idea that language ‘has been made by men’ and conveys a patriarchal bias (Spender 1985: 52). To Morris (1997), she is used when the referent is felt to ‘fall into the realm of what is already known or what is predictable’, ‘probably’ because women are the less dominant group. He, conversely, is used when the referent is viewed as having a potential for unpredictability, such as a bullet that is key evidence in a police case. Romaine (1999) suggests that women are portrayed as the ‘other’ (outwardly civilized, but ‘harbor[ing] an essentially wild inner nature’, strange territory to be conquered and defeated), and applies the concept to inanimates for which she is culturally the only possible animate gender: ships, hurricanes, cities, nations, countries, nature, and so on, as well as a number of allegories, such as Justice, Chastity, or Fortune. It remains to be seen whether the feminist ‘dominance’ reading can account for all gender uses: if we consider hurricanes, to Romaine (1999) the feminine reflects a wild, uncontrollable nature, whereas to Morris (1997), it corresponds to a seemingly contradictory idea of predictability (causing the expected kind of havoc, probably). The wealth of evidence, however, makes the existence of a pattern of asymmetry and dominance undeniable, and the same asymmetry has been found outside pronominal gender, for instance in pairs of gender-differentiated terms such as mistress/master, lady/ lord, or spinster/bachelor, where the terms referring to females have derogatory and/or unprestigious connotations (Spender 1985). The exclusive focus of pronoun activists on a dominance reading might have been further prompted by the potentially greater visibility of uses of she by men. Conventionalized uses of she in professional circles or among enthusiasts tend to be recorded only in traditionally men-dominated domains – for ships, yachts and catamarans, locomotives, racing cars, motorbikes, bells, dying vats, and so on – and they are given written visibility through the websites of individual enthusiasts, clubs or museums, or published diaries (Gardelle 2006). Male use of she in informal or dialectal conversation has also been made visible through dialogues in American fiction (see the many examples in Svartengren 1927). Conversely, a thorough search of the Internet or fiction does not yield any record of she (or he) in traditionally female working environments (such as typewriters in secretarial pools or sewing machines in factories). It is also mainly male speakers who, in the same sources, are shown to use the phrase she’s a beauty to express enthusiasm over entities as diverse as a motorbike, a pool table, a satellite dish, or a prized pen (Gardelle 2006). The phrase he’s a beauty does not yield a single occurrence for inanimates on the Internet. Hurricanes are not referred to as he, even when they have a male name (Romaine 1999: 76). Neither are ships, even when they belong to a category in -man (man-of-war, whaleman, Indiaman) or have an individual male name (together with a male figurehead in older ships) (Gardelle 2006). For instance, HMS Royal George is referred to as she (Daly 2017). The same goes for locomotives, so that Big Boys (Steam Locomotives 2021) and the Flying Scotsman (McLean 2015) are she (or it). 401

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Given this asymmetry between the feminine and the masculine, the use of she is viewed by feminists as reflecting and perpetuating the subordination of women. This holds even when the feminine conveys potentially positive qualities, such as nurturing and maternal behavior in references to ships, or affection toward a tool or a machine for a workman (Romaine 1999: 77). To pronoun activists, such conventionalized connotations define a set of supposedly female qualities that trap women in a limited number of roles. They fail to capture the more varied reality of women’s identities and prevent them from participating in any other ways (Tennant 2019). In addition, association to the feminine gender has given rise to sexist humor, such as ‘Like a woman, a ship is unpredictable’ or patronizing metaphors, such as ‘the old girl’ and the lover (or love of one’s life), found for ships and planes in some press articles about professionals, at least in the 1990s (Romaine 1999: 59) and 2000s (Gardelle 2006: 196). One example is a Northern Echo article entitled ‘The buoyant lady in Brian’s life’, about retired Merchant Navy engineer Brian Stringer, in which we learn that ‘The lady in his life is the Princess Royal, the Hartlepool lifeboat which between 1939–69 saved 94 lives’ (The Northern Echo 2002). Two classes of inanimates received wide media coverage, with lasting consequences on pronouns: hurricanes and ships. Hurricanes were the focus of feminist activism in the 1970s in the United States, especially under the influence of Roxcy Bolton (Roberts 2017). As a result, the practice of giving female-only names to hurricanes at the Weather Bureau was given up in 1978 for the Eastern North Pacific, and in 1979 for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, in favor of a strict alternation between male and female names (National Hurricane Center 2021). More recently, a number of universities and press stylebooks have included recommendations against the use of she. For instance, the Boston University guidelines on inclusive language (2021) state: ‘The gender-neutral pronouns it and its are preferred when making reference to a storm, regardless of name.’ As for ships, Lloyd’s List, the authoritative newspaper of the shipping industry, hit the headlines when editor Leigh Smith decided to use it instead of she in the paper, first in 1998 (causing so much protest that she was restored), and then in 2002 (when the new editor, Julian Bray, went through with the reform) (BBC News 1998, Judd 2002). More recently, Scottish Maritime Museum director David Mann sparked criticism in 2019 when, after signage vandalism in the museum (feminine pronouns were scratched out), he announced that she would no longer be used on new signs. He told journalists the policy was put into place before the signs were defaced (Baynes 2019), but the debate received media coverage as far away as New Zealand (Tennant 2019). In both instances, publicized arguments against the loss of she came mainly from professionals (sailors and maritime museum directors). They are of two kinds. One is semantic motivation: the feminine is said to express ‘affection by sailors who see their vessel as a maternal protector’ (Davies 2019). This is indeed found in sailor poetry, which conveys pride toward the ship and praise for its courage in fighting the elements (Gardelle 2006). To professionals, therefore, these uses of she are not derogatory. To feminists, on the other hand, they are problematic when considered against the broader dominance pattern, in that they trap women in the role of the mother figure. The other argument against the proscription of she is tradition. Where Lloyd’s List editors and other feminists see the shift to it as a token of modernity that conforms to the modern international practice of treating ships as commodities (Julian Bray in Wilson 2002, Richard Meade in Davis 2019), to opponents she is traditional and embodies a professional community’s identity. A Royal Navy spokesman describes the use of she as ‘not just a sentimental thing, but a part of culture’, while Pieter van der Merwe, general editor at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, says: ‘It is a chip out of the wall of a particular cultural sector. You can say it’s a small thing, but small things mount up. You actually lose the color of specialist areas if you destroy the language of them’ (Judd 2002). This sense of cancelled culture probably also underlies the somewhat extreme reaction of Admiral Lord Alan

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West, former First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, who describes the move toward the neuter as ‘an insult to generations of sailors’ (Horton 2019). These speakers do not call for a generalization of she among English speakers, but they attempt to preserve a community’s practices against what they see as an unnecessary change imposed by outsiders. To date, recommendations against using she for ships have been made by a number of universities and press stylebooks, as for hurricanes. For instance, the Associated Press stylebook (Goldstein 2005) reads: ‘Do not use this pronoun in references to ships or nations. Use it instead’. Lloyd’s List also has retained the neuter. But some press articles still have she when the ship’s name is specified (a specific study would be needed to assess the exact contexts; for instance, she in a Guardian article on the historical ship HMS Terror, Watson 2016), and many historical or museum websites still show she for ships and locomotives. Enthusiasts, too, have kept the feminine. What are the implications of these data? There can be no reliable answer without a sociolinguistic study, but tentative hypotheses may be put forward. First, it seems that some speakers or institutions might be more easily convinced than others by feminist arguments. Lloyd’s List explicitly places representations conveyed by gender use above tradition; the Navy takes a more conservative stance. Second, even if any reform is an effort because speakers have to override acquired uses, it seems that pronoun change is less difficult for speakers for whom it is only a tradition (as for hurricanes in the press or countries in history books, where she would now sound patriotic or archaic). To some professionals and enthusiasts at least, gender alternation seems to be meaningful. The existence of gender alternation between she and it in some articles or websites on ships, or on museum signage (for ships, but also for helicopters, U-boats, or locomotives, Gardelle 2006), suggests a difference in perspective between she and it, with she conveying temporary upgrading of the referent. Ships, then, seem to be more than basic inanimates to those speakers. Similarly, names for private boats are typically inspired by loved ones; RAF planes in World War II included the Defiant, whose name does not convey supposedly female attributes but reflects a form of emotional involvement and was also referred to as she (Allnutt 2017); ships and tankers still get blessed for good luck at ceremonial ship launchings, ahead of work fraught with danger at sea. Having institutionalized endorsements of it in the name of gender discrimination could be a problem for such speakers because it would deny them the possibility of upgrading, of expressing a personal relationship to the ship. An alternative solution has been adopted by operators of tunnel boring machines, which are not mentioned in mainstream feminist critique but are often referred to as she, given exclusively female first names, and are blessed during a ceremony (Lawson 2012). Here again, the feminine conveys a maternal figure, according to Christopher Allen, construction manager for DC Clean Rivers: ‘[the blessing] has the connotation, if you treat her well, she’ll be good to you and she’ll save you and keep you safe’ (cited in Payne 2014). Thus, the operators retain the feminine and the representations conveyed by she as part of the broader discourse around the machines. This could be seen as a case of global discourse approach (the idea that a word by itself is not discriminatory; a whole environment is), as advocated by Stibbe (2012) for animal rights (see above). As such, broader representation has been achieved through public appeals to propose names for new tunnel-boring machines, with some being christened after famous women such as queens, scientists, cricket captains, or a woman premier, which has aroused public interest and pride in the machines (Lawson 2012 for Crossrail UK, Rail Projects Victoria 2021). One advantage of this global approach is that it does not run counter to professional experience of the machines (upgrading remains possible) or tradition, but still works on the underlying problem: association of the feminine gender to inferiority. Instead, the global approach promotes pride in the machines and their operators by involving the public in the naming and by communicating about them.

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4.  Future directions These three cases of pronoun activism have shown how much language matters in social and political debates. Even a personal pronoun – an unobtrusive word that exists in the language primarily for a functional role – conveys worldviews when it carries referential gender. By challenging default views, activists bring issues such as animal rights, the right to life of embryos or fetuses, and gender equality into the public arena. In this respect, pronoun activism modestly contributes to raising awareness and triggering debates. There is further success for activists if the promoted views spread through society; one key question, which deserves further sociolinguistic research, is whether linguistic change actually facilitates social and political change – and, if so, how much. This chapter has suggested that adjustments in pronoun use was highly dependent on adjustments of worldviews, rather than the other way round. The use of he/she in the abortion debate goes hand in hand with the adoption of the corresponding noun phrases (from ‘embryo’ or ‘fetus’ to ‘unborn/preborn child’), which itself depends on views on personhood. The systematic use of animate genders for animals seems to correspond to too radical a worldview for animals such as cockroaches or paramecia, and more generally involves considering animals and humans as part of one broad category (cf. the phrase humans and other animals), which is currently a far cry from mainstream conceptualization. This is not even the view of animal welfare organizations, for instance, such as Save the Whales in the United States or the Wildlife Trust in Great Britain, which retain it in non-specific references. Finally, advocating the neuter for ships and the like seems to have convinced institution leaders for whom the feminine was a tradition, more than referentially motivated; but for professionals and enthusiasts, such a change seems more problematic because, in addition to a sense of loss of tradition for a community of practice, generalizing the neuter in a navy-related institution (a merchant navy magazine or a maritime museum) seems to runs counter to the upgrading principle in the gender system in their community. A global discourse approach to language and discrimination may provide one alternative way of challenging discriminatory worldviews while not interfering with pronoun usage. In particular, further research is needed into current upgrading practices in jobs that used to be male-dominated but now have more women, such as positions in the Navy or the RAF. Such a study would have to consider pronouns, but also the general contexts in which they are used, to see if the global discourse has evolved, and why. The case studies also demonstrated that issues about ‘animacy’ are, in fact, searches for definitions of who we are. There are moves to upgrade animals as persons, but not moves toward having systematic he or she for plants as well, although technically they are animate and communicate: they are viewed as too different from us. Similarly, it is the top of the Animacy Hierarchy that is the focus of pronoun activism for ships and the like – what is at stake is really representations of women rather than the status of ships or countries. The notion of ‘human being’ seems objectively definable as a species, but, in fact, it comes with a number of representations about personhood and about our place in the universe, which evolve over time and get challenged. In particular, the last decades have seen major evolutions in our relationship to animals. When we look back at the 1960s, it seems incredible that in scientific research, the idea that animals have conscious thought should have been proscribed as anthropomorphism (Sealey and Oakley 2013). Current animal rights activism seeks to further shift the lines at the top of the animacy scale. The category ‘animal’ requires further research in relation to pronoun activism, since it is definitely not a homogeneous class. In particular, actual and proposed gender use should be tested against the notion of ‘person’, considering the whole range of species, but also types of discourse – is there necessary distancing in scientific discourse, for instance; or how would systematic upgrading of animals as persons manage descriptions of the natural cycle of hunting animals feeding on prey, without conveying undue sympathy for the prey and judgment on the hunters? This perspective also calls 404

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for a fine thinking of the boundary between promoting animal rights and lapsing into generalized anthropomorphism (as in some children’s stories), which is what generalized he/she might actually convey. Thinking about who we are also involves a refined understanding of those who were regarded as the norm: men, whose identities are as varied as those of women. In this chapter, a closer look at feminist readings of gender use for inanimates showed a focus on she, but Mathiot and Roberts (1979) record uses of both she and he and a richer spectrum of representations than dominant men and dominated women. New research on how representations are conveyed by animate (gendered) pronouns is thus needed across a range of countries and languages. In particular, data collection and analysis of the use of he for inanimates is missing. The data are hard to find, but Gardelle (2006) reports one occurrence of he in an engineering meeting for a butterfly valve (‘This guy is not a butterfly, should he be a butterfly ?’) and a few in fiction (e.g., for a fork in the BBC series The Good Life). Her informants (typically representatives from clubs for enthusiasts) remembered occasional uses, such as ‘where has he got to?’ in reference to a teapot, or an English engineer’s colleague, a female secretary, exclaiming ‘Here she is!’ about a report. Finally, the chapter raises the issue of who has the power to trigger or spread language (and societal) change. Activist organizations challenge usage or worldviews that used to be taken for granted, but they represent a minority of the general public, and they are sometimes regarded as radical thinkers. Press stylebooks, academic guidelines, magazines, museums, may, however, offer further endorsement, offering guidance and possibly imposing changes in their communities of practice. Whether the speakers who adjust to those guidelines have the same pronoun uses beyond the immediate context of their correction would be interesting to study. The role of public authorities, of peer pressure, and of communities of practice also deserves further research that would contribute to a better understanding of the complex web that influences individuals to choose particular pronouns.

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Laure Gardelle Daly, S. (2017). The sinking of HMS Royal George and its importance in British Naval Culture. Port Towns and Urban Cultures. Available at http://porttowns​.port​.ac​.uk​/the​-sinking​-of​-hms​-royal​-george/. Davies, C. (2019). And all who sail in … it? The language row over ‘female’ ships. The Guardian 26 April 2019. Available at https://www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2019​/apr​/26​/ships​-she​-royal​-navy​-language​-row​-female. Egginton, W. (2018). The Splintering of the American Mind. Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses. New York: Bloomsbury. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2013). Language and Power (second edition). London: Routledge. Family Planning NSW. (2021). Surgical abortion. Pregnancy Choices Helpline. Available at https://www​.pregnancychoices​.org​.au​/surgical​-abortion/. Gardelle, L. (2006). Le Genre en Anglais Moderne (16e Siècle à nos Jours). Le Système des Pronoms Personnels. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne. Gardelle, L. (2012). Gender/sex discrepancies in pronominal references to animals: A statistical analysis. English Language and Linguistics 17(1): 181–194. Gardelle, L. (2015a). Let her rain, she’s snowing pretty good: The use of feminine pronouns with weather verbs in colloquial English. Folia Linguistica 49(2): 353–379. Gardelle, L. (2015b). Sex-indefinite references to human beings in American English. In L. Gardelle and S. Sorlin (eds) The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 69–92. Gardelle, L. and Sorlin, S. (2018). Introduction: Anthropocentrism, egocentrism and the notion of Animacy Hierarchy. International Journal of Language and Culture 5(2): 133–161. Goldstein, N. (ed.) (2005). Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. New York: The Associated Press. Heuberger, R. (2017). Overcoming anthropocentrism with anthropomorphic and physiocentric uses of language? In A.F. Fill and H. Penz (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. London: Routledge, ebook edition, ch. 22. Horton, H. (2019). Former head of the Navy says decision to scrap ‘she’ title for ships is ‘an insult to generations of sailors’. The Telegraph 24 April 2019. Available at https://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/news​/2019​/04​/24​/gender​ -neutral​-ships​-row​-former​-head​-navy​-says​-decision​-scrap/. Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humane Society of the United States. (2021). What to do about bats. Available at https://www​.humanesociety​ .org​/resources​/what​-do​-about​-bats. IEA (International Ecolinguistics Association). (2022). About. Available at https://www​.ecolinguistics​-association​.org/. Illinois Right to Life. (2021). Pro-life is pro-woman. Available at https://illinoisrighttolife​.org​/pro​-life​-is​-pro​ -woman/. Judd, T. (2002). Lloyd’s List takes sex out of shipping. Independent 21 March 2002. Available at https://www​ .independent​.co​.uk​/news​/uk​/home​-news​/lloyd​-s​-list​-takes​-sex​-out​-shipping​-9215807​.html. Kürschner, S. (2020). Grammatical gender in Modern Germanic languages. In M.T. Putnam and B.R. Page (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 259–281. Lawson, T. (2012). Names of our first six tunnel boring machines announced. Crossrail 13 March 2012. Available at https://www​.crossrail​.co​.uk​/news​/articles​/names​-our​-first​-six​-tunnel​-boring​-machines​-announced. Live Action. (2021). Life’s beginning. Available at https://www​.liveaction​.org​/learn​/the​-problem​/lifes​-beginning/?_​_cf​_chl​_jschl​_tk__​=pmd​_fef​9431​2920​fb1f​4d73​a074​e254​33a5​4068a8aa1​-1626788953​-0​-gqN​tZGz​ NAfi​jcnBszQgO. Marino, L. (2010). Sentience. In M.D. Breed and J. Moore (eds in chief) Encyclopedia of Animal Behaviour. London: Academic Press, pp. 132–138. Mathiot, M. and Roberts, M. (1979). Sex roles as revealed through referential gender in American English. In M. Mathiot (ed.) Ethnolinguistics: Boas, Sapir and Whorf Revisited. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 1–47. McLean, A. (2015). The many guises of Flying Scotsman. Railway Museum blog. Available at https://blog​.railwaymuseum​.org​.uk​/many​-guises​-of​-flying​-scotsman/. Moe, A.M. (2014). Zoopoetics. Animals and the Making of Poetry. Lanham: Lexington Books. Morris, L. (1997). The grammatical role of English pronominal gender. In P. Larrivée (ed.) La Structuration Conceptuelle du Langage. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 149–170. National Hurricane Center. (2021). Tropical cyclone naming history and retired names. Available at https://www​ .nhc​.noaa​.gov​/aboutnames​_history​.shtml. New Nature Writers. (2022). New Nature Writers (welcome page). Available at https://newnaturewriters​.com/. NHS. (2021). What happens: Abortion. Available at https://www​.nhs​.uk​/conditions​/abortion​/what​-happens/.

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Pronoun activism and the power of animacy O’Keefe, P. (2004). Suggests using more-personal pronouns for aborted babies. To the editor. Catholic Courier 27 July 2004. Available at https://catholiccourier​.com​/articles​/suggests​-using​-more​-personal​-pronouns​-for​ -aborted​-babies/. Our Bodies Our Selves. (2014). Aspiration abortion. 2 April 2014. Available at https://www​.ourbodiesourselves​ .org​/book​-excerpts​/health​-article​/vacuum​-aspiration​-abortion/. Pawley, A. (2002). Using he and she for inanimate referents in English: Questions of grammar and world view. In N.J. Enfield (ed.) Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 110–137. PETA. (2022). Someone, not something: Pronouns are important (Grades K–2). Available at https://www​.peta​ .org​/teachkind​/lesson​-plans​-activities​/ellie​-k​-2/. Pregnancy Birth and Baby. (2021). Premature baby. Available at https://www​.pregnancybirthbaby​.org​.au​/premature​-baby. Rail Projects Victoria. (2021). Introducing out TBMs. Metro Tunnel. Available at https://metrotunnel​.vic​.gov​.au​/ construction​/building​-the​-tunnels​-and​-stations​/tunnel​-boring​-machines​/tunnel​-boring​-machine​-facts. Roberts, S. (2017). Roxcy Bolton, feminist crusader for equality, including in naming hurricanes, dies at 90. New York Times 21 May 2017. Romaine, S. (1999). Communicating Gender. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Safina, C. (2017). Wild in the streets: Pronouns on the loose. HuffPost 17 June 2016, updated 6 December 2017. Available at https://www​.huffpost​.com​/entry​/wild​-in​-the​-streets​-prono​_b​_10526910. Sealey, A. (2018). Animals, animacy and anthropocentrism. International Journal of Language and Culture 5(2): 224–247. Sealey, A. and Oakley, L. (2013). Anthropomorphic grammar? Some linguistic patterns in the wildlife documentary series Life. Text and Talk 33(3): 399–420. Sherrow, M. (2013). PETA wants Bible to show God’s love for animals. Blog, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) website. Available at https://www​.peta​.org​/blog​/peta​-wants​-bible​-show​-god​-s​-love​ -animals/. Shoreman-Ouimet, E. and Kopnina, H. (2015). Culture and Conservation: Beyond Anthropocentrism. Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies. London: Routledge. Siemund, P. (2008). Pronominal Gender in English: A Study of English Varieties from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. London: Routledge. Siewierska, A. (2004). Person. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith-Stark, T.C. (1974). The plurality split. Chicago Linguistic Society 10: 657–661. Spender, D. (1985). Man Made Language (second edition). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Steam Locomotives. (2021). Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 ‘Big Boy’ locomotives in the USA. Available at https://www​ .steamlocomotive​.com​/locobase​.php​?country​=USAandwheel​=4​-8​-8​-4andrailroad​=up​#346. Stibbe, A. (2012). Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London: Routledge. Svartengren, T.H. (1927). The feminine gender for inanimate things in Anglo-American. American Speech 3: 83–113. Tennant, E. (2019). Referring to ships as ‘she’ is sexist. Radio interview by Jim Mora in Sunday Morning. Radio New Zealand 23 June 2019. Available at https://www​.rnz​.co​.nz​/national​/programmes​/sunday​/audio​ /2018700924​/ella​-tennant​-referring​-to​-ships​-as​-she​-is​-sexist. The Northern Echo (2002). The buoyant lady in Brian’s life. 28 February 2002. Available at https://www​.thenorthernecho​.co​.uk​/news​/7083117​.bouyant​-lady​-brians​-life/. Thomson, M. (2017). Women’s equality day: Why cars are referred to as ‘she’ and why it has to stop. Newswheel 26 August 2017. Available at https://thenewswheel​.com​/womens​-equality​-day​-why​-cars​-are​-referred​-to​-as​ -she​-and​-why​-it​-has​-to​-stop/. Voice for Life. (2014). 10  ways you can reclaim language for LIFE. Available at https://www​.voiceforlife​.org​.nz​ /media​/blog​/10​-ways​-you​-can​-reclaim​-language​-for​-life. Watson, P. (2016). Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt. The Guardian 12 September 2016. Available at https://www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2016​/sep​/12​/hms​-terror​-wreck​-found​-arctic​-nearly​-170​-years​-northwest​-passage​-attempt. Wilson, J. (2002). That’s no lady, that ship’s an it girl. The Guardian 21 March 2002. Woolfson, E. (2013). Field Notes from a Hidden City. An Urban Nature Diary. London: Granta. Yamamoto, M. (1999). Animacy and Reference: A Cognitive Approach to Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Further reading Andrews, K. (2011). Beyond anthropomorphism: Attributing psychological properties to animals. In T.L. Beauchamp and R.G. Frey (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 469–494. Corbett, G. (ed.) (2014). The Expression of Gender. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Ellis, E.C. (2018). Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fill, A.F. and Penz, H. (eds) (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. London: Routledge. Nelson, D. and Vihman, V. (2019). Effects of animacy in grammar and cognition. Open Linguistics 5(1): 260–267.

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PART 6

Gendered pronouns and beyond

28 EPICENE PRONOUNS NEW AND OLD Charlotte Stormbom

1. Introduction The English language is typically classified as a natural (now also known as ‘social’) gender language, which means that nouns do not carry gender, but there is a gender distinction in third-person singular pronouns (Corbett 1991; for a critical discussion of the term ‘natural gender’, see McConnell-Ginet 2014). This gender distinction is based on the perceived gender of the referent: whereas the pronoun he is used in reference to male individuals, the pronoun she references female individuals. Like most languages, however, English does not have a specific third-person singular pronoun that is used exclusively when the gender of the referent is indeterminate or irrelevant (Corbett 1991); although many efforts have been made at introducing a new, gender-indeterminate (or epicene) pronoun (see Baron 1986, 2020), the solution in English has so far been to make use of the existing pronominal resources instead. As exemplified in (1), the three most common (potentially) epicene pronouns in current English use are generic he (1a), coordinations and composites like he or she and he/she (1b), and singular they (1c) (see, e.g., Newman 1998, Laitinen 2007, Paterson 2014). (1) a. The average person checks his phone 47 times a day. b. The average person checks his or her phone 47 times a day. c. The average person checks their phone 47 times a day. The pronouns in (1) co-occur with the antecedent noun phrase (NP) the average person, which can denote an individual of any gender. Apart from NPs, frequent antecedents of epicene pronouns also include singular indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and nobody. The problem of epicene pronouns in English presents a situation where social desires for linguistic gender equality are pitted against opinions of what is stylistically and syntactically appropriate in language use. Thus, each of the pronominal options in (1) has been condemned for various reasons. Although generic he was the norm for a very long time, this use of the pronoun he has been heavily criticised because it is inherently male biased (see, e.g., MacKay and Fulkerson 1979, Gastil 1990, Miller and James 2009). He or she variants, on the other hand, are arguably awkward and unwieldy to use, particularly if they need to be repeated many times. In addition to this issue, another drawback that has been highlighted in recent times is that he or she forms exclude individuals who do not identify within the traditional gender binary of male versus female (see, e.g., Bradley et al. 2019, Baron

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-34

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2020, Stormbom 2021). The third option, singular they, has often been regarded as a grammatically unacceptable solution, the reason being that they is generally categorised as a plural pronoun, which by definition cannot co-occur with a singular antecedent like the average person in (1c) above (see, e.g., Quirk et al. 1985, Huddleston and Pullum 2002). For the past fifty years, epicene pronouns have featured prominently in debates about genderinclusive language in English. The pronoun problem can evoke strong emotions in people as it raises crucial questions about who is allowed representation and in what way they are represented in language use. In the 1970s and 1980s, the discussions centred mostly around the linguistic exclusion of a specific group of society – namely women. In more recent times, however, the focus of the debate on pronouns has turned more to the individual’s right to decide how they would like to be referenced (see, e.g., Baron 2020).

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics 2.1  Historical overview Prescription of the use of epicene pronouns did not begin until the late 18th century, which was a period when language standardisation and codification efforts were vigorous; prior to this, different types of epicene pronouns were used freely alongside one another in English, following the loss of the Old English system with three grammatical genders (see, e.g., Curzan 2014). Early prescriptive grammarians were strongly opposed to the use of singular they, which was described as grammatically incorrect and therefore to be avoided at all costs. This opposition to singular they is somewhat surprising in the sense that the use of this pronoun was not in any way a new phenomenon: evidence suggests that singular they had been in use in English at least since the 14th century (see, e.g., Curzan 2014). Early prescriptivists also found faults with he or she variants. Although the use of these forms could not be seen as a breach of grammatical rules, they were typically described as too awkward and clumsy to be recommended. Thus, the remaining option, generic he, became the only accepted solution by prescriptive grammarians – this despite the pronoun’s distinct disadvantage of excluding a large portion of society as reference (for a history of epicene pronouns in English, see Baron 1986, 2020). The prescription of generic he prevailed until the 20th century and the second wave of feminism, which started in the United States in the 1960s and had its roots in the civil rights movements. Second-wave feminist linguists were mainly structurally oriented, focusing on how the use of specific words and constructions can lead to gender-bias or even sexism (see, e.g., Mills 2003). Feminist linguistics was in no way restricted to the United States but spread quickly to other Western language communities, including Germany and France. In the context of English, the use of male generics, such as generic he and nouns ending in -man, was widely targeted for being male biased and thus excluding female individuals. The argument against generic he was supported by many studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, which showed that the pronoun he is not, as it were, suitable as a default epicene pronoun as its primary meaning, ‘a male individual’, tends to override any generic interpretations (for a review, see Henley and Abueg 2003). The most commonly suggested solution to the issue was to combine male and female forms, as in he or she, he/she and s/he. This type of strategy is generally referred to as ‘feminisation’ as its purpose is to make women more visible, rather than neutralising gender all together (see, e.g., Bußmann and Hellinger 2001, 2002, 2003, Hellinger and Motschenbacher 2015). With time, however, ‘neutralisation strategies’ – like using singular they or saying police officer instead of policeman or policewoman – have gained ground instead (see, e.g., Baker 2010). As a result of feminist language reform efforts, there have been noticeable diachronic changes in the use of epicene pronouns in English since the 1970s. While generic he has seen a rapid decline in frequency, the use of singular they is becoming increasingly common. This development has been 412

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reported across registers and genres, including, for instance, in newspapers and periodicals (Cooper 1984, Paterson 2011, Laine and Watson 2014), in academic articles (Hegarty and Buechel 2006), and in radio broadcasting (Pauwels 2001). As far as he or she variants are concerned, the development is less clear; although the use of these forms saw a rapid increase in the 1970s and 1980s, they have not continued to gain popularity in the same way as singular they (see Curzan 2014, Paterson 2020). Recent times have also seen significant changes in the attitudes to epicene pronouns. In particular, the use of singular they has become more accepted even in formal genres. In 2019, singular they made it to the dictionary company Merriam-Webster’s list of ten words of the year and it was also added to the 7th edition of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) publication manual. On the other hand, the use of he or she variants, which was seen as a grammatically correct – albeit somewhat cumbersome – alternative to singular they appears to be falling out of fashion (Paterson 2020, Stormbom 2021). It is not so much the aspect of ‘unwieldiness’ that has made he or she variants increasingly unfavoured in current times; rather, discussions have highlighted that these forms perpetuate a binary view of gender by only including a male and a female form (see, e.g., Bradley et al. 2019, Baron 2020). Thus, as conceptualisations of gender develop, so do the use of and attitudes to pronouns and other gender-related features of language.

2.2  Factors that influence the use of epicene pronouns Research on the use of epicene pronouns in English has shown that a variety of factors may influence the language user’s choice of a pronoun. One such factor is the co-referential antecedent (see, e.g., Baranowski 2002, Paterson 2014, 2020, Stormbom 2021). A rough distinction can be made between two kinds of epicene antecedents: (1) NPs, e.g., the child, and (2) indefinite pronouns, e.g., someone. The first group, NPs, can be further categorised into three types: definite NPs, e.g., the student; indefinite NPs, e.g., a student; and quantificational NPs, e.g., any student (see, e.g., Paterson 2014). Historically speaking, the most accepted use of singular they has been in co-reference with indefinite pronouns (see, e.g., Baron 2020) and the use of they with this type of antecedent is now so ubiquitous that it is described as ‘unremarkable – an element of common usage’ and ‘well established in writing’ in The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004: 538). Research has confirmed that singular they is more frequently used with indefinite pronouns than with NP antecedents, whereas generic he and he or she variants display the opposite kind of distribution (see, e.g., Gerner 2000, Baranowski 2002, Paterson 2014, 2020). In some cases, using singular they is, in fact, the only viable option in co-reference to indefinite pronouns, as exemplified in (2). (2) a. *Everyone was here a moment ago, but he’s left now. b. *Everyone was here a moment ago, but he or she’s left now. c. Everyone was here a moment ago, but they’ve left now. The use of he or he or she in examples like (2) results in sentences that are unacceptable for semantic reasons: although the antecedent everyone is grammatically singular, it is interpreted as referring to more than one individual (see, e.g., Newman 1992, 1998). Notional plurality of this kind is typically associated with antecedents including quantifiers, such as the indefinite pronouns everybody and anyone and the quantificational NPs each student and any child. Epicene antecedents also show variation in terms of what gender associations they evoke. On a theoretical level, epicene antecedents refer to an individual of any gender, but social stereotyping may affect what gender the language user expects the pronominal referent to have. While indefinite pronouns are neutral in terms of gender expectancy, nouns that head NP antecedents may be stereotypically associated with either men or women. For instance, the nouns driver and executive tend to be associated with male individuals, whereas the nouns hairdresser and secretary are associated 413

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with female individuals (see, e.g., Kennison and Trofe 2003). Although society changes continuously and gender roles evolve, stereotypes of this kind may linger for a long time. Gender stereotyping can also affect the language user’s choice of an epicene pronoun: for example, research has revealed that generic he is somewhat more likely to co-occur with male-stereotyped NPs, like farmer, than with NPs that are neutral or female-stereotyped, like person or babysitter (see, e.g., Paterson 2014, Stormbom 2020). Another important factor that affects the choice of epicene pronouns is level of formality: whereas singular they is more common in informal than in formal language, the use of generic he and he or she forms shows the opposite kind of distribution (see, e.g. , Newman 1992, Curzan 2014, Paterson 2014). This variation in pronoun distribution is unsurprising given that grammars and style guides have generally proscribed the use of singular they. Studies of attitudes have confirmed that language users may prefer to use he or she to they in very formal contexts because of the supposed ‘ungrammaticality’ of singular they (Bradley et al. 2019, LaScotte 2019, Stormbom 2021). However, as publication manuals have now begun to endorse the use of they in both generic and referential contexts (see, e.g., American Psychological Association 2019), the frequency of they is likely to increase in genres that are more formal as well; as Baron (2020: 179f) concludes, ‘resistance to singular they seems finally on the verge of collapsing, to the point where it is now possible to imagine a future style guide that is silent on the matter’. Research also suggests that older language users tend to be more in favour of he or she variants than younger ones (see, e.g., Hekanaho 2020), presumably because they are less likely to question the binary view of gender that these pronoun forms represent. On the other hand, younger language users seem to find the use of singular they more acceptable than older speakers – and they are not necessarily even aware of the history of proscription of singular they and the stigma surrounding its use (see Pauwels and Winter 2006, Strahan 2008).​

3.  Main research methods Various methods and models have been used to examine epicene pronouns in English, and many researchers have combined different approaches to gain a more holistic view of the situation at hand (see, e.g., LaScotte 2019, Hekanaho 2020, Stormbom 2021a). One of the most popular methods is the use of spoken and written corpora. With the help of corpus linguistics, researchers typically investigate how frequently different types of epicene pronouns occur in different types of texts, taking into account a variety of background factors that could potentially influence the pronoun choice (see, e.g., Paterson 2011, 2014, 2020). Among other things, corpus studies have shown that antecedent type, time period, and style and register are highly relevant factors in explaining distributions of the pronouns he, he or she, and they (see, e.g., Baranowski 2002, Laitinen 2007, Paterson 2014, Stormbom 2021). Corpus linguistic methods have also been employed to examine in what way, if at all, the topic of gender-inclusive language and the use of epicene pronouns in English are presented in grammars (Paterson 2014) and in journal guidelines for authors (Stormbom 2020). Studies of this kind have disclosed that generic he is rarely endorsed any longer in linguistic prescriptivism. However, as Paterson (2014) shows in her study of grammar books, dismissal of generic he is not necessarily followed by endorsement of singular they. As far as author guidelines are concerned, previous research has shown that individual journals do not generally provide instructions for the use of gender-inclusive language – and, in cases where they do provide instructions, the use of epicene pronouns in the published articles does not necessarily correspond with the journal’s own guidelines (see Stormbom 2020). The use and comprehension of epicene pronouns in English has also been examined using experimental methods, including elicitation tests and self-paced reading and eyetracking measures (see, e.g., Speyer and Schleef 2019, Stormbom 2021). Elicitation tests typically include tasks such as cloze (gap-fill) tests and sentence completion tasks, which yield focused data on the use of epicene 414

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pronouns. Among other things, such tests can be used to examine the influence of specific types of antecedents that are infrequent in corpora, such as gender-stereotyped NPs (see, e.g., Kennison and Trofe 2003, Doherty and Conklin 2017). While the purpose of elicitation testing is to study language production, eyetracking and self-paced reading are used to examine language processing. Both techniques have been applied to investigate whether or not language users have difficulties processing different types of epicene pronouns (see, e.g., Kerr and Underwood 1984, Speyer and Schleef 2019). For example, the results of two self-paced reading experiments showed that singular they does not generally cause processing difficulties for native speakers of English, making it a cognitively efficient epicene pronoun (see Foertsch and Gernsbacher 1997). In addition to the above-mentioned methodologies, a number of studies have also used survey data to identify what attitudes individuals hold towards gender-inclusive language, in general, and the use of epicene pronouns, in particular (see, e.g., LaScotte 2016, Hekanaho 2020, Stormbom 2021). Survey studies are often combined with elicitation tests to examine to what degree individuals’ attitudes corroborate with their actual language use. In a similar fashion to corpus studies, survey research tends to control for various background factors, such as age, gender, first-language background, and educational level (Pauwels and Winter 2006, LaScotte 2016, Hekanaho 2020). For example, Hekanaho’s (2020) survey study showed that male users of English are more positive to the use of gendered pronouns than are female and non-binary individuals, who instead show a stronger preference for the use of singular they. Similar trends have been established in both corpus and experimental studies (see, e.g., Meyers 1990, Laitinen 2007, Balhorn 2009), that is, there seems to be a correlation between linguistic attitudes and language use as concerns epicene pronouns in English.

4.  Current contributions and research Early research on epicene pronouns focused almost exclusively on English native-speaker (L1) use. However, with the global spread of the language, L1 speakers are now outnumbered by language users for whom English is an additional (L2) language (see, e.g., Crystal 2003). Linguistic gender systems vary across languages – as do cultural views and understandings of gender – and the diversity of English users thus poses both challenges and opportunities for promoting gender-inclusive language, including the use of gender-inclusive pronouns. To account for this situation, recent studies have expanded their scope to also investigate L2 uses, such as English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a lingua franca (ELF) (see Lee 2007, Abuldalbuh 2012, Hekanaho 2020, LaScotte 2020, Stormbom 2021). These studies have found variation in the use of epicene pronouns that is associated with the L1 cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the language users (Abuldalbuh 2012, Stormbom 2021). For instance, it seems that learners from L1 backgrounds with pervasive grammatical gender, such as Russian and Italian, are generally more prone to using generic he than learners with genderless L1s or L1s with natural gender, such as Finnish (genderless) and Swedish (natural gender) (see Stormbom 2021). A possible reason for this is that the use of generic he may be perceived as the default in English if generic masculine forms are in common use in the L1. A tradition to use masculine forms as generics is found across many language communities, much in the same way as the use of generic he was the convention in English for a very long time (see Bußmann and Hellinger 2001, 2002, 2003). However, in languages with pervasive grammatical gender, many elements need to agree in gender with the antecedent noun, which means that neutralising gender altogether – as with the use of singular they in English – is virtually impossible as a general strategy for increasing inclusivity (see, e.g., Motschenbacher 2014). Instead, feminisation strategies tend to be the preferred solution in languages with grammatical gender. For instance, a feminisation strategy in German is the use of coordinated NPs like Studenten und Studentinnen ‘male students and female students’ – a solution that is arguably more inclusive than simply using the masculine form, Studenten, as a generic noun. 415

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Recent L2 studies have also examined how singular they is perceived and processed by L2 users. In a self-paced reading study, Speyer and Schleef (2019) found that singular they caused processing difficulties for some learners at lower levels of proficiency but not for advanced learners, suggesting that singular they is sufficiently present in L1 input for learners to become accustomed to its use in English (Speyer and Schleef 2019). The study also showed that beginning and intermediate learners may experience processing difficulties when they is used with gender-stereotyped antecedents, as expectations for gendered pronouns – he and she – are particularly high for such antecedents. Another current line of research investigates how singular they is used and perceived as a nonbinary pronoun as well as what attitudes non-binary individuals themselves have to the use of personal pronouns in English. Studies of this kind have taken care to include both L1 and L2 users as these issues affect individuals from all over the globe, regardless if English is their first language or not (Hekanaho 2020, LaScotte 2021). Among other things, recent research shows that singular they is generally more accepted as a non-binary pronoun than neopronouns, such as ze and xe (Hekanaho 2020). A likely reason for this is that the pronoun they is already well established in other uses in English, both referential and generic ones (see Baron 2020).

5.  Future directions The issue of epicene pronouns has been a hot topic in English for a long time, and it is likely to continue to be so in the foreseeable future. Thus, more research is needed on both L1 and L2 use of and attitudes to epicene pronouns. In addition to this, the question of non-binary uses of pronouns and the role of singular they warrants further investigation. An aspect worth examining in this context is to what degree there is a connection between an individual’s use of epicene pronouns and their perception of gender as either a binary category or as more of a continuum. Two highly relevant questions for the future are how the use of pronouns will develop in English and whether or not the language may see the addition of a new epicene pronoun. Pronouns are normally described as a closed-class group of words, which means that they rarely grow in number and their meanings tend to change very slowly. However, recent developments suggest that pronouns may form a more flexible category than what has been claimed in traditional grammar. The Swedish language is a case in point: in the early 2010s, the new, gender-neutral pronoun hen was introduced into the language, and the use of this pronoun quickly spread to a variety of genres and registers, including more formal ones (see, e.g., Sendén, Bäck, and Lindqvist 2015). Many efforts have also been made at introducing a new epicene pronoun in English – starting from as early as the 1770s, Baron (2020) lists more than 200 suggested so-called neopronouns. However, no attempt at expanding the standard English pronominal system has so far proved to be successful. A possible explanation for this is that the English language is now used all over the globe, and an immense number of people would have to approve of and adopt such an innovation. It is no longer self-evident that L1 norms should be the target for second/foreign language varieties of English; as Kachru (1985: 30) pointed out already in 1985, ‘the global diffusion of English has taken an interesting turn: the native speakers of this language seem to have lost the exclusive prerogative to control its standardization’. Since then, the use of English online and in social media has further strengthened the global status of the language (see Lee 2017). Another reason for the failed attempts at introducing a new pronoun is that many language users already seem to have a working solution to the pronominal issue, namely singular they. Although long disapproved by grammarians, the pronoun they has performed the relevant functions for hundreds of years in English. For prescriptivists, the main caveat of using they with singular antecedents has always been its supposed ungrammaticality. The claim that singular they is ungrammatical is only valid in sofar as they is construed as an exclusively plural pronoun. In reality, there is nothing to say that there could not be two homonymous they pronouns: a singular one and a plural one (Paterson 416

Epicene pronouns new and old

2014). In fact, this description already fits another member of the English pronominal system – you – which is used both for second-person singular and second-person plural. In current English use, no one would question the use of you for second-person singular, but singular you was also proscribed in its early days, much in the same way as singular they (see, e.g., Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2011, Baron 2020). There is strong evidence that L1 English language users perceive singular they as a separate pronoun from plural they (for a discussion, see Paterson 2014). For instance, one observation that supports this theory is that singular they is used with such a wide variety of antecedents, even referential ones (see, e.g., Balhorn 2004, Bjorkman 2017). Epicene pronouns are by definition nonreferential, that is, they refer to a hypothetical individual, rather than to a specific, known, individual. Nonetheless, singular they is also used referentially, either when the referent’s gender is irrelevant to the context or when the referent does not identify within the gender binary. Example (3) shows a sentence where either of these referential meanings is possible. (3) A friend of minei told me that theyi would help me with the move. In cases like this, the use of singular they cannot be explained as a consequence of notional plurality as the referent is evidently just one, single individual. It is worth noting, however, that the pronoun they could also potentially have one or more referents who are not present in the clause in examples like (3). While using the pronoun they could theoretically cause misinterpretation in such cases, it can be assumed that contextual factors would normally make the intended meaning evident to the interlocutor. More studies are still needed on how language users conceptualise singular they (see Paterson 2014: 74). The theory that there are two they pronouns is based on the assumption that children are exposed to singular they when forming their pronoun paradigms in their internal grammar systems. Future research could examine to what degree this is, in fact, the case. Another related question is how, if at all, singular they is acquired and conceptualised by L2 users of English. As English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching tends to be conservative, singular they is not necessarily explicitly taught in L2 classrooms (see, e.g., Sunderland 1992, Lee and Collins 2010). However, given how common singular they is across L1 varieties, it can be expected that L2 users are still exposed to singular they to varying degrees, depending on the type and frequency of L1 input that they receive. To account for the conceptualisation of they as a singular pronoun, a revised paradigm of pronouns is necessary, as shown in Table 28.1 (Stormbom 2020: 19; for a similar proposal, see Bodine 1975). In this paradigm, the pronoun they appears twice, once as a singular pronoun and once as a plural pronoun. The definition of they as ‘unspecified’ for gender in the paradigm features both epicene and referential uses, including non-binary reference.

Table 28.1 Revised paradigm of pronouns in English Person

first second third

Number

Human Non-human

Male Female Unspecified

Singular

Plural

I you he she they it

we you they

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This revised pronominal paradigm is not fixed, nor does it capture the pronominal system in all varieties of English. While the paradigm gives an accurate snapshot of the current state of pronoun use in some standard varieties of English, it needs to be remembered that language is constantly evolving and changes in societal norms also tend to be reflected in language use. Thus, the pronominal system may develop in completely new directions in the future, according to how English language users’ attitudes to and conceptualisations of gender evolve.

References Abudalbuh, M. (2012). Ideology, gender roles, and pronominal choice: A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English third person generic pronouns by native speakers of Arabic. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Kansas, Lawrence. American Psychological Association. (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Baker, P. (2010). Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language 4(1): 125–149. Balhorn, M. (2004). The rise of epicene they. Journal of English Linguistics 32(2): 79–104. Balhorn, M. (2009). The epicene pronoun in contemporary newspaper prose. American Speech 84(4): 391–413. Baranowski, M. (2002). Current usage of the epicene pronoun in written English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(3): 378–397. Baron, D.E. (1986). Grammar and Gender. Yale/London: Yale University Press. Baron, D. (2020). What’s your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. London: Liveright. Bjorkman, B. (2017). Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1): 1–13. Bodine, A. (1975). Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: Singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’. Language in Society 4(2): 129–146. Bradley, E., Schmid, M. and Lombardo, H. (2019). Personality, prescriptivism, and pronouns. English Today 35(4): 41–52. Bußmann, H. and Hellinger, M. (eds) (2001). Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bußmann, H. and Hellinger, M. (eds) (2002). Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bußmann, H. and Hellinger, M. (eds) (2003). Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cooper, R.L. (1984). The avoidance of androcentric generics. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 50: 5-20. Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doherty, A. and Conklin, K. (2017). How gender-expectancy affects the processing of ‘them’. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 70(4): 718–735. Foertsch, J. and Gernsbacher, M.A. (1997). In search of gender neutrality: Is singular they a cognitively efficient substitute for generic he? Psychological Science 8(2): 106–111. Gastil, J. (1990). Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of masculine generics. Sex Roles 23(11/12): 629–643. Gerner, J. (2000). Singular and plural anaphors of indefinite personal pronouns in spoken British English. In J. Kirk (ed.) Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English: Papers from the Nineteenth International Conference of English Language Research on Computerised Corpora (ICAME 1998). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 93–114. Hegarty, P. and Buechel, C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965–2004. Review of General Psychology 10(4): 377–389. Hekanaho, L. (2020). Generic and Nonbinary Pronouns. Usage, Acceptability and Attitudes. Helsinki: Unigrafia. Hellinger, M. and Motschenbacher, H. (eds) (2015). Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Henley, N. and Abueg, J. (2003). A review and synthesis of research on comprehension of the masculine as a generic form in English. Estudios de Sociolinguistica: Linguas, Sociedades e Culturas 4(2): 427–454.

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Epicene pronouns new and old Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle’. In R. Quirk and H.G. Widdowson (eds) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–30. Kennison, S. and Trofe, J. (2003). Comprehending pronouns: A role for word-specific gender stereotype information. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32(3): 355–378. Kerr, J.S. and Underwood, G. (1984). Fixation time on anaphoric pronouns decreases with congruity of reference. Advances in Psychology 22: 195–202. Laine, T. and Watson, G. (2014). Linguistic sexism in The Times – A diachronic study. International Journal of English Linguistics 4(3): 1–22. Laitinen, M. (2007). Agreement Patterns in English: Diachronic Corpus Studies on Common-Number Pronouns. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. LaScotte, D. (2016). Singular they: An empirical study of generic pronoun use. American Speech 91(1): 62–80. LaScotte, D. (2021). Nonnative English learners’ use and understanding of singular they. Language Awareness 30(1): 84–94. Lee, C. (2017). Multilingualism Online. New York: Routledge. Lee, J. (2007). Acceptability of sexist language among young people in Hong Kong. Sex Roles 56: 285–195. Lee, J. and Collins, P. (2010). Construction of gender: A comparison of Australian and Hong Kong English language textbooks. Journal of Gender Studies 19(2): 121–137. MacKay, D.G. and Fulkerson, D.C. (1979). On the comprehension and production of pronouns. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18: 661–673. McConnell-Ginet, S. (2014). Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of ‘natural’ gender. In G. Corbett (ed.) The Expression of Gender. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 3–38. Meyers, M. (1990). Current generic pronoun usage: An empirical study. American Speech 65(3): 228–237. Miller, M. and James, L. (2009). Is the generic pronoun he still comprehended as excluding women?. American Journal of Psychology 122(4): 483–496. Mills, S. (2003). Third wave feminist linguistics and the analysis of sexism. Discourse Analysis Online. Available at https://extra​.shu​.ac​.uk​/daol​/articles​/open​/2003​/001​/mills2003001​.html (accessed July 2021). Motschenbacher, H. (2014). Grammatical gender as a challenge for language policy: The (im)possibility of nonheteronormative language use in German versus English. Language Policy 13(3): 243–261. Newman, M. (1992). Pronominal disagreements: The stubborn problem of singular epicene antecedents. Language in Society 21(3): 447–475. Newman, M. (1998). What can pronouns tell us? A case study of English epicenes. Studies in Language 22(2): 353–389. Paterson, L.L. (2011). Epicene pronouns in UK national newspapers: A diachronic study. ICAME Journal 35: 171–184. Paterson, L.L. (2014). British Pronoun Use, Prescription, and Processing. Linguistic and Social Influences Affecting ‘They’ and ‘He’. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Paterson, L.L. (2020). Non-sexist language policy and the rise (and fall?) of combined pronouns in British and American written English. Journal of English Linguistics 48(3): 258–281. Pauwels, A. (2001). Non-sexist language reform and generic pronouns in Australian English. English Worldwide 22(1): 105–119. Pauwels, A. and Winter, J. (2006). Gender inclusivity or ‘grammar rules OK’? Linguistic prescriptivism vs linguistic discrimination in the classroom. Language and Education 20(2): 128–140. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S. and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London, New York: Longman. Sendén, M., Bäck, E. and Lindqvist, A. (2015). Introducing a gender-neutral pronoun in a natural gender language: The influence of time on attitudes and behavior. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 893. Speyer, L.G. and Schleef, E. (2019). Processing ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns: A self-paced reading study of learners of English. Applied Linguistics 40(5): 793–815. Stormbom, C. (2020). Gendering in open access research articles: The role of epicene pronouns. English for Specific Purposes 60: 193–204. Stormbom, C. (2021a). Gendered Language in Flux: The Use of Epicene Pronouns in EFL and ELF Writing. Åbo, Turku: Åbo Akademis förlag. Stormbom, C. (2021b). Towards linguistic gender equality in open access articles?. Paper presented at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference.

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Further reading Everet, C. (2011). Gender, pronouns and thought: The ligature between epicene pronouns and a more neutral gender perception. Gender and Language 5(1): 133–152. Loureiro-Porto, L. (2020). (Un)democratic epicene pronouns in Asian Englishes: A register approach. Journal of English Linguistics 48(3): 282–313. Yakut, I. Genc, B. and Bada, E. (2021). Epicene pronoun usage in the social sciences: The case of research articles. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 52: Early access.

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29 GENDER-NEUTRALITY AND CLITICS Ashley Reilly-Thornton

1. Introduction Gender-neutral language is a generic term that is often used as an umbrella term to cover the use of non-sexist language, gender-inclusive language, or gender-fair language (European Parliament 2018). However, there are slight differences between the meaning of individual terms; for instance, gender-inclusive language aims to include all gender identities while gender-neutral aims to eliminate gender distinctions. The purpose of using gender-neutral language is to avoid discriminatory language that implies that one gender is the norm, as well as to help reduce gender stereotyping, promote social changes to achieving gender equality, and challenge the gender-binary. Using gender-neutral language is important for reducing the use of generic masculine terms, which are androcentric, or lead to a male bias in interpretation. As has been shown in previous studies, generic masculine is not interpreted as a generic but rather as male-specified (see Gabriel and Gygax 2008). Thus, using a gender-neutral term, such as chair in English, rather than a generic masculine term, chairman, reduces the likelihood of a reader having a male-biased interpretation. The reduction of male bias through the usage of gender-neutral terms has also been shown to be true in grammatical gender languages (Kim et al. 2022). Kim et al.’s study with French speakers’ interpretations of role titles in gender-neutral and generic masculine forms showed that switching from the masculine form to using gender-neutral may reduce masculine biases while not producing large stereotype effects and not requiring more cognitive resources to process; as such, the results support the use of epicenes and group nouns as a strategy to reduce biases from the use of grammatical gender markers in grammatical gender languages. (Kim et al. 2022: 23) How a language develops gender-neutral forms depends partially on how the language classifies gender. Languages can be classified as either grammatical gender, social gender, or genderless languages based on their morphological and lexical gender distinctions. This chapter will focus on grammatical gender languages, and specifically those that use clitics, but this introduction will also briefly cover

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-35

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the two other ways that languages classify gender. To start, clitics are a linguistic unit, which, like affixes, attach to a host word and are phonologically dependent on the host. As David Crystal (2008: 80) defines, clitic (n.) A term used in grammar to refer to a form which resembles a word, but which cannot stand on its own as a normal utterance, being phonologically dependent upon a neighbouring word (its host) in a construction. Clitics straddle the boundaries along which grammar is organized as they tend to be idiosyncratic and have unique phonological forms (Hudson 2001, Spencer and Luís 2012). Distinguishing clitics can be difficult as they straddle grammatical boundaries, which is why Spencer and Luís (2012: 5) note that the study of clitics is ‘unique in linguistics because it encompasses almost all components of grammar’. Indeed, Zingler (2022: 2) argues that because distinguishing clitics can be difficult, researchers often ‘categorize a wide variety of phenomena as clitics’. Despite the difficulties researchers may have in distinguishing clitics, their unique syntactic position proves to be a fruitful area of study for the creation and usage of gender-neutral forms. In clitic systems, creating gender-neutral language is not simply a case of modifying the lexical or pronominal systems. Rather, it requires considerations of the morphological and phonological systems, as the clitic is bound to its host word and would need to function as a unit. For example, creating gender-neutral forms in English requires only an alteration to a single lexical item. To make (1a) gender-neutral, we would change the word his to their as in (1b).

(1)

a. A student spoke with his teacher b. A student spoke with their teacher

In a grammatical gender language, on the other hand, the change would also require alterations to the morphological markers. This is illustrated in the following examples from Spanish. The elements that take gender agreement are shown in bold: (2a) and (2b) show the elements that take feminine or masculine gender agreement, while (2c) shows what the usage of the gender-neutral morpheme -e would look like. (2)

a. La the.Fem ‘The child is tall’ b. El the.Masc ‘The child is tall’ c. Le the.Neut ‘The child is tall’

niña child.Fem is.

es 3SING

alta tall.Fem

niño child.Masc

es is.3SING

alto tall.Masc

niñe child.Neut is.

es 3SING

alte tall.Neut

Genderless languages, such as Finnish and Turkish, neither mark gender through a formal gender class system nor convey gender semantically as shown in the examples below using third-person singular pronouns.

422

Gender-neutrality and clitics (3)

(4)

a. hän They.3SING ‘She (Milja) speaks Japanese’ b. hän They.SING ‘He (Kalle) speaks Japanese’ a. O She ‘She (Damla) walks to school’ b.O He ‘He (Murat) walks to school’

(Milja) (Milja.FEM)

puhuu speak.3SING

japania Japanese

(Kalle) (Kalle.MASC)

puhuu speak.3SING

japania Japanese

(Damla) (Damla.FEM)

okula school​.​to

yürür walk.3SING

(Murat) (Murat.MASC)

okula school​.​to

yürür walk.3SING

In (3), the pronoun hän is the third-person singular pronoun in Finnish and does not have a gender distinction. Gender is added in these examples through the name provided in parenthesis. The same holds true for (4), with the third-person singular pronoun in Turkish being O and gender added through the names in parenthesis. As genderless languages do not convey gender through semantics or grammatical markings, gender-neutral language reforms would have to involve changes to the lexicon. Social gender languages, such as English and Swedish, do not have a formal gender class system; rather, they make gender visible semantically based on assumed gender through gender specific nouns and third-person personal pronouns (Tight 2006, Mills 2008, Prewitt-Freilino et al. 2012, Hord 2016). In these languages, the move toward gender-neutral language involves modifications to the personal pronoun paradigm and the lexis. Modifying the personal pronoun paradigms can include altering pronouns already in the language, such as the use of singular they and the coordinate he or she in English, as well as the addition of new pronoun options, such as neopronouns such as xe, hir, and thon. Lexical changes involve removing gender marking on nouns such as the change from fireman to firefighter. In grammatical gender languages, gender is visible through the lexis, morphology, and syntax, and additionally it has a formal gender class system that requires gender agreement among all elements (Hellinger and Buβmann 2001, Tight 2006, Formato 2019). This includes languages such as Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. Since there are more moving parts in grammatical gender languages, converting to gender-neutral language is not as simple as the changes involved with social gender and genderless languages. The remainder of the chapter will discuss clitics in more details framed within a position of advocacy. Here, I advocate for the use of and research into gender-neutral clitics to ensure that all gender identities are linguistically represented. I also advocate for the inclusion of non-academic sources, as much work is being done on these topics in non-academic circles that needs to be recognized. In doing so, the chapter draws on some of the current discussion of epicenes and strategies for creating gender-neutral language in order to showcase how these might be applied to clitics. Examples will be drawn from multiple languages, including Uduk and Naro, but with a particular focus on Arabic, Italian, and Spanish, to illustrate the points discussed. These three languages were chosen because, first, they are all grammatical gender languages that traditionally distinguish between two genders – feminine and masculine. Thus, the usage of gender-neutral language and particularly clitics involves linguistic changes outside of just the personal pronoun paradigm. Second, there is current public discussion in academic and non-academic circles on the creation and utilization of gender-neutral forms in these languages. While much of these discussions are focused on linguistic units other than clitics, the creation principles can be applied for all grammatical elements. Third, as the three languages are utilized in the United Nations (UN) and/or European Union there is at least one publicly available

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(set of) guideline(s) for gender-neutral language. The guidelines may not be adopted by all speakers, but they do represent an institutional approach to creating/promoting more equitable language forms.

2.  Brief overview of clitics As Spencer and Luís (2012: pxiii) state, studying clitics requires you ‘to be concerned with all aspects of linguistics, from detailed phonetics to the analysis of discourse and conversation’. This is because clitics are a linguistic unit that, similar to affixes, attach to a host word while retaining their own syntactic independence. Clitics, thus, blur the boundary between the morphological and syntactic systems of a language (Anderson 2005, Kolković et al 2022). Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) work Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N’T, establishes six aspects that differentiate clitics from affixes. These are as follows: A. Clitics can exhibit a low degree of selection with respect to their hosts, while affixes exhibit a high degree of selection with respect to their stems. B. Arbitrary gaps in the set of combinations are more characteristic of affixed words than of clitic groups. C. Morphophonological idiosyncrasies are more characteristic of affixed words than of clitic groups. D. Semantic idiosyncrasies are more characteristic of affixed words than of clitic groups. E. Syntactic rules can affect affixed words but cannot affect clitic groups. F. Clitics can attach to material already containing clitics, but affixes cannot. (Zwicky and Pullum 1983: 503–504) These aspects are important to keep in mind when considering if something is a clitic or an affix. One distinguishing characteristic of clitics is that they are unable to appear alone nor are they able to be conjoined (Garavito 2013). Clitics also differ from affixes in the fact that they show a degree of freedom that is not typical of affixes, as mentioned in Zwicky and Pullum’s Aspect A (1983: 503). For instance, English clitics ‘s, ‘ve, ‘ll are reduced forms of is/has, have, and will, respectively. Clitics can attach to a variety of host words, as demonstrated in (5), as well as modals and other clitics. Affixes are only able to attach to a specific group of host words, as with the affix -ing attaching to only host words that are verbs. Clitics attached to a proper noun, a pronoun, or to a whole noun phrase are shown in (5) with the clitics in bold. (5)

a. Alex will be reading. b. Alex’ll be reading. c. They’ll be reading. d. The person over there will be reading. e. The person over there’ll be reading.

As in Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) Aspect F, clitics are able to attach to constructs where there is already a clitic present. This is shown in (6), with clitics in bold. (6)

a. They will have had breakfast by 10am. b. They’ll have had breakfast by 10am c. They will’ve had breakfast by 10am. d. They’ll’ve had breakfast by 10am.

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In (6b), the clitic ‘ll is attached to the host word they and (6c) shows the clitic ‘ve attach to the host word will. (6d) shows both clitic ‘ve and ‘ll attaching to the host word to produce the construct they’ll’ve. While this may not be acceptable in all varieties of English, it does demonstrate the positional range of clitics. Clitics can be used to show gender agreement in a language, with these clitics often called pronominal clitics (Spencer and Luís 2012). However, while it is possible that clitics can be used to show gender agreement, as Audring (2016) notes, they are not frequently used in this way. One language that does use clitics for gender agreement is Uduk, a Koman language of the Ethiopian(South) Sudanese borderland, which primarily realizes gender agreement via a set of clitics (Killian 2019). Killian explains that semantics plays a smaller role than usual in gender assignment and, as such, ‘personal pronouns do not differentiate gender in any person’ (2019: 147). Rather, there are two classes that all nouns can be assigned, Class 1 and Class 2, with Class 2 nouns marked with the clitic à= (see Killian 2019 for more detail on the gender system of Uduk). Examples from Killian are repeated below, with the clitic in bold and the class of each word indicated in parentheses (cl1 = Class 1, cl2 = Class 2):

(7)

a. kʼwāní lǒɓ-ón=ā kʰúrā people(cl1) play:ipfv-3PL=acc.cl2 ball(cl2) ‘The people are playing football’. b. à=nós gì wàtíʔ̪ cl2=pot(cl2) gen.cl1 man(cl1) ‘the man’s pot’ c. à=rǐs kʼwāní cl2=many.PL(cl2) people(cl1) ‘very many people’ d. à=rǐs=ā kúnùʔ cl2=many.PL(cl2)=assoc.cl2 owl(cl2) ‘very many owls’ (Killian 2019: 152–153)

Note that Uduk allows for the clitic gender marker to be dropped when the noun occurs alone or if it has been used on a previous word in the phrase to indicate gender (Killian 2019: 149). Naro is another language that uses clitics to mark person, gender, and number. Naro is a language spoken in the Ghanzi District of Botswana and in eastern Namibia. It uses Person-Gender-Number (PGN) markers that co-occur with both subject and object noun phrases (Kari and Mogara 2016). These markers have a full or reduced form that relate to the context and logical head of the sentence (Kari and Mogara 2016). As Kari and Mogara explain, when the sentence initial word in Naro is the logical head, a full form occurs whereas if the sentence initial word is not the logical head, a reduced form is used instead. Kari and Mogara argue that these are clitics because of the ‘separability or nonseparability of PGN markers from the noun phrases they co-reference’ (2016: 136). Examples from Naro are shown in the examples below, which are originally from Kari and Mogara (2016). The clitic markers are in bold.

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a.

Néò sà     n|ãa  n|ãaka |ám  kà   khoe   sà    bóò. Neo 3FEM.SG PST PST   day PostP woman  3FEM.SG see ‘Neo saw the woman yesterday’

b.

(Kari and Mogara 2016: 134)

Ncoa=m      cóá=m     qáò  Ba red=3MASC.SG    child=3MASC. SG tall  3MASC.SG ‘The red tall boy’             (Kari and Mogara 2016: 138)

c.

Kaisá-se=s      ko qgonò loud-ADVZ=3FEM.SG PRS snore ‘She snores loudly’          

  (Kari and Mogara 2016: 140)

The sentences given in (8) also illustrate Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) Aspect A. This is because the clitic markers are able to occur with a variety of word categories, including adjectives, nouns, and adverbs. Clitics are often phonologically bound to either a proceeding or a following word (Albuharyri 2013). When they combine with the host word, they are often unstressed or appear in a reduced form. This form may or may not correspond to the full form, as Zwicky and Pullum (1983) discuss in more detail. Albuharyri mentions that the phonological changes that occur when clitics and host words combine include ‘vowel harmony, gemination, anaptyzis, epenthesis, and dipthongization’ (2013: 61). Clitics in languages such as Italian and Spanish show phonological dependency and must occur next to the verb; something that their corresponding full forms do not need to do. This is shown in the examples below in Spanish with the clitics in bold.

(9)

a. Dió un regalo a mi gave.3PL a present to me They/She/He gave me a present today b. Me lo dió hoy me it gave.3PL today They/She/He gave me it today c. *Dió lo me hoy gave.3PL me it today

hoy today

Clitics can also be identified by their relation to the host word. There are proclitics, which appear before the host, and enclitics, which attach either after or at the end of the host (Anderson 2005, Kari and Mogara 2016: 130). They can also attach within their host as either endoclitics, which attach inside mono-morphemic hosts, or mesoclitics, which attach between the stem of the host and other affixal morphemes (Kari and Mogara 2016: 130). Examples can be found below with clitics in bold:

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Gender-neutrality and clitics (10) b.

(11) (12)

(13)

tatanɛ́ ó= kotu ᴐ́jɪ ɔ= kpɛ́ Tatane 3SGSCL.NEG= call him 3SGSCL= ‘Tatane did not call him and tell (him) something’ (Kari 2005: 18) tatanɛ́ ó= kotu me (ɔ=) kpɛr ɪ inum. Tatane 3SGSCL.NEG= Call me tell something (3SGSCL=) ‘Tatane did not call me and tell (me) something’ (Kari 2005: 18) a. Devojke su u sadu girls be.3PL in garden ‘The girls are in the garden’ (Spencer and Luís 2012: 16) a. ayel-en one-ne-xa4 Child-ERG cry-3SG-SAY.PRES ‘The child is crying’. (Harris 2000: 595) b. zavod-a as-ne-b-sa factory-DAT work-3SG-DO-PRES ‘'She works in a factory’. (Harris 2000: 598) fériméti féri=mé=ti bring.2IMP=1SG=PL ‘(You.PL) bring (to) me’! (Joseph 1988: 210) a.

rɪ́ tell

ínúm. something

Example (10) shows proclitics in Degema; (11) shows an enclitic example from Serbian/Croatian, example (12) uses examples from the Vartašen dialect of Udi, as shown in Harris (2000), to showcase endoclitics, whereas example (13) shows an example of a mesoclitic in Modern Greek. The position a clitic takes in a sentence can be governed by syntactic rules different from those that govern the rest of the sentence. Take for instance Serbian/Croatian, as mentioned in Spencer and Luís (2012). The verb ‘be’ has both a full form jesu and a clitic form su, and each form has different syntactic properties. The clitic su cannot occur in sentence-initial position like the full form, and, instead, it must occur only in the second position in the sentence. This is illustrated in the examples below from Spencer and Luís (2012: 16–17) (14)

a. b. c. d.

U sadu su in garden be.3PL ‘(They) are in the garden’ U sadu su in garden be.3PL ‘The girls are in the garden’ *Devojke u sadu su Girls in garden be.3PL *Su u sadu be.3PL in garden

devojke girls

When a language uses multiple clitics, there is often a strict order even if the word order itself is free (Spencer and Luís 2012). For instance, Italian clitics must have the indirect object (dative) clitic before the direct object (accusative) clitic, see (15).

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a. b. c.

Ti scrivo You write.1SG ‘I write you a letter’ Ti la you it​.f​em *la ti it​.f​em you

una a.fem

lettera letter​.f​em

scrivo write.1SG scrivo write.1SG

When the clitics do not appear in the correct order, the sentence is ungrammatical as illustrated in (15c).

3.  Epicene debates and gender-neutrality Discussions on how to create gender-neutral language are different in grammatical gender languages than in social gender languages. This is because grammatical gender languages require gender-agreement between more elements within a sentence. Take, for instance, the Spanish sentences in (16), with the gendered elements in bold. (16) a. el/la/le      niño/niña/niñe    va  al   cine the​.masc​/fem​/​neut   child​.masc​/fem​/n​ eut   go.3SG to the  movies ‘The child goes to the movies’ b. Él/ella/elle va  al    cine He/she/they  go.3SG to the movies ‘He/she/they go to the movies’ c. la/el/le     niña/niño/niñe    alta/alto/alte    va the.Fem/Masc/Neut child.Fem/Masc/Neut tall.Fem/Masc/Neut  go.3SG al   cine to the movies ‘The tall child goes to the movies’ Here, gender agreement is needed between the determiner and the noun, as well as the adjective, if there is one. Thus, the move towards gender-neutral clitics may not be simple, as there must be consideration for how they would work in different morphological and phonological contexts, i.e., how the clitic attaches to the host word and, while they do not need to show gender agreement, how they would be pronounced. To inform discussion about gender-neutral clitics, some ideas for genderneutral language reform in Arabic, Italian, and Spanish are discussed below.

3.1 Arabic Standard Arabic is a grammatical gender language that is traditionally considered to have two genders: feminine and masculine. Standard Arabic does not show any distinction in gender for both independent and dependent subject and object first-person singular, first-person plural, second-person dual, and third-person dual pronouns and clitics (Albuhayri 2013). Gender is marked on second-person singular and plural and third-person singular and plural pronouns and clitics. The examples below show some of the gender-marked and non-gender-marked clitics in Standard Arabic, with the clitic in bold.

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Gender-neutrality and clitics

(17) a. haaðaa kitaab-ii(ya) this   book -1SG. ‘This is my book’               (Albuharyi 2013: 45) b. ʔan​.​ti  katab-ti        risaalat-an 2SG​.f​em  write​.perf​-2SG​.​fem. letter-accu. ‘You wrote a letter’               (Albuharyi 2013: 45–46) c. katab-tu         bi-qalam-i-hi write​.perf​-1​SG. with​-pen​-gen​-3SG​.​masc. ‘I wrote with his pen’              (Albuharyi 2013: 46) All epicenes in Moroccan Arabic, for example, are grammatically masculine and thus use masculine clitics and affixes on verbs, adjective, and prepositions (Hachimi 2001). For some generic masculine words, such as someone (shakhs ma, ‫)ام صخش‬, the feminine counterpart can only be used when the referent is certain to be female (Hachimi 2001: 35). However, neither generic feminine nor generic masculine are truly an epicene as they are visibly marked for a single gender and thus are not genderneutral in usage. As noted by Berger (2019), one potential form of gender-neutral language in Standard Arabic is the usage of the dual form of ‘they’ and ‘you’, huma (‫ )امه‬and antuma (‫)امتنا‬, as these forms do not contain gender markers on the full and clitic forms. This would provide an expansion of a current form already used in Standard Arabic, similar to the expansion of they in English, which may have the benefit of increasing speaker acceptance (see Paterson 2011 for a discussion on the expansion of Whitley’s (1978) Homonymy Theory). The potential benefit for the usage of these forms is that Standard Arabic’s clitics already have corresponding forms -huma (they dual) and -kuma (you dual), which work within the phonological and morphological considerations of the language. However, the dual forms are often not used in other Arabic varieties (e.g., Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic (see Benmamoun 2000, Brustad 2000)), which may cause their usage to sound very formal for speakers who are unaware of their extended usage as a gender-neutral term (Berger 2019). Increased dissemination of information by gender-neutral language supporters to other speakers about the genderneutrality of the dual forms may help to increase awareness of their potential usage. There may also be novel forms that are currently being created by speakers who do not use an expansion of the dual form. However, the general acceptability of these novel forms is unlikely to be widespread without institutional support (c.f. the Swedish pronoun hen). There is, however, work being done to create more gender-inclusive Arabic by groups such as Wiki Gender (2022). Wiki Gender is a feminist platform established in 2016 that works to produce knowledge on gender and feminism, as well as curate and store works within these fields. The group discusses and experiments with Arabic language terms and grammar to create and promote more gender-inclusive forms. Additionally, the UN has also produced a guideline in Arabic for strategies on how to use gender-inclusive language that is intended for UN staff members (https://www​.un​ .org​/en​/gender​-inclusive​-language​/guidelines​.shtml). These guidelines were developed to support the objective of the system-wide Strategy on Gender Parity, which has the objective of supporting equality in multilingual contexts. In the UN’s guidelines, three proposed strategies are to (1) use non-discriminatory language that does not reinforce gender stereotypes; (2) make gender visible when relevant by using a gender-fair pair, which involves using both the feminine and masculine noun forms; and (3) using gender-neutral terms whenever gender is not relevant for communication. The last strategy of using gender-neutral terms, such as ‫( ةيميداكأ طاسوأ‬academic circles) instead of ‫( نويميداكأ‬academics), involves using a collective term rather than a generic masculine. While the

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work being done by Wiki Gender and the UN does not deal directly with gender-neutral clitic forms, they provide a starting point for the conversation, as similar strategies could be adapted for clitics specifically. These initiatives also serve to demonstrate motivations for moving towards genderneutral language. See Schor (2021) for a summary of current research on gender bias and gender-inclusive language in Arabic, which also provides a case study regarding translations between German and Arabic.

3.2 Italian Moving onto Italian, some proposed gender-neutral language reforms involve the use of the asterisk (*) or the asperand symbol (@) instead of the typical masculine (-o/-i) or feminine (-a/-e) endings. This is similar to proposed forms in Spanish and has the same drawback of not being easily pronounceable. However, these forms do have the benefit of drawing attention to the fact that currently there is no formally endorsed gender-neutral option in Italian. Another recent proposed form for gender-neutral Italian involves the use of schwa (ə) or long schwa (ɛ) instead of the typical masculine (-o/-i) or feminine (-a/-e) endings. Schwa has the benefit of being pronounceable in spoken Italian and is orthographically similar to both the feminine and the masculine singular endings. Examples of how these proposed gender-neutral forms might work are shown below, with the endings in bold. (18) a. alunno/alunna pupil.Masc/pupil.Fem ‘pupil’ b. alunnə/alunn*/alunn@ pupil.Neuts ‘pupil’ c. alunne/alunni pupils.Masc/pupils.Fem ‘pupils’ d. alunnɛ pupils.NeutPL ‘pupils’ Italian linguist Vera Gheno, whose 2021a book Femminili singolari [Feminine singular] as well as her 2021b TedX Talk Brevissima storia dello schwa [A Brief History of Schwa] discuss schwa in more detail, has been a proponent for more gender-inclusive Italian. Italian writer Michela Murgia’s 2021 article ‘Perché non basta essere Giorgia Meloni’ [Because being Giorgia Meloni is not enough] was one of the first times schwa was used in a national newspaper. In Italian, clitics occur as both indirect and direct objects. When clitics are used, they are unstressed, and they have explicit gender markings only on the third-person forms (le/gli for indirect object and la/lo/le/li for direct objects) (Marcato and Thüne 2002). Clitics can only attach to verb forms, otherwise a full form pronoun should be used. It is important to note that third-person singular clitics are reduced to l’ both orthographically and phonetically when they are used in a proclitic position. Clitics are typically inserted before the host word, as show in (19). Although, there are some instances where it attaches after the host word (20). Clitics are shown in bold.

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Gender-neutrality and clitics

(19) a. Le     ho     invitati a cena them.Fem   have.1SG    invited to dinner ‘I have invited them to dinner’ b. Martina lo   legge Martina it.Masc read.3SG ‘Martina reads it’              (Monachesi 1998: 7) (20) Leggilo! Read it.Masc ‘Read it!’ Italian clitics exhibit variable behaviour and can undergo clitic climbing (Monachesi 1998). Clitic climbing is where clitics ‘climb’ from the end of a verb combination to the front. This is shown in the example below, with clitics in bold. (21) a. Gianni vuole     comprar    lo Gianni want.3SG   buy.INF    it.Masc ‘Gianni wants to buy it’ b. Gianni lo     vuole     comprare Gianni it.Masc    want.3SG     buy.INF ‘Gianni wants to buy it’ The clitic lo climbs from its enclitic position in (21a) to a proclitic position in (21b). Monachesi (1998) notes that clitic climbing for monosyllabic clitics is required if the verb combination contains an auxiliary verb. However, clitic climbing is not required if the verbs contain a restricting verb such as a modal, aspectual, or motion verb. These are demonstrated in the examples below, with clitics in bold. (22) a. Martina l’ha      mangiata Martina it.Fem        has eaten ‘Martina has eaten it’ b. *Martina ha mangiatola Martina has eaten it.Fem ‘Martina has eaten it’              (Monachesi 1998: 17) (23) a. Martina la       voleva spedire Martina it.Fem       wanted send.INF ‘Martina wanted to send it’ b. Martina voleva       spedirla Martina wanted       send.INF it.Fem ‘Martina wanted to send it’            (Monachesi 1998: 17) Discussions have taken place on ways to use gender-neutral Italian both within and outside of academic circles; though the majority of the discussion is happening in non-academic circles on social media and blogs (see Belletti 2021, Bottini 2022). These discussions often centre on what schwa is and how it can be used in Italian to create gender-neutral forms. Often, they focus on changes to the lexicon in order to create gender-neutral terms rather than on morphological changes that might

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affect the clitic system. As such, there is limited to no discussion on how a gender-neutral clitic that uses schwa (lə) would integrate into the current clitic system. Instead, the proposed changes to the lexicon are similar to language reforms in the 1970s in English that promoted the use of the coordinate he or she. Additionally, some debates have centred on counteracting androcentrism, or male-centredness, within Italian by creating and/or using more feminine terms. These discussions can involve strategies such as using a gender-neutral collective like corpo docente ‘teaching body’ rather than a generic masculine term insegnanti ‘teachers’ as well as using feminine titles such as la ministra (the minister) rather than a generic masculine title (il ministro). Both of these strategies decentre the idea of the male-as-norm and counter the usage of generic masculine terms, which may be intended as generic but is not interpreted as such (Gygax et al. 2008).

3.3  Spanish Spanish is the third grammatical gender language discussed here and is also traditionally considered to have two grammatical genders: feminine and masculine. Ben Papadopoulos (2022) indicates that Spanish may be considered to have two additional gender-neutral grammatical genders that correspond to the morphemes -x and -e. Gender-neutral Spanish, which uses either the -x or -e morphemes, has received criticism from institutions such the Real Academia Española (RAE), ‘Royal Spanish Academy’, as they view gender-neutral forms as artificial and unnecessary as genericmasculine encompasses all gender (for a more in-depth discussion on gender-inclusive Spanish, see Papadopoulos 2022). In Spanish, clitics occur in the form of direct and indirect object pronouns. These clitics are gender marked only in the third-person forms when they occur as direct objects (lo/la singular and los/las plural). Like Italian clitics, they take either a proclitic position or an enclitic position depending on the verb form and can undergo clitic climbing, as shown below. (24) a. Dámela give me it.Fem ‘Give me it’ b. Voy   a   verla Go.1Sing to   see.Inf her ‘I’m going to see her’ c. La voy     a ver her go.1Sing to see.INF ‘I’m going to see her’ d. Comprelas buy them.Fem ‘Buy them’ Some varieties of Spanish utilize leísmo, where the indirect third-person clitic pronoun (le/les) is used instead of a direct clitic (lo/la/los/las). Leísmo lessens the discernible gender in a sentence as indirect third-person clitics and pronouns do not make a gender distinction. This results in usages similar to those shown in the examples below with clitics in bold. The use of le instead of a gendered lo/la also creates a form that is orthographically the same as a gender-neutral direct object pronoun using the -e morpheme.

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Gender-neutrality and clitics

(25) a. La veo      hoy her see.1Sing today ‘I see her today’ b. Lo veo      hoy him see.1Sing today ‘I see him today’ c. Le        veo    hoy him/her/them see.1Sing today ‘I see him/her/them today’ It is important to note that leísmo often occurs with masculine direct objects rather than with feminine ones. This is likely because the RAE has endorsed its usage only when it refers to men and prescribes using only la when it refers to women (RAE 1983, Real Academic Española 2019). The different prescriptions for when to use le has created a case where ‘men are referred to as people, women are objects’ (Mathews 1998). However, Mathews’ (1998) study found that native speakers of Spanish allow le to occur with any human referent in grammaticality judgement tests. Thus, leismo has the potential to expand to a gender-neutral clitic that can be used with any direct object referencing a human.

4. Summary This chapter has provided a brief introduction to clitics for readers unfamiliar with the topic and has discussed possible avenues for the usage of gender-neutral forms in three languages: Arabic, Italian, and Spanish. The chapter began by providing a working definition of clitics and illustrated how they differ from affixes utilizing Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) six aspects. Some of the examples showcased how clitics can be used to show gender-agreement, such as those from Uduk and Naro. First turning to Arabic, a proposed expansion of an element within the system for gender-neutral meaning was discussed. Here, the dual forms huma (‘dual they’) and antuma (‘dual you’) in Standard Arabic were noted, as their corresponding clitics do not contain gender markings and thus could be used for creating gender-neutral forms. In Italian the creation of a new morpheme using schwa as a morphological ending was discussed. Rather than being an expansion within the current system, this would involve the introduction of a novel form to work alongside the gender-marked third-person forms. Finally in Spanish, a mix of introducing a new element and an expansion of an existing phenomenon in some varieties was explored. The expansion of leísmo would create a gender-neutral object clitic that removes gender distinction; it would also follow the morphological endings used for the gender-neutral morpheme -e.

5.  Future directions Gender-neutral reform in grammatical gender languages is a topic of growing interest (e.g., Hord 2016, Auxland 2020, Erdocia 2022), and there are many opportunities for future research, especially concerning clitic forms. First, work that progresses activist and grassroot movements (e.g., Ahmed 2015, Zimman 2017, Rivera Alfaro and Cuba 2022) into the academic sphere is needed. This work can allow scientific evidence-based research to be underpinned by the discussions held by activists on social media and in blog posts. It can also provide unique insights from the speakers who are actively working to create gender-neutral forms on what neologisms have been created and/or forms that are being expanded. The reverse is also true, as academic work on gender-neutral clitics can be disseminated to underpin new language recommendations. Future work could investigate the current gender-neutral clitic strategies being used within a speech community. For example, a study on the 433

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dual forms used by Arabic speakers for gender-neutral instances could provide insight into whether there is a preference for either huma (‫‘( )امه‬dual they’) or antuma (‫‘( )امتنا‬dual you)’. Such work might also show that neither of these forms is preferred and there is a novel form that speakers prefer more, or that there are counterarguments made based on prescriptive grounds. The findings could then be used to create informative work that can be used to increase speaker awareness of genderneutral alternatives and provide information on how the clitic system has adjusted to include the gender-neutral forms. Research can also explore speakers’ attitudes towards gender-neutral clitics, similar to the studies of either Bengoechea and Simon (2014) or Vergoossen et al. (2020), to highlight how speakers evaluate various gender-neutral options. For example, research into speakers’ attitudes towards schwa in Italian may provide further insight into the reasons some speakers are for/against it beyond ‘political correctness’ or endorsing prescriptive norms. Such work could highlight, for example, that a potential reason against gender-neutral forms is a lack of awareness and/or a general confusion about how the forms would be used in everyday contexts. Educational materials could then be created by researchers or advocates to help illustrate the usage of gender-neutral clitics (and other forms) that show how they would function alongside currently used terms. Projects focused on the phonological elements of clitics could also prove insightful for clarifying any potential restrictions gender-neutral clitics may have. For instance, research may find that one gender-neutral clitic option is more likely to be used as it shares phonological similarities with forms that already exist in the language and is easily able to bind with a host word. Research looking at differences between the processing or production times of gender-neutral clitics (across multiple languages) may also provide more information on how gender-neutral forms differ from genderedforms. Findings from this work could be used to highlight the benefits or downsides to proposed gender-neutral forms to speakers and policymakers.

References Ahmed, M.A.M. (2015). Androgynous content: Gender-inclusive language in Qur’anic Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. Doctoral Thesis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana. Albuhayri, S. (2013). The pronominal system in Standard Arabic: Strong, clitic and affixal pronouns. Masters Thesis, Arizona State University, Tempe. Anderson, S. (2005). Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Audring, J. (2016). Gender. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Available at https://oxfordre​.com​ /linguistics​/view​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780199384655​.001​.0001​/acrefore​-9780199384655​-e​-43 (accessed 25 February 2022). Auxland, M. (2020). Para Todes: A case study on Portuguese and gender-neutrality. Journal of Languages, Texts and Society 4: 60–83. Belletti, S. (2021). The Schwa: Opponents vs Supporters. Available at https://italicsmag​.com​/2021​/12​/23​/the​ -schwa​-opponents​-vs​-supporters/ (accessed 14 February 2022). Bengoechea, M. and Simón, J. (2014). Attitudes of university students to some verbal anti-sexist forms. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 4: 69–90. Benmamoun, E. (2000). The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, M. (2019). A Guide to How Gender-Neutral Language is Developing around the World. Available at https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/world​/2019​/12​/15​/guide​-how​-gender​-neutral​-language​-is​-developing​ -around​-world/ (accessed 25 February 2022). Bottini, V. (2022). Non-binary in Italian: Queering the Italian Language. Available at https://saltyworld​.net​/non​ -binary​-in​-italian​-queering​-the​-italian​-language/ (accessed 14 February 2022). Brustad, K. (2000). The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: A Comparative Study of Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti Dialects. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Crystal, D. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Germany: Wiley. Erdocia, I. (2022). Participation and deliberation in language policy: The case of gender-neutral language. Current Issues in Language Planning 23(4): 435–455.

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Gender-neutrality and clitics European Parliament. (2018). Gender-neutral Language in the European Parliament. Available at https://www​ .europarl​.europa​.eu​/cmsdata​/151780​/GNL​_Guidelines​_EN​.pdf (accessed 18 February 2022). Formato, F. (2019). Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Cham: Palgrave Macmillian. Gabriel, U. and Gygax, P. (2008). Can societal language amendments change gender representation? The case of Norway. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 49(5): 451–457. Garavito, J.B. (2013). What research can tell us about teaching: The case of pronouns and clitics. In M. Whong, KH. Gil and H. Marsden (eds) Universal Grammar and the Second Language Classroom. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 17–34. Gheno, V. (2021a). Femminili singolari. Il femminismo è nelle parole. Firenze: Saggi Pop. Gheno, V. (2021b). Brevissima storia dello schwa. June 2021. Available at https://www​.ted​.com​/talks​/vera​ _gheno​_brevissima​_storia​_dello​_schwa (Accessed 28 January 2022). Gygax, P., Gabriel, U., Sarrasin, O., Oakhill, J. and Garnham, A. (2008). Generically intended, but specifically interpreted: When beauticians, musicians, and mechanics are all men. Language and Cognitive Process 23(3): 464–485. doi: 10.1080/01690960701702035. Hachimi, A. (2001). Shifting sands: Language and gender in Moroccan Arabic. In M. Hellinger and H. Buβmann (eds) Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men Vol. 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing, pp. 27–52. Harris, A. (2000). Where in the word is the Udi Clitic? Linguistic Society of America 76(3): 593–616. Hellinger, M. and Buβmann, H. (2001). The Linguistic representation of women and men. In M. Hellinger and H. Buβmann (eds) Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing, pp. 1–26. Hord, L. (2016). Bucking the linguistic binary: Gender neutral language in English, Swedish, French, German. Western Papers in Linguistics 3(1): 1–29. Hudson, R. (2001). Clitics in word grammar. Working papers in linguistics 12: 243–297 Joseph, B.D. (1988). Pronominal affixes in Modern Greek: The case against clisis. Papers from the 24th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society: 203–215. Kari, E. (2005). Degema subject markers: Are they prefixes or proclitics. Journal of West African Languages 32(1–2): 13–20. Kari, E. and Mogara, B. (2016). The clitic nature of person-gender-number markers in Naro. Languages Matter 47(1): 128–148. Killian, D. (2019). Gender in Uduk. In F. Di Garbo, B. Olsson, and B. Wälchli (eds). Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity, Vol I: General issues and specific studies. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. 147–168. Kim, J., Angst, S., Gygax, P., Gabriel, U. and Zufferey, S. (2022). The masculine bias in fully gendered languages and ways to avoid it: A study on gender neutral forms in Québec and Swiss French. Journal of French Language Studies 33: 1–26. Kolković, Z., Jurkiewicz-Rohrbacher, E., Hansen, B., Đurđević, D.F. and Fritz, N. (2022). Clitics in the Wild: Empirical Studies on the Microvariations of the Pronominal, Reflexive and Verbal Clitics in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (Vol. 7). Language Science Press. Marcato, G. and Thüne, E.M. (2002). Gender and female visibility in Italian. In M. Hellinger and H. Buβmann (eds) Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing, pp. 187–217. Mathews, T. (1998). The acquisition of sexist language by native and non-native speakers of Spanish. Southwest Conference on Language Teaching, 25 April 1998. Mills, S. (2008). Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monachesi, P. (1998). Decomposing Italian clitics. Romance in HPSG 75: 305–357. Murgia, M. (2021). Perché non basta essere Giorgia Meloni [Because being Giorgia Meloni is not enough]. Available at https://espresso​.repubblica​.it​/opinioni​/2021​/06​/07​/news​/perche​_non​_basta​_essere​_giorgia​_meloni​-304566404/ (accessed 26 February 2022). Papadopoulos, B. (2022). A brief history of gender-inclusive Spanish. DEP – Deportate, esuli, profughe 48: 40–48. Paterson, L.L. (2011). The use and prescription of epicene pronouns: A corpus-based approach to generic he and singular they in British English. Doctoral dissertation, Loughborough University, Loughborough. Prewitt-Freilino, J.L., Caswell, T.A. and Laakso, E.K. (2012). The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages. Sex Roles 6(3): 268–281. Real Academia Española de la Lengua (RAE). (1983). Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

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Ashley Reilly-Thornton Real Academia Española. (2019). Uso de los pronombres «lo(s)», «la(s)», «le(s)». Leísmo, laísmo, loísmo [Use of the pronouns lo(s), la(s), le(s). Leísmo, laísmo, loísmo]. Available at https://www​.rae​.es​/espanol​-al​-dia​/uso​ -de​-los​-pronombres​-los​-las​-les​-leismo​-laismo​-loismo (accessed 24 March 2023). Rivera Alfaro, S. and Cuba, E. (2022, September 8–9). Different approaches to naming gender-inclusive language in Spanish: A data-driven contribution to the transnational debate [Abstract]. Attitudes towards genderinclusive language: A multinational perspective, Queen Mary University, London. http://qmul​.pfalzgraf​.net​/ riveraalfaro​_cuba​-abs​.pdf. Schor, L. (2021). Geschlechtergerechte Sprache im Arabischen: Skizzierung des Forschungsstands und Fallanalyse arabischer Übersetzungen bayerischer Behördentexte. Master’s Thesis, Universität Bamberg (University of Bamberg), Bamberg. Spencer, A. and Luís, A.R. (2012). Clitics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tight, D.G. (2006). The relationship between perceived gender in L1 English and grammatical gender in L2 Spanish. In Selected Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese as First and Second Languages. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 149–160. United Nations. mbādʾi tūǧīhīẗ fī sbīl ṣīāġẗ šāmlẗ ǧnsānīā bāllġẗ al-ʿrbīẗ [Guidelines for gender-inclusive drafting in Arabic]. Available at https://www​.un​.org​/ar​/gender​-inclusive​-language​/guidelines​.shtml (accessed 25 February 2022). Vergoossen, H.P., Renström, E.A., Lindqvist, A. and Gustafsson Sendén, M. (2020). Four dimensions of criticism against gender-fair language. Sex Roles 83(5): 328–337. Whitley, M.S. (1978). Person and number in the use of we, you, and they. American Speech 53(1): 18–39. Wiki Gender. (2022). Available at https://genderiyya​.xyz​/wiki​/Project​:About​_Gender​_Wiki (accessed 28 January 2022). Zimman, L. (2017). Transgender language reform: Some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination 1(1): 84–105. Zingler, T. (2022) Clitics, anti-clitics, and weak words: Towards a typology of prosodic and syntagmatic dependence. Language and Linguistics Compass 16(5–6): 1–23. Zwicky, A.M. and Pullum, G.K. (1983). Cliticization vs. inflection: English n’t. Language 59(30): 502–513.

Further reading Anderson, S. (2005). Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corbett, G.G. (2014). The Expression of Gender. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kolković, Z., Jurkiewicz-Rohrbacher, E., Hansen, B., Đurđević, D.F. and Fritz, N. (2022). Clitics in the Wild: Empirical Studies on the Microvariations of the Pronominal, Reflexive and Verbal Clitics in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Vol. 7. Language Science Press. Spencer, A. and Luís, A.R. (2012). Clitics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zingler, T. (2022) Clitics, anti-clitics, and weak words: Towards a typology of prosodic and syntagmatic dependence. Language and Linguistics Compass 16(5–6): 1–23.

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30 GENDER BINARIES IN CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGES Angela Zottola

1. Introduction This chapter sets out to explore the extent to which gender binarism is encoded within constructed languages, specifically by focusing on their pronominal systems. As the use of personal pronouns nowadays has become increasingly political and a means to escape and fight gender binaries it is crucial to examine the magnitude of binary thinking and how it is mirrored (or not) in language creation and use. The chapter illustrates in more detail the cases of Esperanto and Láadan and argues that in the same way that any language production is political/ideological so are constructed languages as attested by the use of pronouns and the binary normative standards that these languages follow. Historically, English personal pronouns have been categorized as part of a closed lexical category (McArthur 1992: 810, Murphy 2010). What differentiates a closed lexical category from an open one is its incapability to receive new items as part of that same category (Murphy 2010). Following this assumption, the set of pronouns available in any language varies minimally and only across extended time periods. Yet, this notion has been questioned by many. Wales (1996: 15), for example, suggests that there are ‘many ways in which the pronouns can be seen to be unstable’. Wales continues by pointing out that there have been quite a few changes in the English pronominal system alone, they and its variants being borrowed by Norse languages in Early Middle English is one case, as it is unusual for closed lexical categories to borrow linguistic items from other languages (Wales 1996: 15). Another example can be made again in relation to the pronoun they, used in modern English to indicate the plural, but actively and consciously being used in the past decade with the function of a singular gender-neutral option (Paterson 2014), a function that the pronoun used to have in the past, as attested as early as the fourteenth century (Balhorn 2004, LaScotte 2016) and that has become mainstream. For open lexical categories, such as nouns or adjectives, the change or evolution within the category is much more fluid. This receptiveness of open lexical categories can be observed not only in reference to novel situations (for example, new words coined during the COVID-19 pandemic), but also in relation to existing concepts, as in the case of gender identity and sexuality-related categories. The number of new or reclaimed terms connected to gender identity, gender expression, or sexuality that go beyond the gender binary and have entered the mainstream vocabulary in the past decade and are now part of day-to-day conversation patterns are an example of this trend. Labels such as non-binary and gender neutral language, as well as terms like agender, pansexual, or genderqueer that fall under those definitions, are now consistently used to refer to gen-

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-36

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der identity and sexuality, while new terms, as gender diverse (Thorne et al. 2019) or new pronouns being ze, zie, or zir have been introduced (Zimman 2017, Zottola 2020). Going back to grammatical categories, when it comes to the expression of grammatical gender, languages can be divided in three different groups (Stahlberg et al. 2007). The first group includes languages, such as Finnish (Stahlberg et al. 2007) or Turkish (Braun 1999) (among many others), that do not overtly mark for gender, meaning that no morphological agreement is required between nouns and pronouns, verbs, or adjectives associated to them. For example, the sentence ‘tämä opiskelija on kotoisin italiasta. hän on italialainen’ (trans. this student is from Italy. She/he is Italian) the speaker does not know the gender of the student, and is not required to, as the noun and the correspondent pronoun are unmarked for gender. The second group consists of languages in which not all word classes express gender differences; in fact, most nouns can be used both to indicate masculine and feminine, this is the case of natural/social gender languages, English can be categorised within this group (Stahlberg et al. 2007). However, personal pronouns, and specifically the third-person singular, express gender differentiations in this group. Going back to the example provided for Finnish, the English translation shows that while the noun ‘student’ is unmarked, we would need to know the gender of the student to choose its corresponded pronoun (unless we choose to use singular they). A third group reflects gender distinctions in all grammatical classes. In the grammatical gender language group, which accounts for most Latin languages such as Italian and Portuguese, the speaker can indicate the gender of a person or object even when the noun, the subject, or the pronoun is not explicit in the sentence (Hellinger and Bussmann 2001). For example, to translate the sentence ‘This student is from Italy. He/she is Italian’ from English into Italian, we are required to specify whether the student is male (studente) or female (studentessa) four times in this sentence, to translate the determiner ‘this’, the word ‘student’, the pronoun ‘he/she’, and the adjective ‘Italian’: ‘Questo studente viene dall’Italia. Lui è italiano’ or ‘Questa studentessa viene dall’Italia. Lei è italiana’. With the exclusion of some languages that fall within these categories – see, for example, Swedish which offers gender neutral option for the third-person singular pronoun, hon (she), han (he), and hen (gender-neutral) (Sendén et al. 2021) – the idioms that are included in the two latter types of language are more likely to reflect the gender binarism that is rooted in the dominant society, which frequently adheres to (hetero)normative ideas about gender, and in the way language is produced. In these languages, stating the gender of the person involved in the interaction is crucial to make the conversation fluent and the communication effective. As contemporary society is striving to move away from binary and heteronormative behaviours and definitions of gender identity (Zimman 2017, Scharrón-del Río and Aja 2020) to acknowledge the vast spectrum of gender identities, the use of the existing pronoun paradigms becomes problematic and the quest to finding a set of non-binary or gender-neutral pronouns that are acceptable from a prescriptive perspective has increased. Some languages, such as English (Zimman 2017) and Swedish (Sendén et al 2021), and concurrently the societies in which they are spoken, have been more receptive to changes than others. In English, for example, one attempt at going beyond binarism was the introduction of new pronouns such as ze and hir (Zimman 2017). Alternatively, the use of they as a gender-neutral pronoun has become a valid and popular option (see, among others, Paterson 2014, Hord 2016, Bradley 2020). In other cases, societies have not been ready to accept the fact that it is no longer possible to continue to view the world through the lenses of binarism and heteronormativity and people have been reluctant to actively embrace the use of gender-neutral formulations. Accordingly, Prewitt-Freilino et al. (2012: 296) posit that languages that consistently ‘call attention to gender distinctions by discriminating between masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns’ lead speakers to make these distinctions in their view of society. An example of this is my own native language Italian. One of the first solutions proposed by activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community to sidestep binarism is the use of the asterisk as a substitute for the final vowel that signals the gender marker, in Italian ‘a’ for the 438

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singular and ‘e’ for the plural in the feminine form and ‘o’ and ‘i’ for the masculine, for example, considering the word student used in the previous example it would be l* student*, where the asterisk can be applied to the article as well. In Italian articles are also agreed in gender and number, il or lo (sing. masc.), la (sing. fem.), gli (plur. masc.), le (plur. fem.). One of the problems that this method presents is the impossibility of differentiating singular from plural. The ‘asterisk method’ was followed by the suggestion of using ‘u’ as a final vowel recalling the Latin neuter suffix, which again would only work in the singular, looking like lu studentu. Alongside the use of these two variations, other options were also recommended, such as the use of the @ or the underscore sign (l@ student@ or l_ student_). More recently, a growing number of people have started to use the schwa symbol (Gheno 2019). This last option is particularly interesting since it also allows a differentiation for number, using the symbol in the capital for plural and lowercase for singular, as in lɜ studentɜ and lǝ studentǝ. All these new options, and particularly the last one, have generated controversy and dissention across the country. Apart from religious associations, one of the leading figures of this battle against inclusivity is based within the academic context, a professor of general linguistics at the University of Cagliari, Massimo Arcangeli (2022), who summarises his ideas in a recently published book titled: La Lingua Scəma: Contro lo Schwa (e altri animali) [trans. The stupid language: Against the schwa (and other animals)]. Arcangeli claims that it is prescriptively unacceptable to use any signs as suffixes of terms in Italian and that our society is taking a dangerous turn in the name of inclusivity. One of the criticisms opposing the use of these gender-neutral forms is the difficulty in producing the appropriate phonetic rendering for the schwa sound or even associating a sound to the asterisk. In fact, the prescriptively endorsed formulation in Italian is the generic masculine, for example, it is common to begin a collective email with Cari tutti (‘dear all’) both ending with the masculine suffix ‘-i’ regardless of how many men, women, or non-binary people the email is addressed to. A formulation that explicitly includes both the masculine and the feminine (such as care tutte e cari tutti) is obviously a step forward if we consider the generic masculine to be the standardised norm, but such formulations are still problematic as they exclude any individual who does not identify within the gender binary. Third-person singular pronouns have become extremely political when used to explicitly escape and fight gender binaries (Zimman 2016). In an attempt to fully explore the extent to which the use of gender-neutral language has become so political/ideological, this chapter moves away from attested uses of gendered pronouns and considers how (or indeed if) gender is encoded in constructed languages as well. The following section, titled ‘Constructed, artificial or planned?’ provides a brief overview on constructed languages, introducing the different terminology used in the field, i.e., planned, constructed, and artificial, in an attempt to situate such languages within an ideological and political context. The chapter continues by focusing on the use of pronouns in constructed languages, discussing two of these languages in more detail. The first is Esperanto, chosen as it is representative of a language specifically created for actual use in society as a tool for international communication (Broadribb 1970). The second is Láadan, a fictional language created by Suzette Haden Elgin and included in her science fiction trilogy Native Tongue (Elgin 1987). The chapter ends with a discussion in which I argue that, in the same way that real-world language production is political/ideological, so are constructed languages, and the composition of the personal pronominal system and consequent use of pronouns in them attests to this. Lastly, the chapter offers a reflection on future directions in this field. This chapter thus interrogates the relationship between ideas about gender, politics, and power as realised in languages created ex novo that, in principle, do not have to adhere to any standard prescriptivist linguistic standard or mainstream social norm.

2.  Constructed, artificial or planned? The past 150 years have seen a rise in interest in the creation of new languages. However, the first attested attempt dates to the 16th century with the creation of Balaibalan, the oldest documented 439

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constructed language created in what today is known as Iran (Bausani 1974). Its creator is officially unknown, but the available documentation allowed scholars to established that its creation was likely to have been a collective endeavour (Bausani 1974). As conlangs (a blended form of the phrase constructed languages (Martin 2014)) increased in the last 25 years, Okrent (2009) suggests that it has become increasingly difficult to keep track and appropriately document all the new constructed languages. The main reason connected to the creation of new languages is the attempt to facilitate communication; see, for example, Esperanto, now popular worldwide. Other explanations behind the creation of new languages stem from literature or mediatic productions; an example is Na’vi, an artificial language created for the film Avatar (Cameron 2009), or Quenya, the Elvish language described in the book series Lord of the Rings (Tolkien 1954). Constructed languages can be defined and classified in many ways, for instance, most commonly used terms are artificial (Culbertson and Schuler 2019), planned (Gobbo 2017), or fictional (Barnes and van Heerden 2006). In some cases, constructed languages are also referred to as invented (Okrent 2009). Generally speaking, constructed languages can be defined as the opposite of natural languages, that is to say, they are systems of communication, written, oral, or both, artificially created by someone for a specific purpose (Wüster 1979, Blanke 1985). Constructed languages can be based on one or more existing languages (in this case they can also be categorised as a posteriori languages) like Esperanto, or they can be built completely from scratch (these are generally referred to as a priori languages) (Libert 2018). In the latter case, I believe this definition of a constructed language being completely a priori is not entirely accurate, as when it comes to the sound that a given symbol (or combination of symbols) will take in a new language, this can always be described using a known phoneme from the phonological alphabet (on this matter, see Okrent 2019). Thus, while the symbols/ graphemes used for a constructed language can be potentially infinite in structure, the phonemes available for that language are restricted to the sounds of human speech and/or the meaningfully distinguishable noises that can be produced in the human vocal tract. Constructed languages can also be classified according to their function. In this case we distinguish among auxlang, artlang, and engelang. Auxlang, also known as international auxiliary languages, recall the idea of a lingua franca and have been created to facilitate communication between people of different nations who do not share a common language. Again, an example is Esperanto, which will be discussed more at length in the following section. Artlangs are languages created for the purpose of art, such as those invented for literature or films. There are many examples of such languages that became very famous according to the artistic production they appeared in, such as Klingon in Star Trek and Parseltongue from the Harry Potter saga, just to name a few. Lastly, engelang, or engineered languages, are created for testing purposes, in other words to assess the extent to which a change in a given language could be functional (Schreyer 2021). An example of such languages is Lojban, created in 1987 by the Logical Language Group, a US non-profit organization that promoted the study of language, thought, human culture, and their relationships. Various dictionaries of constructed languages exist around the world – an example is the translation of the sentence ‘I speak Esperanto/Klingon/Lojban’, according to those dictionaries, would result in: (1) Esperanto: mi parolas esperanton (2) Klingon: tlhIngan Hol vIjatlh (3) Lojban: mi tavla fo la lojban A seminal role in the development and progression of constructed languages is also played by speakers of such languages. In fact, as it can be imagined, these languages exist because there is a community of practice (Eckert 2006) that is willing to use them and continue to keep each language alive. Gobbo (2017) highlights how these are not simply speech communities (groups of people who speak the language), but authentic communities of practice that interact routinely and share a 440

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set of social norms (Gumperz 2009). These communities are, as a matter of fact, structured around the constructed language, and they welcome people to the community based on their interest in the conservation and development of the language and regardless of gender, race, or economic class (Gobbo 2017). Against this backdrop, it can be argued that communities built around constructed languages are small-scale reproductions of different societies and cannot be considered immune from the ideological underpinnings guiding them. In other words, while Gobbo (2017) suggests that people can join a community of speech formed around a constructed language just because they are interested in the language, this still contributes to building barriers between the in-group and outgroup, that is to say that even in these theoretically judgement-free communities, no one is immune to the society in which they live and its social norms. This is particularly important when thinking about pronoun use and gender binaries, as societal views might very easily influence the very construction of the language or the level of inclusivity of the community itself. Only a few scholars of constructed languages, with reference to specific languages (mainly Esperanto), have given some space to the topic of gender and inclusivity within these languages (see Fiedler 2015). On the contrary, a brief search among online fora reveals that there is a considerable number of conlangers – those who create and speak constructed languages (Ottenheimer and Pine 2019) – who have started threads about the use of gender in conlangs. Although a systematic analysis of these fora was not possible for the purpose of this work, the general idea that these threads seem to disclose is that people are wondering what should be done with regards to the expression of grammatical gender and to what extent this is really something necessary to the effectiveness of their constructed language. On reddit, for example, in the r/conlang subreddit, a thread about the use of gender discusses this issue raising a few unresolved questions: (4) Basically I’m wondering how your languages deal with gender. Do most nouns have gender? Are there more than two genders? Are there no genders in your language? I’m curious how everyone has dealt with this – especially if you’re designing a language for a race that can be hermaphroditic or that reproduces asexually (posted on March 5, 2018) These questions allowed many conlangers to share their choices, a user who replied on the same day said: (5) I personally don’t like noun gender, since it complicates the grammar, but since many many many natural languages have it, I’ve elected to use it from time to time. The thing about gender is that it’s not always masculine and feminine, and even in languages where it is, it only really refers to biological sex for animate things like people and animals. […] However, you can literally use grammatical gender to separate anything – the term ‘gender’ can be confusing to make you think that there can only be a feminine/masculine (or neuter) distinction. Another user replies: (6) Definitely depends on what I want. In my current conlang, there is no concept of grammatical gender at all (words like he and she are the same third person pronoun). It usually feel it really complicates things, and so I don’t usually bother with it, though I have made outlines for conlangs with gender. (posted on March 5, 2018) And some conlangers even have a different conceptualization of the category gender: (7) Currently have a conlang with two genders: Zone and non-zone. Zone nouns are affixed with / sp/. They denote a specific meaning in the base noun, usually related to ridiculous things. For 441

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example, a regular rip or tear would be /kʰərɑ/ while /kʰərɑsp/ would denote a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum. I generally don’t deal with gender other than that, though. (posted on March 6, 2018) The variety of these comments highlights how the question remains unresolved, and the influence of prescriptive grammar and mainstream societal norms is concrete in the minds of conlangers.

3.  Pronouns in constructed languages 3.1  Esperanto Esperanto was created in 1887 by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist from Bialystok (Poland, formerly a part of the Russian Empire), who was hoping to provide his fellow citizens with a language that could facilitate international communication in an area in which a relatively small amount of people spoke a considerable number of different languages. Among the many attempts at creating a posteriori artificial languages, Esperanto is the only one that reached the status of a fully fledged language, thanks to the large community of speakers that actively continue to practice it and the extensive development of its system (Fiedler 2015). However, in her study on gender in this planned language, Fiedler (2015: 117-118) concludes that ‘gender-related expressions are used heterogeneously in Esperanto […] Esperanto in its current form [...] is not a perfect planned language and one of its flaws is that it violates gender neutrality’, since it follows the general rule of the generic masculine, while a suffix is added for the feminine, like most romance languages such as Italian, i.e. ‘the children’ is translated as infanoj, the plural form of infano, masculine singular noun meaning ‘the boy’. The personal pronoun system in Esperanto mirrors that of English, there is no distinction for singular and plural or for formal and informal second-person pronouns. As Table 30.1 shows, Esperanto differentiates between feminine and masculine pronouns in the singular form. The list also includes a neuter pronoun used for things, animals, and small children that nowadays is considered by some Esperantists as archaic (Fiedler 2015), making it not an option to be used as a non-binary third-person pronoun. Interestingly, Esperanto’s largest group of nouns consists of lexically gender-indefinite terms, such as persono (person), studento (student), or kelnero (waiter). The second largest group is masculine nouns from which it is possible to derive feminine nouns by using a suffix, for example patro (father) and patrino (mother), where the feminine suffix -ino is added to form the feminine, or viro (man) virino (woman). In Esperanto, this principle of generating female nouns from masculine ones has been long criticised (originally by Baudouin de Courtenay 1976 [1907]) and is still at the centre of debates today (Fiedler 2015). This debate goes far beyond Esperanto. One of the first feminist scholars to address this issue was Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1895, who recommended the use of they as opposed to the generic masculine in English. Later, other scholars have argued against the use of generic masculine, seen as a way of setting the masculine as norm and the feminine as deviant (see, among others, Lakoff 1973), suggesting that this use of the generic masculine elicits a male bias in the cognitive representation of genders (Kaufmann and

Table 30.1 Pronouns in Esperanto Person

Singular

Plural

first second third

mi vi li (masculine) ŝi (feminine)ĝi (neuter)

ni ili

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Bohner 2015). Given that the use of generic masculine had been long problematized, why the creators and users of Esperanto continue with these formulations remains unclear. As Fiedler (2015) explains, pronominalization in Esperanto is quite complex due to the different views on the use of the masculine pronoun li as a generic neutral pronoun. Zamenhof (1962), for example, rejects the possibility of using ĝi as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to people as the scholar finds it diminishing to use the same pronoun for humans and for things. Lastly, Wennergreen (2005: 104) posits that while it seems discriminatory to use the masculine pronoun as a generic/ gender-neutral option, this ‘is only a grammatical affair’ (as cited in Fiedler 2015) and proposes as a solution the use of the combined pronouns li aŭ ŝi, ‘he or she’. This is also an old argument generally put forward by those in favour of the use of generic masculine; thus, aside from being obsolete, the use of combined pronouns not only reinforces the idea that gender is binary, but research has proven that it is unlikely for ‘he’ to be perceived as a ‘true generic form’ (Paterson 2020: 260). The definition of ‘masculine as the normative gender and feminine as deviant’ as a discriminatory practice was pointed out in Esperantist circles as early as 1894. In response to this, Zamenhof, despite agreeing with this perspective, counters the arguments by specifying that Esperanto was created with the aim of making communication easier. For this reason it would go against the foundational principles of the language to include structures that would counter the habits of those who are meant to become its speakers. In other words, Zamenhof refuses to make such a change for the sake of keeping things the way they have always been. Although this could have been the perfect chance to reform the language and eliminate discrepancies in gender markers (Back 2011, Fiedler 2015), the choice made by Zamenhof transformed this possibility for inclusivity into a precedent and a justification to continue using the generic masculine, eradicating any possibility for the language to evolve beyond gender binarism and discriminatory practices. A reformed version of Esperanto, Ido, was created by Louis de Beaufront and Louis Couturat (1907). This variety tried to address this issue of gender inclusivity, but, as has been mentioned earlier, this version of the language was never as popular as Esperanto. In fact, Ido envisaged the default to be unmarked for gender and masculine and feminine to be optional. For example, the word ‘director’ translates as: (8) Esperanto: direktoro (sing. masc.), direktorino (sing. fem.) (9) Ido: direktisto (sing.), direktistino (sing. masc.), direktistulo (sing. fem). While Fiedler (2015) extensively discusses the problems and set backs of Esperanto when it comes to inclusiveness and gender-related forms, she also concludes that the language and its users are striving towards a non-sexist usage and suggests that ‘[n]ouns especially designations for jobs and functions, are increasingly treated as gender-indefinite’ while the use of combined pronouns (e.g., li aŭ ŝi ‘he or she’) is gaining ground. This development towards a gradually more gender-fair language proves that Esperanto is not an artificial and sterile construct, as some people believe, but a fully-fledged language that changes in active use’ (2015: 118). In the 1970s the use of the pronoun ri as a gender-neutral option was proposed. This proposal was never officially endorsed by the Akademio de Esperanto, the most important body of Esperanto speakers, but it has been increasingly used, especially by younger Esperanto speakers, as affirmed by Markos Kramer (2020), a member of the Akademio. The use of gender-neutral options among Esperanto speakers, remains so far, an issue debated as some online threads on various fora reveal. Going back to online discussions proves useful to get a sense of what actual users of Esperanto think. One answer in a dedicated forum by one user seems like a good summary: ‘Sadly, like English, Esperanto has several solutions, none of which are entirely satisfactory. […]’ (posted by Neil Roberts on August 24, 2016, on Stack Exchange).

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3.2 Láadan In 1984, Suzette Haden Elgin created Láadan (a word that can be translated into English as ‘the language of those who perceive’), a fictional language included in her Native Tongue science fiction series (see also Elgin 1985). Elgin was a professor of linguistics and a writer of feminist science fiction. She constructed this language ‘to be a feminist language that directly encodes issues and perspectives relevant to women’ (Sanders 2020: 18). This definition summarises Elgin’s goal, rather in contrast with Zamenhof’s for Esperanto, of a new language created ‘in order to bring about change in […] society and secure [women’s] liberation’ (Bruce 2012: 50). The Native Tongue trilogy, comprising of Native Tongue (1984), The Judas Rose (1987), and Earthsong (1994), is set in a dystopian future in the United States of America, where society has been reorganised following an amendment to the US Constitution issued in 1991 that declares women to be inferior to men on the basis of some sort of false scientific evidence. In this new society, a different type of caste system groups people together by function, and linguists, grouped at birth into the Linguist Lines, are invested with the responsibility of becoming fluent in a variety of different languages used to communicate with alien civilizations with which Earth does business and for diplomacy purposes. Those belonging to the Linguist Lines basically represent the only connection between humans and aliens; it is thanks to them that life on Earth can continue. The first book explores the complex relationship between the government and the Linguist Lines. Being the only ones able to effectively communicate with aliens, linguists find themselves constantly under scrutiny by the other lines. In this book, the issue of women being seen as inferior to men is described as optimal, because it allows women to act more freely while considered harmless and thus allows them to work on the development of a secret project to produce a new language, Láadan. After being segregated to a communal living space for the sake of men’s peaceful living, the women begin to work on the elaboration of a secret language that could more effectively express emotions and perceptions of women without the fear of being discovered. The second book continues to focus on the women’s constructed language and specifically describes their attempt at spreading the language universally by infiltrating convents of the Roman Catholic Church. In the last book of the trilogy, the women realise that their experiment to disseminate Láadan globally has failed, but they try to learn from their mistakes and apply their model of social change through language to try to solve human hunger (I’ll leave it to the readers to find out how that ends). As Elgin explains (1987), the idea of Láadan stems from her belief that no human language is adequate enough to express the perceptions and emotions of women. This hypothesis developed following Elgin’s studies on language, which led her to believe that languages are unable to express concepts that cannot or will not be understood by the culture in which that same language is spoken (1987: 177; Bruce 2012). She gives the example of the United States; Láadan could never be spoken in the United States because its mainstream culture (based on patriarchy, capitalism, and I add, heteronormativity) could never accept a language that accurately expresses women’s perceptions; in fact, this would result in the culture’s self-destruction. There was no one way for Elgin to scientifically test her hypothesis. Ideally, she would have created a test group who would speak Láadan and compare it to a control group who spoke English in their day-to-day activities. To make this experiment even more robust, the speakers in the test group would have acquired Láadan from birth and spoke no other languages (to avoid the impact of confounding variables), but clearly this would have been unethical, thus not an option. Nonetheless, she wanted to present her new language to as vast an audience as possible, and, taking advantage of her previous experience as a science fiction writer, she decided to do it through her novels. As she explains: ‘[t]he novel would take up the hypothesis that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true in its weak form, which means that language does become a mechanism for social change. […] and it would explore the hypothesis that if you were to introduce into American culture a language that did express 444

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the perceptions of women, that culture would perforce self-destruct and change radically’ (Elgin 1987: 178). Elgin also explains why this could be the ideal environment to explore the potential real-world ramifications of Láadan, in fact, ‘[i]n the novel you have a large number of women using this language, using it with small children so that it becomes a pidgin, then a creole, and eventually spoken as a native language in the linguists’ households’ (Elgin 1987: 180). While this chapter will not explain how the language works as a whole, the key point I want to address here is that in Láadan there is only one pronoun for the third-person singular form, i.e., be. Rafey (2014) observes that initially Elgin writes in the first of the trilogy’s novels that be is genderless, but then corrects herself in the second edition of the Dictionary and Grammar of Laádan that this third-person pronoun had no equivalent in English, it is neither masculine nor feminine nor neuter, but a separate, new concept. These affirmations, notes Rafey (2014), are nonetheless not confirmed by the various translation into Láadan that can be found, where be is usually used to translate ‘she’ and behid (be + the masculine morpheme ‘-id’) to translate ‘he’. There are a number of pronouns that can be used in Láadan that derive from three initial forms, the consonant ‘l’ is used in combination with other suffixes for the first person, ‘n’ for the second person, and ‘b’ for the third person. These can be followed by the vowel ‘-e’; in this case, they are considered neutral. If they are followed by the vowel ‘-a’ they signal a beloved person, the vowel ‘-i’ is used to talk about an honoured person, and the prefix ‘lhe-’ to indicate you despise the person. Lastly, there are suffixes that signal number, ‘-zh’ marks the plural form that includes only several people and ‘-n’ to signal a larger group. Pronouns are never marked for gender. Third-person pronouns will thus look like Table 30.2 (adapted from Lesson 22 Advanced Pronouns, http://www​.laadanlanguage​.org​/22​.html). In this language, ‘constructed deliberately by women and for women with the goal of bringing about drastic social change’ (Elgin 1987: 179), gender is not something that needs to be necessarily expressed when using pronouns. However, for other lexical categories, ‘the feminine is always treated as normative in Láadan’ (Bruce 2012:50); in this sense Láadan follows the structure of a social gender language, such as English. As Bruce (2012:56) suggests, the generic feminine used in Láadan is just as problematic as the generic masculine being the normative reference because it still strives to move away from gender equality or neutrality. A women’s language is just as problematic as a men’s language, not only does it homogenise women, but it does not solve the problem of gender binaries; on the contrary, it reiterates it, simply posing it from a different and novel perspective. This novel perspective is exactly what makes Láadan a seminal contribution to constructed languages. In fact, it could be inferred that Elgin’s goal is not necessarily that of spreading this language and hoping that people would actually start speaking it, thus replacing a ‘men’s language’ with a ‘women's language’, but to shed light on the power imbalances that are coded into male-as-default languages. Perhaps the creation of Láadan can be viewed as a counterattack on implicit patriarchal and heteronormative power, one that tries to be political and one that points to the fact that current languages do not sufficiently and systematically encode the experiences of all human beings. The analysis of the proposed system makes it even more evident that the only possible way towards an inclusive

Table 30.2 Third person pronouns in Láadan

third person

unmarked beloved honoured despised

singular

several

many

be ba bi lhebe

bezh bazh bizh lhebezh

ben ban bin lheben

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and all-comprehensive language is to go beyond gender binaries altogether and opt for an unmarked language that does not consider differentiations such as gender.

4. Discussion Language is a political instrument and a thus a tool to exert power and oppress or liberate people (Foucault 1972, Baldwin 1979, Fairclough 1989). What is said and how makes a difference. As early as 1977, John Lyons affirmed that ‘a language with proper names could dispense with pronouns: although participants may not always know the names of the other(s)’ (Lyons 1977: 640). The idea that binary pronouns only add an additional layer of difficulty to language and that perhaps it could be a possibility to omit them altogether is not totally remote. If we observe the two examples of constructed languages presented in this chapter, it is clear that gender issues are not resolved and that the proposal that these languages put forward do not seem final or acceptable as inclusive or completely non-discriminatory. As far as Esperanto and Láadan are concerned, the evidence suggests that constructed languages draw heavily on the structures of already existing languages, even in the case of a priori languages. Láadan is an excellent example of how, even when attempting to push back against the status quo, the message still has to be packaged in a way that people will understand. There is a necessity that has to do with the way society is shaped by power, by which the oppressed continue to use, perhaps inadvertently, the tools of the oppressors, and to reiterate those same structures and behaviours that are used to restrict the freedom and rights of a given individual or group (Palmer et al. 2019). As systems of domination work thanks to languages, these become a fundamental instrument in the permanence of systematic oppression through structures of domination and subordination based on ideologies of superiority and inferiority. Thus, critical thinking about language itself can be one of the mechanisms that can lead our society to understand oppression, resist it, and protect those in a position of less power (Fairclough 1992). While the pronoun system in Láadan seems to reject the norm of a gender binary through the existence of a singular inclusive and unmarked pronoun, the gendered nature of the other lexical categories in the language replicates exactly the social structure that proposes one gender as the norm/ default. And while a lot can be learned from inverting the gender binary, with women positioned as the default realisation of ‘human’, the resulting language (and society) still perpetuates an unequal gender binary, thus an unequal society. As Bruce (2012:50) posits ‘while language may be an essential means of classifying and understanding the universe, it is not an innocent or neutral system of organization. It serves the purposes of hegemonic group, which tends to be male in every contemporary society’. It is eye-opening to see how this applies to most communicative systems. Hegemonic ideologies are deeply rooted in people’s perception and understanding of reality, and it is for this reason that in this society, people are led to believe that the status quo is unchangeable. Zamenhof’s fears related to the possible demise of Esperanto should he adopt changes that would eliminate grammatical gender are testament to this.

5.  Future directions Makoni and Pennycook (2006), reflecting on the meaning of creating a constructed language, seem a useful point of departure to explore a possible future direction. The two scholars point out that when arguing that languages are constructed: we seek to go beyond the obvious point that linguistic criteria are not sufficient to establish the existence of a language […], in order to identify the important social and semiotic process 446

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that lead to their construction. Social processes include, for example, the development of colonial and nationalist ideologies through literacy programs. Semiotic processes, following Irvine and Gal (2000) include the ways in which various language practices are made invisible (erasure), the projection of one level of differentiation onto another (fractal recursivity) and the transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features and the social images with which they are linked (iconization). These different social and semiotic processes interact in complex ways, so that nationalism, for example, generates iconization and fractal recursivity, which in turn generate more nationalism as part of an ideological process of homogenization. (Makoni and Pennycook 2006: 1–2) This same process can be applied to ideologies related to gender identity and sexuality and binary norms. To overcome gender binaries in language, this process needs to be problematised. In Bruce’s words (2012: 48) ‘[i]f systems of linguistic classification are not natural and comprehensive but arbitrary and incomplete, then who lays down the lines along which language is organized, and whose purposes does that system of classification serve’? Language serves the purpose of communication but also the purpose of conceptualization of notions and understandings. The idea that language does not need to be created around the concept of gender binarism should be reflected in the way we speak, but it still is not. While it is understandable that changing the way things are is a complex and long process, constructed languages are the ideal environment to showcase how gender-neutrality in language could be achieved. Although some constructed languages, such as Esperanto, have now become fully fledged languages used in their own communities of practice with their own social rules to follow and thus may no longer be the ideal venue for this type of experimentation, new ones that can be created in the future have no preestablished social norm to which to attend. Could this be the fresh perspective that is needed to elect conlangs as a platform for linguistic inclusiveness and innovation? They represent a blank page where semiotic systems can be dissected, re-created, and reinvented, drawing from previous knowledge but without the burden of prescriptivist models or social norms rooted in patriarchal and binary thinking.

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Gender binaries in constructed languages Scharrón-del Río, M.R. and Aja, A.A. (2020). Latinx: Inclusive language as liberation praxis. Journal of Latinx Psychology 8(1): 7–20. doi: 10.1037/lat0000140. Schreyer, C. (2021). Constructed languages. Annual Review of Anthropology 50(20): 1–20. Sendén, M.G., Renström, E. and Lindqvist, A. (2021). Pronouns beyond the binary: The change of attitudes and use over time. Gender and Society 35(4): 588–615. Stahlberg, D., Braun, F., Irmen, L. and Sczesny, S. (2007). Representation of the sexes in language. In K. Fiedler (ed.) Social Communication. New York: Psychology, pp. 163–187. Stanton, E.C. (1895). The Woman’s Bible. New York: European. Thorne, N., Yip, K.A., Bouman, W.P., Marshall, E. and Arcelus, J. (2019). The terminology of identities between, outside and beyond the gender binary – A systematic review. International Journal of Transgenderism 20(2– 3): 138–154. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1954). The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins. Wales, K. (1996). Personal Pronouns in Present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wennergren, B. (2005). Plena Manlibro de esperanta Gramatiko. Esperanto-Ligo por Norda Ameriko. Wüster, E. (1979). Einführung in die allgemeine Terminologielehre und terminologische Lexikographie. Vienna: Springer. Zamemhof, L.L. (1962). Lingvaj respomdoj. Komsiloj kaj opinioj pri Esperanto [Linguistic replies. Recommendations and opinions on Esperanto]. 6th ed. Marmande: Esperantaj Francaj Eldonoj. Zimman, L. (2016). Pronouns have always been political. Sociallypmotivated change in our pronoun system is nothing new. TransTalk. https://medium​.com​/trans​-talk​/pronouns​-have​-always​-been​-political​-a32c753a1539 (accessed 20 July 2022). Zimman, L. (2017). Transgender language reform: Some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination 1(1): 84–105. doi: 10.1558/jld.33139. Zottola, A. (2020). Inclusive (and not) uses of pronouns and honorifics in the British Press. In B. LewandowskaTomaszczyk, V. Monello and M. Venuti (eds) Language, Heart and Mind. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 303–321.

Further reading Adams, M. (2011). From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, K.J. (1992). Places where a woman could talk: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Feminist Utopia. Women Language 15(1): 7–10. Ball, D. (2016). Constructed languages. In R. Jones (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity. New York: Routledge, pp. 143–157. Coon, J. (2021). The linguistics of Arrival: Heptapods, field linguistics, and universal grammar. In J. Punske, A. Fountain and N. Sanders (eds) Language Invention for Linguistics Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tonkin, H. (2015). Language planning and planned languages: How can planned languages inform language planning? Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13(2): 193–199.

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31 NON-BINARY SINGULAR THEY Lex Konnelly, Kirby Conrod, and Evan D. Bradley

1. Introduction Singular they can be used as an epicene, generic pronoun, as in (1), or as a gender-neutral pronoun with a specific antecedent, as in (2). The history of the generic use of singular they represented in (1) is well documented in previous literature (Bodine 1975, Balhorn 2004). In this use, the referent is abstract or otherwise non-specific, and it does not represent one specific individual. Specific singular they, as in (2), is an emergent use that is documented only in more recent literature (Bjorkman 2017, Conrod 2019, Konnelly and Cowper 2020). In this context, singular they is used to refer to a definite noun phrase, one that refers to a specific individual (such as a proper name). (1) [Every author]i knows theyi should get an early start in the morning. (2) Jani received lots of houseplants for theiri birthday. This chapter focuses on the definite use of singular they (2), specifically as it is used to refer to nonbinary individuals – that is, individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine and does not fit into a binary system of gender. Non-binary uses of singular they are not the only specific uses of the pronoun; for instance, singular they can also be used to obfuscate the gender of a referent if it is unknown or irrelevant to the discourse context (for further discussion, see Conrod 2019), or to ‘de-gender’ an individual as a form of misgendering (e.g., referring to transgender people who use he or she as their pronoun of reference with they instead, perhaps as a means to avoid including them in a given gender category). In principle, there are a variety of interpretations available for (2) above: Jan is non-binary and uses singular they as their personal pronoun; Jan may or may not be non-binary, but the individual describing them does not know their gender or does not want to disclose it to the audience; or, unkind but also possible is that Jan is a transgender woman who is being misgendered by the person describing her. Determining which reading is the correct one is highly dependent on discourse context. In short, while not all specific uses of singular they are necessarily non-binary, all non-binary uses are specific, and our focus in this chapter will be on these non-binary uses in particular. Though they is the particular pronoun we discuss in relationship to non-binary identities in this chapter, we would like to note that all pronouns are resources used by all language users to do gender (West and Zimmerman 1987, Butler 1993, 1997) in some way, and singular they is not the only

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pronoun that can be used to refer appropriately to non-binary people: some non-binary people use different pronouns, either alone or in combination with each other, and that does not make those pronouns any less non-binary for those people. We also differentiate between non-binary they and neopronouns, which are neologous pronouns also used to indicate non-binary or other non-normative gender identities (Miltersen 2016, Hekanaho 2020). Put simply, we take the position that non-binary pronouns are those that are used by non-binary people. In Section 2, we open with a critical summary of some central aspects of the sociocultural linguistic context for non-binary singular they as it relates to the study of language and gender diversity, with specific attention to how it differs from generic, epicene (i.e., indeterminate gender) uses. In Section 3, we review the current literature on analyses of non-binary singular they in (morpho)syntax, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Lastly, in Section 4 we present some opportunities for future directions in research on non-binary singular they, followed by some suggestions for further reading.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics 2.1  What is non-binary they? To discuss non-binary singular they in detail, we first need to differentiate more finely between the many uses of singular they. We will refer to three different uses of singular they in this chapter (although note that these definitions include all inflected forms of the pronoun (them, their, themselves, themself, theirs): 1.

Epicene singular they, also sometimes referred to as generic singular they (esT): Uses of singular they that are co-indexed with (i.e., refer to) generic or indefinite antecedents. {Anyone/the ideal author/each student} can write their own novel. 2. Definite specific they (dsT): Uses of singular they that are co-indexed with definite, specific referents. {My professor/that author/Dr. Ahn} has written their own textbook. 3. Non-binary they (nbT): Uses of singular they that are used specifically to refer to a non-binary person. {My professor/Dr. Chen} has written their own monograph. Epicene they (esT) includes any use of singular they that is co-indexed with a generic or indefinite Noun Phrase (NP). Indefinite NPs include words like anyone, someone, and nouns accompanied by a quantifier such as each student. Generic NPs may be definite, but nevertheless refer to generic types of people, like the ideal student or the average person; generic NPs like this in English have a meaning different from definite NPs that refer to some particular person (for more on using pronouns for generic kinds in this way, see Zobel 2015). Since they refer to generic groups described by the noun phrase, this may also include uses of they for semantically gendered NPs like each woman. Epicene they is often used with the express intention of avoiding linguistic sexism, such as that encoded in generic he (Bodine 1975, LaScotte 2016), and it is widely considered to be the preferred epicene pronoun across varieties of English (Siemund 2013). Definite uses of singular they are co-indexed with definite noun phrases, such as the student or my friend; specific definite uses are anteceded by NPs like proper names or noun phrases, such as that student over there (differentiating between specific definite and non-specific definite antecedents is highly dependent on discourse context; we discuss other discourse sensitivity below). Note that the referents in dsT and nbT overlap, and that some instances of definite specific they are also instances of non-binary they. Recall that while not all definite specific uses of they are necessarily non-binary uses of they, the reverse is true: this is because non-binary they constitutes a subset of definite, specific 451

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they. The main difference between nbT and dsT is a matter of discourse context, which supports an interpretation of an instance of dsT that indicates that the referent is indeed non-binary.

2.2  Grammatical gender vs. biopsychosocial gender Any discussion of gender in linguistic features is incomplete without careful consideration of gender in its sociocultural context. The relationship between gender in language and gender in society is complex, and, in order to be linguistically accurate, it is necessary to also be accurate to the lived realities of gender and gender diversity. Linguistic analysis of gender in pronouns therefore also requires careful distinction between the way we feel, perceive, and talk about gender. To unpack some of the complexity of these different aspects, Ackerman (2019) proposes three components of gender that interact in a linguistic context: grammatical gender, biosocial gender, and conceptual gender. Grammatical gender is a formal linguistic feature that may be marked to a greater or lesser degree (or not at all) in various languages: languages like Spanish and French, for example, mark all nouns for whether they are ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine,’ while languages like Mandarin and Finnish do not. Grammatical gender is also sometimes referred to by linguists as noun class; many Bantu languages, for example, have 8–12 noun classes that show morphological marking on the nouns, only some of which resemble anything like ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’ Grammatical gender can be broadly understood as a system of categorization that is arranged variably cross-linguistically, and it should not be confused or conflated with biosocial, ‘semantic,’ or what some linguists have deemed ‘natural’ gender (e.g., referring to some aspect of the referent’s biological sex, though this is increasingly considered to be outdated and essentialist terminology). Biosocial gender is composed of the culturally variable physical, mental, and social traits that together form an individual’s gender identity and their expression of it. Although the various traits making up this nuanced nexus of gender experience and performance can vary independently in time and place, in many cultures these traits are grouped into two clusters, which are labeled feminine and masculine. It should be noted, however, that there is significant variation within (and overlap between) the masculine and feminine groupings, as well as individuals who do not belong to either. While biosocial gender is composed of both externally observable characteristics and mental states, Ackerman proposes a final component, conceptual gender, which refers to the purely mental categories that individuals use to classify others on the basis of biosocial characteristics and other factors. Just as the array of characteristics contributing to an individual’s biosocial gender is idiosyncratic, so too is conceptual gender – two individuals need not have the same mental concepts of gender(s). And while biosocial gender is a multi-dimensional spectrum, conceptual gender may or may not be: some individuals may have only two categories (i.e., they may hold a binary conceptualization of gender), while others may use more complex concepts. Ackerman argues that in English, which has only limited elements of grammatical marking (such as on pronouns), individuals evaluate the gender ‘match’ between noun phrases and pronouns based on their notion of conceptual gender rather than grammatical gender: in the absence of more extensive grammatical marking that sorts nouns into classificatory categories labeled masculine or feminine, English users rely on their understandings of gender appropriateness. Conversely, in languages with more extensive grammatical elements, such as French or Spanish, this ‘match’ is more likely to be based on language users’ linguistic categories of grammatical gender.

2.3  Prescriptivism against singular they Prescriptive norms of English have often avoided gender-neutrality in favor of gendered forms, such as generic he, in order to maintain the status of they as a plural pronoun (Curzan 2003). Despite claims by such sources that he functions as essentially gender-neutral when used generically, it remains 452

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subject to a male interpretive bias (Moulton 1978), and has long been the target of feminist language reform efforts (Bodine 1975). Alternatives such as he or she are an improvement in this regard, but still subject to a similar bias: they exclude intended referents, specifically non-binary individuals; this is likely to be a contributing factor to an increasing preference for singular they, especially in speech (Pauwels 2001). Although objections to singular they are often couched in grammatical terms, recent psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research suggests that this may be related more to individual differences in conceptual gender rather than grammatical gender (Bradley et al. 2019, Bradley 2020, Hekanaho 2020, Hernandez 2020), such that the grammaticality of epicene and non-binary forms of singular they seems to hinge more on definiteness, and to a lesser degree gender, than on plurality (Bjorkman 2017, Konelly and Cowper 2020). Further, resistance to this change is often predicated on social attitudes towards transgender people, rather than solely grammatical prescriptivism (Hernandez, Shukla and Bischoff 2018). Style guides play a dual role in validating or inhibiting the ongoing language change wherein more English speakers are adopting the innovative (definite, specific) form of singular they. First, they reflect that an innovation has reached mainstream use and serves an important communicative purpose, and, second, they can accelerate (if not cement) that change by making more language users aware of it. The 2020 style guide of the American Psychological Association explicitly endorsed singular they for the first time, both for identified individuals and as a generic singular pronoun (American Psychological Association 2020). The Associated Press introduced some guidelines for singular they even earlier, in 2017 (Acoca 2017). Such styles can exert influence even outside of their scope because they guide usage conventions in widely consumed media: for example, this has been argued to be the case for acceleration in acceptance of the Swedish non-binary pronoun hen, which has been partially attributed to its adoption in media and resulting familiarity by the public (Sendén et al. 2015). Still, many language commentators (as well as some linguists) use singular they in epicene or generic contexts while still distinguishing it from non-binary they (as well as advocating in favor of the former but not the latter). The issue of the inclusion of non-binary they in ‘standard’ Englishes remains controversial (Zuber and Reed 1993), even within the discipline of linguistics, leading the Linguistic Society of America (2021) to issue a ‘Statement against Linguistic Misgendering.’ Due to their increasingly visible relationship with non-binary, transgender, and gender-diverse communities, the greater prominence of third-person singular pronouns in public discourse may mean that any language user’s choice (whether implicit or explicit) about whether to expand or maintain their use of singular they can be viewed as a personal and political statement about the linguistic encoding of gender (Zimman 2016; Bradley 2023) and their willingness to cause harm to others via misgendering.

2.4  The social stakes of pronouns and misgendering Misgendering is the practice of misattributing gender to a person, either linguistically or otherwise. Linguistic misgendering refers to using the incorrect gendered terms to refer to someone; this includes names (especially deadnames), labels, or titles (e.g., Miss, chairman), pronouns, or gendered morphology (e.g., actor vs. actress). Social psychological research has shown that misgendering causes significant adverse effects (Freeman and Stewart 2018, Atteberry-Ash et al. 2019), including effects on mental health (McLemore 2015, 2018). For people who use singular they as their pronoun of reference, the use of any other pronoun constitutes misgendering, with all the same risks of harm. See Gupta (this volume) for an in-depth discussion of the politics of misgendering. Singular they can be useful, in its epicene sense, to avoid identifying an individual’s gender in cases where it is irrelevant or undesirable to disclose. However, it should be noted that the use of singular they to refer to someone who does not use it as their pronoun of reference can also be a 453

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form of misgendering. This degendering function of singular they is often experienced by binary transgender people, and it is disproportionately experienced by trans women. In a pragmatic analysis, Conrod (2022) attributes this to a confluence of conversational implicatures: since they is ungendered, it is a less informative description of a referent (following Grice’s Maxim of Quantity), and its use can trigger an implicature that suggests that other, more informative pronouns (she or he, etc.) would not be appropriate. For transgender men and women who have had to advocate at great lengths to have their use of he or she recognized, use of they can be interpreted as a refusal to gender them appropriately. Linguistic misgendering is not only a topic of scientific inquiry, but also a matter of linguistic justice. Linguists are in a uniquely advantageous position to advocate for gender-affirming language practices, and their public support of affirming grammatical changes can be highly influential. For further reading on the role of linguists in commentary about misgendering, see the Linguistic Society of America’s (2021) ‘Statement against Linguistic Misgendering’ and Conrod (2022).

3.  Current contributions and research Non-binary they is newer than the more widely documented epicene singular they, with attestations from the mid-20th century onward (Baron 2021, Merriam Webster, n.d.), although the scarcity of written records suggests it may have been in use much earlier (particularly among queer communities). Non-binary they has been growing in usage in recent decades, driven by greater use of non-binary singular they by younger adults compared to older adults (Conrod 2019), a fact that is reflected by its adoption in mainstream style guides (e.g., Associated Press and American Psychological Association). There have been recent analyses of the morphosyntactic features of singular they focusing in particular on non-binary they; the sources we review here all separate the non-binary they from epicene they, at least in part on the basis of antecedent. The first account of the morphosyntactic features of non-binary they is given by Bjorkman (2017), in which she proposes a point of sociosyntactic variation on the basis of gender features of lexical items. Bjorkman proposes that, for innovative users of English, gender features are not required to be present on pronouns (such as they) and some NP antecedents; the types of antecedents she identifies in (3–5) below are demarcated with a %, indicating that conservative users report these constructions as ungrammatical but innovative users judge them grammatical. (3) %I just saw Chrisi and I really love theiri costume. (4) %Professor Smithi left theiri sweater here. (5) %moongirl17i said theyi’ll be joining the chat later. Bjorkman’s (2017) analysis delineates only two apparent varieties within English with regard to the grammaticality of singular they (i.e., those conservative users that do not allow singular they for definite antecedents, and those innovative users who allow it for definite antecedents of known gender, so long as that antecedent is not marked for gender, including by name). The following analyses, by Konnelly and Cowper and by Conrod, on the other hand, identify three distinct ways that English users pattern in their reports of acceptability; both of those analyses, therefore, propose a three-way grammatical distinction. Konnelly and Cowper (2020) advocate for the expansion in use of singular they as a grammatical change in progress, one that can be categorized into three distinct stages according to the criteria below: Stage 1 (quantified antecedent or antecedent of unknown gender; corresponds to Bjorkman’s (2017) conservative variety) 454

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[The person at the door]i left before I could see who theyi were. Stage 2 (antecedent of known gender, but ungendered description or name; corresponds to Bjorkman’s innovative variety) [The strongest student]i will present theiri paper next. Stage 3 (antecedent of any gender, no restrictions on description or name; unaccounted for by Bjorkman (2017)) Mariai wants to send theiri students on the field trip. For Konnelly and Cowper (2020), Stage 1 corresponds to Bjorkman’s (2017) Conservative variety in assuming three contrastive features: the gender features [masc] and [fem], as well as the feature [inanim]. In this system, features are considered contrastive if their absence implies their opposite; e.g., the absence of a [fem] feature implies [masc]. Konnelly and Cowper’s Stage 2 corresponds to Bjorkman’s (2017) Innovative variety. However, here, they suggest that there is no change in the status or position of gender features in the pronoun system: all three features (masc, fem, inanim) remain contrastive. What distinguishes these two stages is the way that nouns are specified in the lexicon, and whether gender-nonspecific nouns referring to people are obligatorily assigned a gender feature. In this sense, it is the systematic assignment of referent gender that is optional. The effect is that in a person’s mental lexicon, a subset of nouns (such as mother, father, sister, brother, actress, as well as certain proper names, etc.) lexically bear contrastive gender features; the gender feature is present on the noun in the language user’s lexicon rather than being dynamically assigned based on a given referent. Which lexical items are assigned a given gender feature depends in large part on the individual’s experience with that lexical entry or name (e.g., for those who have only known Kelly to be a name for women, it may carry a contrastive [fem] feature; but for those who have met non-binary people named Kelly, this item may lose that contrastive feature). Due to space constraints we do not recapitulate Konnelly and Cowper’s argument in full, but we note that the gendered meaning of words like mother, are not universal/uniform across English speech communities, or necessarily based on sex assigned at birth or any other static qualities. Uses of the word like drag mother (referring to cis male drag queens in mentoring relationships within the drag community) are a good example of the flexibility of the denotations of these types of words. Ackerman (2019) also discusses the semantic flexibility of words like cowgirl and other similar, apparently semantically gendered words. Conrod (2019) gives a similar account, but rather than basing the source of ungrammaticality (for conservative Stage 1 and Stage 2 speakers) on features of lexical nouns, they instead propose that the underlying root of variation is whether gender features are obligatory on referential (definite, specific) pronouns at all. They propose that for referential singular they (dsT) to be grammatical, a speaker must have an internal grammar that can tolerate unvalued gender features on referential pronouns. The primary difference between Conrod’s account versus Bjorkman’s or Konnelly and Cowper’s is that Conrod specifically argues against the existence of any grammatical gender features on lexical nouns for any speakers of modern English, including conservative speakers who reject dsT.

3.1  Sociolinguistics of non-binary they The three morphosyntactic analyses reviewed above all suggest that there is sociolinguistic variation in the use and acceptability of dsT (and perhaps nbT). In this section, we review several of the major sociolinguistic studies of dsT and nbT. The dependent variable for most of these studies is the overall (population-level) scalar rating of acceptability of dsT; most of these studies were online surveys, 455

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and acceptability ratings were given on Likert scales. We first review the correlations between acceptability of dsT and social demographic variables, and then discuss studies that investigate correlations between ratings of dsT and other social variables, such as ideological belief systems about gender and language. Social demographics of English users have been shown to predict both the use and the ratings of acceptability of dsT (and in some cases nbT). This section will focus primarily on acceptability ratings, as these represent the bulk of quantitative data currently published. Conrod (2019) performed an acceptability judgment study using an online survey with 884 participants; the target stimuli included a NP antecedent and a pronoun. The antecedents included proper names (masculine, feminine, and neutral; (6)), quantified universals (7), and generic definite NPs (8). Each antecedent type was combined with the pronouns he, she, and they. Participants rated sentences on a Likert scale from 1 (‘very unnatural’) to 7 (‘very natural’). The survey included distractor items and a demographics questionnaire which asked age, gender, gender orientation, and sexual orientation. (6) John i is very forgetful. Theyi never remember library due dates. (7) Students are very ambitious. [Every student]i tries to write theiri essay perfectly. (8) [The perfect spouse]i is very thoughtful. Theyi will always try to remember birthdays. Conrod found that, while masculine and feminine names were less acceptable with she and he, respectively, all proper names patterned largely the same with they. Proper names were less acceptable with they overall, while quantified universals and generic definites were largely acceptable with they. Conrod also found that participants’ age impacted how highly they rated sentences with they+proper name, regardless of the (stereotypic) gender of the name used; older participants rated the specific, definite use (which we take as representative of non-binary they) lower (Figure 31.1). Conrod (2019) used this effect of age to support an analysis that non-binary they is undergoing a change, based on the Apparent Time Hypothesis (Weinreich et al. 1968), which uses age as a proxy to

Figure 31.1  Effect of age on acceptability rating of singular they by antecedent type (Conrod 2019: 111)

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measure language changes over time; that is, the fact that younger participants gave more favorable ratings to uses of non-binary they than older participants can be interpreted as a change in the pronouns’ use (and its evaluation) between the time that the oldest speakers were the age of the youngest speakers, and the present day. The proposal that non-binary they is undergoing a change over time, while epicene singular they is stable, is in line with the difference in findings of psycholinguistics studies performed at different times, as we discuss in more detail below. The difference in age found by Conrod (2019) has also since been replicated by Conrod, Ahn, and Schultz (2021). It is worth noting that earlier studies (particularly pre-2000) do not directly investigate nbT, and instead focus primarily on esT. This is because, as best we can surmise, the researchers simply did not consider nbT to be an extant form of English; indeed, in a footnote, Curzan (2003: 81–82, fn. 9) dismisses the notion of nbT as ungrammatical out of hand. Thus, while nbT may have been extant in some queer communities before the early 2000s, it was not given any significant attention by linguistics researchers. In the same study, Conrod (2019) found an effect of gender on ratings of acceptability of nonbinary they: men and women rated they+proper name comparably, but non-binary participants rated they+proper name higher than other genders. Additionally, participants who identified themselves as trans, regardless of gender (i.e., including trans men, women, and non-binary people) rated they+proper name higher than cis participants. Figure 31.2 shows that non-binary people did not show an effect of age on ratings of singular they (with all antecedents); while men and women did. This effect was replicated by Conrod, Ahn, and Schultz (2021) in an online acceptability judgment survey with more participants (n=1,127): non-binary participants rated they with proper name antecedent higher than men or women did, regardless of antecedent. Similarly, Block (2019) found no differences in reading times for cisgender or non-binary participants processing non-binary singular they when it refers to indefinite antecedents with and without a gender bias (such as secretary vs. intern, where the former is often assumed to be stereotypically feminine, while the second is unlikely to have such connotations) with low- or high gender-expectancy or to proper names (such as James

Figure 31.2  Effect of age on acceptability rating of singular they by participant gender (Conrod 2019)

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vs. Kimberley). However, cisgender participants rated sentences where they refers to a proper name as less natural than other sentences. While most sociolinguistic studies have relied primarily on acceptability ratings or other measurements of perception or processing, Sheydaei (2021) performed an elicitation study in which participants were asked to write about a referent of unknown gender (a potential roommate in a fictional housing ad), before later asking participants to directly rate pronouns (singular they, as well as other neopronouns) for appropriateness in the discourse context. Sheydaei found that participants used singular they as well as he, she, and pronoun avoidance strategies, such as using the referent’s name, generic nouns, or avoiding reference altogether; additionally, the participants’ gender affected what pronouns they used about the referent. Besides identity variables such as age and gender, several social variables related to language and gender ideology also correlate with the use and acceptance of non-binary they; these include prescriptivist language ideology, gender binarist and transphobic attitudes, and also the degree of familiarity or experience users have with transgender and non-binary people. Adherence to prescriptivist linguistic norms exerts an effect on language users’ judgments about non-binary they, but this is not always independent of other social characteristics and attitudes. Bradley (2020) found that endorsement of general linguistic prescriptivism predicted lower ratings for non-binary they (more so than for epicene they), but that attitudes about gender also independently predicted lower acceptability of nonbinary they. Hernandez (2020) showed that sexual orientation and gender (trans or cis) moderated the relationship between prescriptive grammar ideology and attitudes toward they such that non-queer participants showed less effect of linguistic prescriptivism on their judgments. Building on Hernandez’s findings, Conrod, Ahn, and Schultz (2021) used an adjusted version of Hernandez’s (2020) prescriptivism scale to give participants a prescriptivism score; participants whose prescriptivism score was higher generally rated themself as less acceptable than themselves regardless of the antecedent; additionally, those participants who expressed more prescriptivist attitudes rated themself and themselves as more acceptable with quantified and indefinite antecedents, and less acceptable with definite and specific antecedents, including proper names. Taken together, the results of Hernandez (2020) and Conrod, Ahn, and Shultz (2021) suggest that prescriptivist language ideology is a factor in whether individuals participate in a language change (and the language change around non-binary they in particular). Using the Gender Role Attitudes Scale (García-Cueto et al. 2015), Bradley, Schmid, and Lombardo (2019) found that participants who endorsed more ‘traditional’ (i.e., binary and essentialist) notions of gender rated sentences containing non-binary singular they as less grammatically acceptable on a five-point Likert scale than those containing epicene they, while participants who endorsed more ‘transcendental’ notions of gender (i.e., egalitarian) considered them equally acceptable. Bradley (2020) used the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick and Fiske 1996) to examine similar acceptability judgments, finding that Benevolent Sexism (attitudes that are positive in tone but which emphasize stereotypical traits and restricted roles of women; e.g., “Women should be cherished and protected by men”) was associated with lower acceptability of non-binary they. Similarly, Hekanaho (2020) found that may users of generic singular they objected to non-binary they, sometimes on the basis that it was ungrammatical or unfamiliar (which Hekanaho suspects may be masking other prejudices), but also because they viewed gender as a binary, and thus he and she should be sufficient for any particular individual. In addition to ideologies about prescriptivist language, the use and acceptability of non-binary they varies by individuals’ attitudes toward transgender and non-binary people and ideologies regarding gender identities; several recent studies have probed this relationship, focusing particularly on correlations between transphobia and lowered acceptability of singular they in both epicene and non-binary contexts. Hernandez, Shukla, and Bischoff (2018) administered two attitudinal surveys to participants, collected from a combination of electronic mailing lists and Amazon’s Mechanical 458

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Turk platform (n=722): one assessing prescriptive attitudes and the other assessing attitudes toward transgender people. In the results of grammaticality judgments for singular they in both generic and non-binary contexts, survey responses were highly predictive of they judgments: negative attitudes toward non-binary singular they were best predicted by prejudice against transgender people, while negative attitudes to generic singular they were similarly predicted both by survey indications of antitransgender bias and by prescriptive grammar ideology (recall the earlier discussion of Conrod, Ahn, and Schultz’s (2021) attitudinal survey, finding that participants who endorsed more gender binarist beliefs also rated non-binary they lower). One final variable that has been observed to correlate with ratings of non-binary they has been a given language user’s level of familiarity – both with trans and with non-binary people, and with gender-neutral pronouns more generally (though experience with these seems to be closely intertwined as well). Ackerman et al. (2018) showed in an acceptability rating study that participants rated non-binary they higher when the participants had greater experience with non-binary people (e.g., having more than one or two non-binary friends). Block (2019) observed that cisgender participants who do not have experience with gender-neutral pronouns rated sentences with non-binary they lower than cisgender participants who did have direct experience. Bradley et al. (2019) found that English users were equally likely to select a photo of a subject with feminine, masculine, or ambiguous gender expression when prompted by sentences containing singular they, regardless of whether or not they personally knew someone who used that pronoun; when prompted with the neopronoun ze, participants who had personal experience with neopronouns also selected all photo types equally, while those who did not have such experience tended to select masculine photos, suggesting that they interpreted ze as a typo for he. Familiarity with someone who used a neopronoun affected the interpretation of said pronoun (via photo selection), but the same was not true of singular they, which was interpreted as gender-neutral regardless of experience. These effects of identity, experience, and exposure suggest a vector for linguistic change that is not just generational, but personal, as English users change the way they use and interpret pronouns over the lifespan. Whether this is due to exposure, motivation, or other factors warrants further research.

3.2  Psycholinguistic approaches to non-binary they The morphosyntactic analyses reviewed above rely on two types of data: Bjorkman’s (2017) paper uses introspective grammaticality judgments by the author, and Konnelly and Cowper’s (2020) paper is informed by the authors’ grammaticality judgments as well as a small sample of informants. Conrod’s (2019) analysis is informed as well by sociolinguistic data. However, the acceptability of different types of singular they have also been analyzed from psycholinguistic perspectives. In this section, we review some of the major findings on dsT and nbT (leaving aside the many, many studies on esT*; see Stormbom this volume). These studies use a variety of psycholinguistic methodologies to investigate two core questions: first, whether English speakers generally find dsT and/or nbT to be acceptable, and, second, whether dsT/nbT introduce difficulties in processing. The methodologies covered in this section will include acceptability rating surveys, timed reading and Maze tasks, eyetracking, and EEG studies. Consistent with an ongoing change, recent processing studies, such as Moulton et al. (2020), found an inverse relationship between age and the acceptability of non-binary they, with younger participants finding it more acceptable. The authors conducted two experiments that manipulated whether the gender of the referent is known by all fictional discourse participants in the example, and whether there is a nominal antecedent for singular they (e.g., I think the server put their hair in my potatoes vs. I think they put their hair in my potatoes). Both experiments (n=40 L1 English speakers for the former, and n=64 L1 English speakers for the latter) used a 6-point Likert scale and were administered on the Ibex platform, with all participants recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical 459

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Turk. A particular innovation observed by Moulton et al. is that non-binary they can also be used with a referent whose (binary) gender is known to the interlocutors in contexts where that gender is irrelevant, suggesting that for younger English users, gender marking may be optional in some contexts. The authors also note that these findings do, at least partially, bear out the conclusions of morphosyntactic and socio-syntactic analyses such as those by Bjorkman (2017), Conrod (2019), and Konnely and Cowper (2020) regarding innovative users of non-binary singular they. Further confirming the ongoing change are the findings by Camilliere et al. (2021), who also performed an acceptability judgment study on they with eight types of antecedents: plural NP, quantified NP, non-gendered singular NP, gendered singular NP, definite NP known to the speaker (my friend), family member (my sister), non-gendered proper name, gendered proper name, and inanimate singular NP (as ungrammatical control condition: the cup). They found that singular inanimate and singularly gendered NPs were rated lowest with they, and quantified NPs and non-gendered definite NPs (the dentist) were rated highest. Camilliere et al. also performed a k-cluster analysis, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that sorted participants (n=148) into groups where the group members’ means are most similar to each other. The results of the k-cluster analysis showed that English users generally grouped into three types – essentially the types predicted by Konnelly and Cowper (2020). Camilliere et al. found that gender marking of antecedents, specificity, and social distance from the language user (i.e., referents whom the speaker did or did not know) had reliable effects on acceptability, which also align with predictions made by Bjorkman (2017), Konnelly and Cowper (2020), and Conrod (2019). Finally, Camilliere et al. (2021) examined participants’ self-reported familiarity with – and attitudes toward – non-binary genders using the Trans Prejudice Scale (Davidson 2014) and Gender Essentialism Scale (Smiler and Gelman 2008), questionnaires that measure the extent to which individuals conceptualize gender and gender roles as dichotomous, unchanging, and biologically based (i.e., sex essentialism), as well as the extent to which individuals feel comfortable sharing physical and social space with transgender individuals. The authors found that participants who were more accepting of, or had more experience with, nonbinary people accepted singular they in more situations. This aligns with earlier findings found by Ackerman, Riches, and Wallenberg (2018), who observed that English users differed in how they compute coreference between pronouns and antecedents depending on how often they interact with transgender or non-binary people in everyday life. Arnold, Mayo, and Dong (2021) examined how language users negotiate the ambiguity between plural and singular interpretations of they by using short stories involving characters who are assigned different pronouns, followed by questions about the content of the stories. The choice of participants to interpret a sentence in the story containing they as referring either to one or several referents was affected by contextual information, including whether there were one or more salient potential referents (e.g., Alex, whose pronouns are they/them, or Will and Liz, whose pronouns are he/him and she/her, respectively), and which potential referent was mentioned first (e.g., Alex, whose pronouns are they/them, or another character with different pronouns). In addition, explicit mention of a potential referent’s they pronouns increased the frequency of singular interpretation, suggesting that pronoun discourse and the trend of sharing pronouns plays a role in the growth of non-binary they, and that some language users may not yet consider the non-binary interpretation in all contexts without prompting. Some very recent work using event-related potentials (ERP) from EEG experimental methodologies, which index involuntary neural responses to surprising or unexpected linguistic stimuli, parallel behavioral findings. Chen et al. (2021) found a P600 effect for gender/number mismatches between antecedents and pronouns; they elicited a P600 effect with singular named antecedents, as well as an effect of frontal negativity (Nref) that is associated in ERP studies with a search for a possible referent; this was comparable with the P600 and Nref findings for name/ gender mismatches (e.g., Charlesi forgot heri homework.). Notably, Chen et al. found that offline 460

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(untimed) Likert scale acceptability judgments (n=78 undergraduate participants) of singular they did not necessarily line up with ERP results; they found that participants who rated non-binary they as acceptable and participants who rated non-binary they as unacceptable both showed similar P600 effects, suggesting that some of these users may report non-binary they as acceptable despite experiencing some processing difficulties. This affirms that acceptability judgments and unconscious processing measures should not be conflated, and that self-reported data may not always accurately reflect either performance or real-time language processing in the brain. They also found an effect of age: older participants displayed less processing difficulty with non-binary they. However, this effect of age cannot be generalized beyond this study, because the study population is undergraduates at a liberal arts college, so ‘older’ participants in this case mean comparing 21-year-olds to 19-year-olds. The authors surmise that the college environment may facilitate more experience with non-binary identities and pronouns over the course of attendance. Chen et al. conclude that while some English users may still experience processing difficulty with non-binary they (even if they rate uses of non-binary they as acceptable), this processing difficulty may be reduced as individuals gain further experience with this use of the pronoun. In another contemporary ERP study of non-binary they, Prasad and Morris (2020) investigate the effects of themselves when coindexed with specific named antecedents as compared to indefinite antecedents. Prasad and Morris find, similar to Chen et al. (2021), that a P600 effect is observed for non-binary they – that is, themselves with a singular named antecedent – but this effect is not present when singular they is used with indefinite antecedents (epicene they, rather than nonbinary they). However, Prasad and Morris only tested ‘unambiguously gendered’ proper names (they used the 50 most common names for men and women in the United States as their source material) and did not include gender-ambiguous or gender-neutral names. Thus, the P600 effect reported by Prasad and Morris could arguably be an effect of gender features rather than specificity of the antecedent. The authors also used plural themselves (rather than themself) in the stimuli. Among English users who accept non-binary singular they, themself is the preferred reflexive form in some contexts (Bradley and Schmid 2019, Stern 2019, Davenport 2020). Conrod et al. (2021) performed an online acceptability judgment survey (n=1,127, recruited via Twitter and Prolific, and conducted in Qualtrics) in which themself and themselves appeared with seven different types of singular antecedents, which varied by specificity. In Likert-scale ratings of acceptability (1 ‘very unnatural’ to 5 ‘very natural’), the participants rated themself as more acceptable than themselves with singular antecedents overall; themself was most strongly preferred when it appeared with more definite, specific antecedents (like definite, specific NPs and proper names), and themselves was rated higher with less definite, specific antecedents (like quantified universals and generic definite NPs).

4.  Future directions Because non-binary they, as distinct from the gender-neutral epicene, is a relatively new form in the grammar of English, we can provide only a snapshot of a rapidly growing research field; while we hope that this chapter serves as an entry point into this research, we cannot claim that the coverage is exhaustive. Moreover, a number of open avenues for research on non-binary singular they remain. First, little is known about how singular they is learned or acquired by either adults or children, and how language users orient to it as a feature that may undergo change throughout the lifespan. We hope that some child-focused studies will be undertaken, including longitudinal studies, using a variety of methods (e.g., corpus, elicitation, truth-value judgment). Longitudinal panel and population studies (of the type carried out by Sankoff and Blondeau (2007)) would provide significant insight not only into how grammatical change spreads through a population and interacts with individual lifespan change, but also how grammatical change and lifespan change might behave in unique ways when 461

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acting on a sociolinguistic variable about which language users have a high level of metalinguistic awareness. Early childhood acquisition studies focusing on non-binary they may also provide insight into how children acquire grammatical forms that are tightly linked to social meaning (and may be comparable to parallels cross-linguistically in acquisition of honorific morphosyntax or pronouns). Neurophysiological research on non-binary they is still very preliminary; currently, the few studies that exist are compatible with the theoretical morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic analyses, which we discussed above. The difference in findings between early studies focusing primarily on esT (such as Gastil 1990, Foertsch, and Gernsbacher 1997) and later studies that included dsT and nbT (Moulton et al. 2020, Conrod et al. 2021) is in line with the interpretation of non-binary they as undergoing a change that is still in progress. Further work using ERP/EEG should not only continue these lines of inquiry, but also investigate how the processing of nonbinary language changes over time. More research is also needed on non-binary singular they from an applied linguistics perspective, particularly from both a pedagogical (i.e., how to teach non-binary singular they, both in language classrooms and more generally; cf. LaScotte 2021) and a usage-based perspective (i.e., how to teach language users to use pronouns accurately and with attention to social context). Building on the work of Ackerman et al. (2018), much is still unknown about the effects of exposure to non-binary and gender-diverse people on the way individuals conceptualize such identities, and its corresponding consequences for fluency in the use of non-binary singular they. Similarly, we do not yet understand how language users’ subscriptions to transphobic or prescriptive ideologies may modulate their participation in the change in progress toward greater use of non-binary singular they in wider linguistic (written and spoken) and social contexts. Because of the connection between misgendering and harm (see McLemore 2015, 2018), we also expect that research on non-binary they will continue to build on existing explorations of how writers, scholars of language and culture, as well as psychologists, policymakers, and others who serve the public might apply research findings in order to reduce the rate of misgendering faced by trans and non-binary people. This will likely necessitate an interdisciplinary-applied approach and should incorporate the insights reported here on exposure to and experience of non-binary people and non-binary pronouns, as well as ethical beliefs (including gender and language-related ideologies). Besides research in applied linguistics, we hope that linguistic professional organizations, educational institutions, and other loci of linguistic power will take the initiative to promote the use of pronouns and gendered language in a way that protects and affirms transgender and non-binary people, especially young people, and any others impacted by linguistic hegemony.

References Ackerman, L. (2019). Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): 1–27. Ackerman, L., Riches, N. and Wallenberg, J. (2018, January). Coreference dependency formation is modulated by experience with variation of human gender. In 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Salt Lake City, UT. Acoca, S. (2017). The Associated Press Stylebook 2017 and Briefing on Media Law. Associated Press. American Psychological Association. (2020). APA Style. Available at: https://apastyle​.apa​.org/ (accessed 31/07/23). Arnold, J.E., Mayo, H.C. and Dong, L. (2021). My pronouns are they/them: Talking about pronouns changes how pronouns are understood. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review: 1–10. Atteberry-Ash, B., Speer, S.R., Kattari, S.K. and Kinney, M.K. (2019). Does it get better? LGBTQ social work students and experiences with harmful discourse. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services 31(2): 223–241. Balhorn, M. (2004). The rise of epicene they. Journal of English Linguistics 32(2): 79–104. Baron, D. (2021). What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. Liveright.

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Non-binary singular they Block, T. (2019). Interspeaker Variation in the Syntactic Processing of Referential Singular They. Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University. Bodine, A. (1975). Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: Singular ‘they’, sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’. Language in Society 4(2): 129–146. Bradley, E.D. (2020). The influence of linguistic and social attitudes on grammaticality judgments of singular ‘they’. Language Sciences 78: 101272. Bradley, E.D. and Schmid, M.H. (2019). Me, myself, and them. They, Hirself, Em, and You: Nonbinary Pronouns in Theory and Practice. ON: Kingston. Bradley, E.D., Schmid, M. and Lombardo, H. (2019). Personality, prescriptivism, and pronouns: Factors influencing grammaticality judgments of gender-neutral language. English Today 35(4): 41–52. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2011). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge. Butler, J. (2021). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. Camilliere, S., Izes, A., Leventhal, O. and Grodner, D. (2021). They is changing: Pragmatic and grammatical factors that license singular they. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43(43). Chen, P., Leventhal, O., Camilliere, S., Izes, A. and Grodner, D. (2021). Singular they in transition: ERP evidence and individual differences. In 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Conrod, K. (2019). Pronouns Raising and Emerging. Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington. Conrod, K. (2022). Variation in English gendered pronouns: Analysis and recommendations for ethics in linguistics. Journal of Language and Sexuality 11(2): 141–164. Conrod, K., Ahn, B. and Schultz, R. (2021). ‘How many selves for them?’ In Proceedings of North Eastern Linguistic Society Meeting, Rutgers University. https://osf​.io​/2s8hm/. Curzan, A. (2003). Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge University Press. Davenport, C. (2020). The Use of Themself to Refer to a Singular Antecedent. Undergraduate thesis, College of William and Mary. Davidson, M. (2014). Development and validation of the transgender prejudice scale. WWU Graduate School Collection: 384. Foertsch, J. and Gernsbacher, M.A. (1997). In search of gender neutrality: Is singular they a cognitively efficient substitute for generic he? Psychological Science 8(2): 106–111. Freeman, L. and Stewart, H. (2018). Microaggressions in clinical medicine. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28(4): 411–449. García-Cueto, E., Rodríguez-Díaz, F.J., Bringas-Molleda, C., López-Cepero, J., Paíno-Quesada, S. and Rodríguez-Franco, L. (2015). Development of the gender role attitudes scale (GRAS) amongst young Spanish people. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology 15(1): 61–68. Gastil, J. (1990). Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of masculine generics. Sex Roles 23(11): 629–643. Glick, P. and Fiske, S.T. (1996). The ambivalent sexism inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3): 491. Hekanaho, L. (2020). Generic and Nonbinary Pronouns: Usage, Acceptability and Attitudes. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Helsinki. Hernandez, E. (2020). Pronouns, Prescriptivism, and Prejudice: Attitudes toward the Singular 'They', Prescriptive Grammar, and Nonbinary Transgender People. Master’s thesis, Purdue University. Hernandez, E., Shukla, A. and Bischoff, S. (2018). ‘They’ as a window into ideology: Prescriptivism, gender neutrality, and LGBTQ+ people. In Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference 25, Providence, RI. Konnelly, L. and Cowper, E. (2020). Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1). LaScotte, D.K. (2016). Singular they: An empirical study of generic pronoun use. American Speech 91(1): 62–80. LaScotte, D.K. (2021). Nonnative English learners’ use and understanding of singular they. Language Awareness 30(1): 84–94. Linguistic Society of America. (2021). Statement against linguistic misgendering. https://www​.linguisticsociety​ .org​/content​/lsa​-statement​-against​-linguistic​-misgendering. McLemore, K.A. (2015). Experiences with misgendering: Identity misclassification of transgender spectrum individuals. Self and Identity 14(1): 51–74. McLemore, K.A. (2018). A minority stress perspective on transgender individuals’ experiences with misgendering. Stigma and Health 3(1): 53. Merriam Webster. (no date). Though singular 'they' is old, 'they' as a nonbinary pronoun is new—and useful. https://www​.merriam​-webster​.com​/words​-at​-play​/singular​-nonbinary​-they.

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Lex Konnelly, Kirby Conrod, and Evan D. Bradley Miltersen, E.H. (2016). Nounself pronouns: Third person personal pronouns as identity expression. Journal of Language Works-Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift 1(1): 37–62. Moulton, J., Robinson, G.M. and Elias, C. (1978). Sex bias in language use:’ Neutral’ pronouns that aren't. American Psychologist 33(11): 1032. Moulton, K., Han, C.H., Block, T., Gendron, H. and Nederveen, S. (2020). Singular they in context. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1): 122. Pauwels, A. (2001). Non-sexist language reform and generic pronouns in Australian English. English WorldWide 22(1): 105–119. Prasad, G. and Morris, J. (2020). The P600 for singular “they”: How the brain reacts when John decides to treat themselves to sushi. PsyArXiv. Sankoff, G. and Blondeau, H. (2007). Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French. Language: 83: 560–588. Sendén, M.G., Bäck, E.A., and Lindqvist, A. (2015). Introducing a gender-neutral pronoun in anatural gender language: the influence of time on attitudes and behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 6: [online first]. Siemund, P. (2013). Pronominal Gender in English. London: Routledge. Sheydaei, I. (2021). Gender identity and nonbinary pronoun use: Exploring reference strategies for referents of unknown gender. Gender and Language 15(3): 369–393. Smiler, A.P. and Gelman, S.A. (2008). Determinants of gender essentialism in college students. Sex Roles 58(11): 864–874. Stern, N. (2019). Ourself and themself: Grammar as expressive choice. Lingua 226: 35–52. Weinreich, U., Labov, W. and Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change (Vol. 58). Austin: University of Texas Press. West, C., and Zimmerman, D. (1987). Doing gender. Gender and Society 1(2): 125–151. Wiltschko, M. (2008). The syntax of non-inflectional plural marking. Natural Language And Linguistic Theory 26(3): 639–694. Zimman, L. (2016). Pronouns have always been political. Trans Talk. https://medium​.com​/trans​-talk​/pronouns​ -have​-always​-been​-political​-a32c753a1539. Zuber, S. and Reed, A.M. (1993). The politics of grammar handbooks: Generic he and singular they. College English 55(5): 515–530.

Further reading Bradley, E.D. (2023). Linguistic prescriptivism as social prescription: The case of gender. In The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism. Routledge. Conrod, K. (2018). Pronouns and gender in language. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Oxford University Press. Zimman, L. (2017). Transgender language reform: Some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination 1(1): 83–104. Zimman, L. (2018). Pronouns and possibilities: Transgender language activism and reform. In Language and Social Justice in Practice. New York: Routledge, pp. 176–183. Zobel, S. (2015). Voldemort phrases in generic sentences. Grazer Linguistische Studien 83: 107–123.

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32 INDIVIDUALS’ PRONOUN CHOICE: A CASE STUDY OF TRANSGENDER SPEAKERS IN BERLIN, GERMANY Olga Steriopolo and Harley Aussoleil 1. Introduction This chapter considers the individual pronoun choice among transgender individuals in the LGBTQIA+ community in Berlin, Germany. The acronym LGBTQIA+ refers in the broadest sense possible to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and people with non-normative and non-binary genders or sexual identities. Transgender is typically defined as gender identity that diverges from the sex assigned at birth (as opposed to cisgender individuals who identify with the sex assigned to them). This definition is crude in that its rudimentary understanding takes the notion of ‘sex’ as something fixed, natural, and real, with the ancillary conceptualisation of ‘gender’ as a social and cultural construct. The uniform nature of sex, however, has long been questioned by researchers in the fields of Gender and Language Studies (Hall and O’Donovan 1996, Hellinger and Buβmann 2001, 2002, 2003, Borba and Ostermann 2007, Johnsen 2008, Motschenbacher 2010, 2016, Michelson 2015). To this end, activist and scholar Judith Butler wrote in 1999 in Gender Trouble: ‘As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts’ (Butler 1999: 11). Here Butler argues that part of the function of understanding gender as a social construct is that it automatically reinforces the construction of sex as fixed, natural, and more real. Butler’s argument is essentially that there is no tangible part of the body that objectively exists outside of culture, and therefore power, which means that trans people are not deviating from their ‘natural’ sex; rather, they are participating in the same culturally gendered embodiment that cisgender people do. In this chapter, we apply the three-tiered model of the category ‘gender’ proposed in Ackerman (2019: 15), which represents gender as an inherently complex phenomenon (Figure 32.1). This model will be used throughout the chapter to investigate which grammatical gender features (if any) are employed by non-binary transgender individuals and under which circumstances. As languages with grammatical gender often have the binary grammatical gender features, [fem] and [masc], used to refer to human referents, it is highly interesting to investigate how individuals with non-binary identities deal with this grammatical binarity. Are there any specific linguistic strategies and preferences applied to overcome the linguistic binaries and, if so, what are they?

DOI:  10.4324/9781003349891-38

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Figure 32.1  A schema depicting the three proposed tiers of gender, overlaid (Ackerman 2019: 15)

In Ackerman’s model, the Feature Tier represents grammatical gender, a system of formal features that are defined morphosyntactically, such as [fem] and [masc]. The formal features serve solely for the purpose of grammatical agreement. The Category Tier represents gender used by a perceiver to classify a referent (so-called semantic or notional gender, or the less appropriate term ‘natural’ gender, sometimes used in the linguistic literature). This category is realised in occupational terms, such as surgeon, doctor, or lawyer, meaning a feminine or masculine surgeon, doctor, or lawyer. The Exemplar Tier consists of tokens of variation, e.g., hair length, pitch range of voice, properties of speech. These can be used to categorise individuals into a certain gender, but they do not always correspond to what Ackerman calls an individual’s ‘biosocial’ gender (we prefer to use the term ‘social’ gender), which is defined as ‘an individual’s gender as it is experienced internally’ (Ackerman 2019: 9). According to Ackerman, such gender is different from the other types of gender, as it is impossible to assess by external observers ‘without input from the individual’s introspection’ (Ackerman 2019: 9). For example, some transgender people may present in a binary way, but they may not identify with that binary identity (such as someone who wears dresses but does not identify as a woman). With regard to this three-tiered model, the point of most interest is how gender is encoded linguistically in reference to – and through self-reference by – non-binary individuals. What formal gender features are used by and in reference to individuals whose gender is outside the binary rectangles, as illustrated in Figure 32.1? Transgender communities are generally evolutionary in how they create and use innovative non-binary language forms in order to amend the existing linguistic gender binaries. In this chapter we will focus on a small non-binary transgender community residing in Berlin. Our goal is to describe, document, and preserve grammatical gender forms used by members of the community, including non-binary linguistic innovations. But, first, we consider research on pronoun choice more broadly. We also wish to note that, in the Berlin queer scene, it is common to see ‘transgender* (or trans*)’ written with an asterisk to draw attention to and maintain awareness of the diverse ways transgender identity may be experienced and expressed. Because the German language is gendered in a binary way, the asterisk is also used (among other diacritics) to denote gender variety, for example, to amend the word worker in such a way that it means something wider than a male or female worker, such as Arbeiter*in ‘worker (gender neutral)’. We acknowledge that queer scholars, especially in the United States, have problematized the use of the asterisk since the identifier transgender already implies this kind of polyvalence, but it is worth noting that it is still prevalent in Berlin.

2.  Contemporary research on pronoun choice The most recent doctoral dissertation known to us on pronoun choice is ‘From ey to ze: Genderneutral pronouns as pronominal change’ by Callaway (2022). It is a study of genderqueer pronouns in 466

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English and other languages in which Callaway argues that genderqueer pronouns are not a non-naturalistic phenomenon; on the contrary, they follow naturalistic morphosyntactic processes and changes in English and across languages. Like many previous studies, Callaway also found singular they to be the most common epicene pronoun in speech and writing. Another doctoral thesis, ‘Generic and nonbinary pronouns: Usage, acceptability and attitudes’ (Hekanaho 2020), focusing on the perception and production of singular they, found that a large portion of the study’s participants employed it as a common epicene pronoun. Out of 882 participants, 734 used this pronoun with a generic meaning. Similarly, in the dissertation ‘Pronouns raising and emerging’, Conrod (2019) used data from two sociolinguistic studies to show that definite generic and epicene uses of singular they were broadly accepted among their participants. Turning to history, in ‘What’s your pronoun?’ Baron (2020) documents how people got from he and she to zie and hir. Baron lists multiple epicene forms and illustrates how people have long created and used novel forms to establish their rights and identities. Indeed, Loughlin (2021) examined whether gender identity impacts on what pronouns people chose to coindex with singular generic nouns (e.g., student, mechanic, secretary). Loughlin conducted a survey with 623 participants (289 of whom identified within the LGBTQA+ umbrella, 196 ‘queer-adjacent’, 131 nonLGBTQA+, and 7 with no response) across Canada and the United States. The findings show that the LGBTQA+ participants used singular they the most frequently (with the non-binary participants employing it at the highest rate), followed by the queer-adjacent participants. The non-LGBTQA+ participants used singular they least frequently. These findings sit well alongside Konnelly and Cowper’s (2020) argument that, despite its long history in English, there are speakers who do not see non-binary uses of singular they as grammatical. They propose that this is due to the different levels of participation in a gradual grammatical change​. Only when this change is complete can non-binary they ​become​​​accepted and used by speakers in all contexts, including with names (see also Konnelly et al. 2022). Expanding the focus to other languages, the most recent typological study we can identify is Rott (2023), who conducted a cross-linguistic investigation of possible pronominal innovation strategies. Rott proposed four different strategies: (1) re-semanticised pronouns (preexisting forms acquire a new gender-neutral meaning, e.g., singular they in English), (2) re-pragmatised pronouns (pronouns break with the established pragmatics, e.g., employing the neuter form it to refer to a human referent or using gendered pronouns interchangeably), (3) disruptive pronouns (strongly neologistic forms, often orthographic, e.g., ellx/lx and ell@/l@ in Spanish; X也 (tā) in Mandarin), and (4) re-combinative pronouns (using elements from the established pronouns, e.g., sier/sien/siem in German; iel/lea in French). In the remainder of this chapter, we focus on the types of pronoun innovations found in a contemporary multilingual LGBTQA+ community in Germany.

3.  The LGBTQIA+ community in Berlin, Germany The LGBTQIA+ community in Berlin is extremely diverse and multilingual. There are many immigrants from all around the world who have chosen to settle in Berlin for its abundant queer resources and the relatively high quality of life Berlin offers in Europe. Aside from German, English is commonly used. In our opinion, there is no single community per se but rather many different ones. These differences are determined by language, country of origin, racial identity, political identity, ability, and various other vectors of identity. In spite of these differences, many queer people in Berlin see themselves as part of a larger community. The queer community in Berlin is well known for the creation of and contribution to nightlife, cultural centers, and events. Some community members congregate in bars, but even these are sometimes organised through different factions, like FLINTA* nights at otherwise general queer bars or anti-fascist community spaces. In German, FLINTA* stands for ‘women, lesbians, intersex, non467

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binary, trans, and agender people’. It is a common queer subculture in Berlin that is often problematised by other queer people for being exclusive of or alienating for transwomen. Beyond FLINTA*, other groups form around other aspects of identity that are primary to their queerness, such as race. Some communities also emerge via activism, such as QUARC Berlin (Queers Against Racism and Colonialism). There are several support and health-care centres for the LGBTQIA+ communities, such as the Transinterqueer e.V. (Triq), Schwulenberatung, Lesbenberatung, and Casa Kuà that primarily provides resources for trans and non-binary Black and indigenous people and people of color. Berlin hosts the famous Berghain, originally conceived as a gay men’s club, but now a more broadly visited night club. There is also a museum dedicated to documenting queer life in Berlin called the Schwules Museum* (Gay Museum*). It features contemporary work by queer artists and curators and uses the asterisk to reflect a wider history than just exclusively that of cis gay men. In Berlin despite growing gentrification, there are still communal living communities called Hausprojekte ‘house projects’ and Wagenplätze (‘wagon places’; a literal translation referring to mobile homes or tents, among other kinds of shelters, parked in a shared space where the residents live), comprising LGBTQIA+ individuals who live collectively, resist gentrification of the city, and form protected enclaves for themselves. A very well-known example is Liebig 34, an Anarcha-QueerFeminist Collective that was located on Liebig Straße 34 in the district of Friedrichshain, Berlin. Liebig 34 battled in court to remain in their house under immense pressure from the state and local police, who regularly raided the building. The residents were evicted by police during the pandemic on October 9, 2020. Other houses like Liebig 34 are part of a movement to protect queer people living communally from the rapidly rising cost of rent in Berlin. In these houses, queerness means living in an alternative way, in communal self-organisation with other queers.

4.  Research design For our investigation into grammatically marked gender forms, we approached individuals who identify as non-binary and currently reside in Berlin. We invited 12 participants (22–38 years old) who have lived in Berlin for at least two years (ranging up to ten years). The participants were introduced to this study by Harley Aussoleil, who also played the role of an interviewer. Harley is a queer cis woman working as a curator, artist, and researcher in Berlin. All the participants interviewed were either friends of hers, friends of friends (or partners of friends), and some were former roommates from the FLINTA* house project where Harley lived for seven years. Some of the participants knew each other through this house project or were mutual friends with Harley, but not all the participants knew each other. Ten participants have a university degree, and two do not (the participants Frances and Ben). Eleven participants use at least two languages on a daily basis. Whether L1 or L2 speakers, all participants are fluent in English and employ it regularly to communicate. The participants’ L1s are English (five speakers), French (two speakers), German (two speakers), Hebrew (one speaker), Latvian (one speaker), Spanish (one speaker, Mexican variety), Thai (one speaker), and Turkish (one speaker). To obtain information about the participants’ pronoun choice and to gather their opinions on the use of gender-neutral language more broadly, we applied the research methods of systematic self-observation and semi-structured interviews. Systematic self-observation (Rodríguez and Ryave 2002) is concerned with interior emotions and cognitive processes that are not always available to a researcher conducting interviews. This research method values the individual voice of participants and tries to validate them as their own agents of expression. Using this method, the participants were given notebooks with the instructions to write down terms, sayings, or phrases using non-binary language forms that they would use in their daily lives together with any emotions and feelings connected to this language. Examples ranged from a misunderstanding someone would have with a stranger because they used gender neutral language for something typically gendered to simply 468

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lists of words that participants used to describe themselves. After one month, the notebooks were collected. This methodology was applied to gain insights into more interior processes, to record what happened on a given day in the participants’ lives, and to gather the emotional traces that these language forms left behind. In addition, we conducted semi-structured interviews (Lindlof and Taylor 2002) with the participants. The interviewer posed predetermined questions that followed an organisational logic, and both the interviewer and the participant were free to ask questions or say something that emerged spontaneously. The interviewer asked the participants questions related to gendered language forms that they employed in their daily lives. This method presented some difficulties because the answers were varied since the prompt of non-binary language was so broad. We will address this later in considering the future directions this research could take. The answers were written down but not audio-recorded to maintain the anonymity of the participants. The maximum number of hours taken for each interview was two hours, and there was no required minimum length. Participation was entirely voluntary, and the participants were able to withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. No information that would identify the participants appears with the data. Each participant was anonymized using a code number and a pseudonym, known only to the participant, the interviewer, and the principal investigator. In this chapter, we refer to the participants only by their pseudonyms. Lastly, all the participants were paid for their time, which we believe is an essential part of an ethical work practice.

5.  Current contributions to the study of non-binary gender expressions After collecting and analysing the data, we studied the similarities and points of overlap among the participants. From these points, we identified a taxonomy for categorising our findings by creating four major strategies for queering linguistic gender forms, employed by the participants to express non-binary gendered language: i. ii. iii. iv.

Queering gender-binary language; Using gender-neutral forms to queer familial terms; Queering pronouns (across languages); Écriture Inclusive and language reform.

We will discuss each one in turn, paying special attention to queering pronouns and discussing the preferences and linguistic strategies in the use of pronouns that were revealed in the course of the study.

5.1  Queering gender-binary language We begin by focusing on the role that social, cultural, and physical context can play in terms of what language practices may feel safe for non-binary folks in our study at any given time. For example, Nova reflects on how presenting oneself as feminine can be differently construed in different contexts. A contrast is made between having femininity imposed by wider social norms and choosing femininity as an agentive act. (1) I find that a lot of people who start hormones (testosterone) realise they want to present more femininely. I find this is because if you’ve been socialised and forced to be female for so long and you have no control over how you present yourself, then it’s not affirming to conform to those conventions by force. But when one starts changing one’s presentation, one has

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agency and choice and then they can experiment and safely see how it feels for them. (Nova, 13.07.2020) Sometimes for non-binary folks’ conventional gender presentation (in regards to how one dresses, for example) can be fun or pleasurable because traditionally these heteronormative conventions of gender were imposed at an earlier age and were coupled with broader expectations from family (and society in general) to conform to gendered norms, as Nova alludes to. Challenging these conventions can sometimes mean queering them. For example, Elie shared that they were playful with their partner by affectionately referring to themselves as the ‘girlfriend’. Sometimes they also describe themselves and their partner as ‘gay husbands’ as a way to evoke a stereotype of modern gay life, which they used to parody their own domestic life together. Similarly, Drew’s close friends would sometimes say, ‘Who is she?’, when complimenting them on their clothes or how they looked, especially when they were wearing something that could be conventionally considered feminine, such as a skirt or make-up. The context is key here: when in the company of close queer friends, Drew knows their femininity is being praised and not simply conflated with cisgender womanhood. In this context, Drew’s femininity does not make them less non-binary or trans. Importantly, these examples highlight the moments in which femininity is, in fact, very queer and uncoupled from oppressive and normative gendered conventions. In another context (i.e., an environment that is normatively cisgender) such uses of binary-gendered language could make someone feel vulnerable, uncomfortable, or insulted. Relatedly, this playfulness and evocation of normative femininity through the use of gendered terms is highly racialised, as Drew discusses in (2). (2) I know I have the luxury to be visible as a queer person because I don’t get violence that is racialised or the violence that transfeminine folks receive – so I want to be visible as trans. Someone once said, ‘Sorry, I thought you were a transwoman’, and I took this as a compliment. I like playing both sides, as long as that surprise doesn’t come with violence. But I’m white, masculine, and tall (and this is a privilege that protects me from such violence). (Drew, 06.06.2020) The concepts of privilege and ‘passing’ was also discussed by Ben, who is non-binary and pangender, meaning that their gender ‘encompasses multitudes and vibrations across the spectrum of the social gamut of that which we understand as gender’ (Ben, 06.08.2020). Ben acknowledges that they often ‘pass’ as a cis man, which may protect them from certain forms of transphobic violence, but they also enjoy celebrating their femininity in the safety of close queer friends. Similarly to Drew, Ben acknowledges how specifically racialised these instances are. For example, Ben enjoys being called ‘girl’, as in the melodic and playfully exaggerated ‘Girrrrrrrrrrrl!’ from Black femme trans women, where they feel a sense of solidarity and safety. Again, like in Drew’s case, context is very important. Black diasporic and queer lexicons both have a rich legacy of creative linguistic terms, but when such terms are employed by those who benefit from white and cisgender privilege, they can represent an appropriation of language and an offensive attempt to erase one’s privilege and aestheticize language for its proximity to societal margins. There are also entirely individual reasons for why binary terms can be enjoyable or affirming for non-binary people. For example, Skye is non-binary and generally prefers adjectives that are as gender neutral as possible. However, they also enjoy being called ‘handsome’, although they do not identify as a man. Skye finds there is a liminal space they occupy that some normative cisgender people do not easily access or understand that is not the territory of ‘man’ but is still masculine and something entirely other to womanhood and femininity. (3) Being caught in a conventional gender binary feels bad, it simply feels wrong. I like ‘cute’ because it doesn’t affirm or deny any gender, it feels more neutral. (Skye, 25.07.2020) 470

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Similarly, Hibiki, who was non-binary at the time of the interview but is now trans masculine, liked to be called their partner’s ‘boyfriend’ even though he used they pronouns at the time of the interview and did not identify as a trans man. He felt that boyfriend held a youthful and teenager-like connotation, a nod to youthfulness that is seemingly less gendered, which felt intimate and playful. (4) I feel, at this moment, that ‘man’ will never feel entirely comfortable, but terms like ‘boy’ feel really good. Both in the first and third person. For example, ‘Boy, hey boy’, rather than, ‘Hey, Hibiki!’, I would enjoy that. Or if you were to say, ‘Where’s the boy?’ Apart from that … Maybe boy star, star boy, the star from the trans – it’s silly, but it’s fun. (Hibiki, 22.05.2020) Thus, we found that for some participants, binary gender expressions can be employed in self-reference and reference to other queer people. However, the common understanding was that it can only be done in two main contexts: (1) in the safe company of other queer people and/or close friends; and (2) in a playful, intimate, and affectionate manner, such as when addressing a partner. With regard to Ackerman’s (2019) three-tiered model of gender, we observe that the binary grammatical gender features [fem] and [masc] can deliberately be employed and are sometimes used interchangeably as a means of intimate and affectionate address, but they can occur only in a safe environment, where there is no risk of violence or devaluation of one’s gender.

5.2  Using gender-neutral forms to queer familial terms The participants showed a preference for using gender-neutral language when referring to or asking about others, which was a preference that also applies to pronoun use (discussed below). For example, Valentine always uses Geschwister ‘siblings’ when speaking German (in contrast to Schwester ‘sister’ or Bruder ‘brother’) when asking people about their family, unless the gender of that sibling was already known. When referring to themself with their parents, Valentine asked to be called Kind ‘child’, not Tochter ‘daughter’ or Sohn ‘son’. In Valentine’s own words: (5) Using ‘child’ does feel perhaps like it seems as though I’m still a small child, or young, but it feels the most affirming. (Valentine, 22.08.2020) Hibiki also asked his parents to call him ‘child’, as quoted in (6). (6) This escapes the binary of being daughter or son. It also feels more tender to me. (Hibiki, 03.07.2020) These examples illustrate an important linguistic innovation by which non-binary individuals have created ways of queering many conventionally gendered familial roles. There are no widely recognized ways of referring to an ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ without referring to the linguistic binary gender, but Valentine recently asked to be called Tonkel in relation to their brother’s new-born child stating: Ich bin Tonkel geworden ‘I have become a Tonkel’ (Tonkel is a mix of Tante ‘aunt’ and Onkel ‘uncle’; Valentine, 22.08.2020). Similarly, Reese likes to be called a thunkle in English (a gender-neutral term for ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’). Drew prefers the title auntcle, which comes from ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ and refers to their sister’s child as nibling, which is a gender-neutral alternative to ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’. This kind of language is productive in making queer families in that it produces new positionalities through the creation of new titles. A thunkle for example, is a categorically new familial role for someone to occupy, even though it is still linked to the terms ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’, because it exploits the binary categories to make a third alternative. In short, these new titles both borrow and depart from

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the binary-gendered titles, making new possibilities for what it means to be a member of a family. This language use strategy is also employed in pronouns, as we will describe below. Two participants in this study, Drew and Frances, are parents to a young child. Although their first languages are different, they both refer to the baby in English using the singular pronoun they. Their common languages are English and Spanish, which they speak with each other as well as the baby. It is important to both of them that people close to the family consistently use they when referring to the baby. The idea behind this practice is that both Drew and Frances want to create room for their child to express their own gender. Drew finds that by using they to refer to their baby, the child’s gender will not be assumed based on their genitals. When the child is old enough to be articulate and more conscious of themselves, Drew believes they will assert for themselves which pronoun(s) reflect their identity. Frances recalled that once they had announced they were expecting a baby, the first question was whether it was a boy or a girl. Both Drew and Frances find this to be simply irrelevant. Drew noted that not gendering their child meant that conventional gender-related expectations (such as girls are gentler than boys, or boys play with toy cars) would not be immediately placed upon them. It is also important to Drew that their baby should be referred to by they because they themselves know the pain of having such gender norms imposed upon them and the pressure to thusly conform. Drew wants to protect their child from this and allow them an alternative way to exist adjacent to these norms. For Frances, however, they find it harder to always use they for their baby when they speak their first language, Spanish. Even though it is as important for Frances as it is for Drew to use genderneutral language when referring to their child, Frances has started using ella ‘she’ for their baby in Spanish, as described in (7). (7) It drains you to fight the world. At first it was confusing for me to always choose between ‘he’ and ‘she’ in Spanish, which is what I began to do but stopped. There is really no good equivalent to ‘they’ in Spanish to use. (Frances, 07.07.2020) Nova does not have a child, but often discusses the prospect of having a baby with their partner. When it comes to the use of language and its role in the creation of a family, their partner would probably be mama, but Nova would not be papa, as Nova shares in (8). (8) I wouldn’t want to be ‘papa’ because this feels too hierarchical to have a title with the child who comparatively would only be referred to by their first name. And perhaps [I don’t like it] too because of the hierarchical connotations with being the ‘papa’ in the household. If I had a child, I would just call them ‘my baby’ and not gender them until they could gender themselves and not ‘reveal’ the gender to anyone else. (Nova, 13.07.2020) Thus, when it comes to familial terms, we observe either (1) the creation of innovative gender-neutral forms, often done by fusing two binary familial terms; or (2) the avoidance of binary gender terms altogether, such as calling someone ‘child’ instead of ‘son’ or ‘daughter’. This preference for the use of gender-neutral language is an important preference observed among the most participants, although there are exceptions, such as Frances’s use of the binary gender pronoun in Spanish. Unlike the previously discussed cases, we see especially in regards to Frances a kind of weariness and fatigue that results in trying to use language forms one prefers in languages and cultures that actively make this possibility harder. While queer lexicon is meant to be empowering for the individual speaker, it can also ‘drain’ people, as Frances describes. In terms of Ackerman’s (2019) model, we observe that in most cases, no binary grammatical gender features [fem] and [masc] are employed by the participants when it comes to familial terms. 472

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5.3  Queering pronouns (across languages) All the participants shared a commitment to the use of singular they when they speak about someone whose gender is not already known or seems ambiguous to them. However, they did not feel it was good practice to continue using they without asking the person to reveal their preferred pronoun(s). As Ari commented, singular they is a reasonable interim solution only when first addressing someone. Ari says: (9) Once at a tour someone casually referred to me as ‘they’. This person didn’t know me and I really liked this. I felt so good that someone made the effort to use something ambiguous with me in a quick instance where they didn’t know my gender and couldn’t immediately ask. (Ari, 01.08.2020) Ari most appreciated the effort that this person made not to assume their gender and to create space for the possibility that their gender could not simply be read from their appearance. This was particularly acute because the tour happened outside a queer context. However, Elie perceived that most cis people are afraid to ask trans people about their preferred pronouns for fear they would offend them, yet Elie felt that it is usually the most affirming question one can receive. However, this varies from person to person. For example, it can be alienating for trans people if they are asked by cis people for their pronouns but those cis folks do not offer their own pronouns in return. Furthermore, some trans people find that cis people ask the pronouns only of people who ‘look’ trans. In other cases, if someone is stealth (someone who is stealth is trans and does not inform others of their gender history), it might be extremely insulting to be asked their pronouns. In Elie’s case, they present in an androgynous way, they are not stealth, and welcome the question. Elie also expressed how grateful they were to live in a largely English-speaking queer scene in Berlin and away from the Francophone queer scene they were previously part of. Elie found that asking others to use iel (a gender-neutral pronoun in French) was hard, even among queer people, because it is still so new, and people had little practice using this pronoun. Similarly to Frances’ experiences in Spanish, there was a rigidity they encountered in French when it came to pronouns. In French, people would address Elie in public as Madame or Mademoiselle. In contrast, Elie found that people in Berlin do not use such gendered titles, but rather say ‘excuse me’ when addressing someone in public. To this effect, Elie comments in (10). (10) English is a huge relief for my gender! (Elie, 01.09.2020) We found that for many participants, certain non-binary English forms are also used in their first languages as a form of language mixing. As we noted above, eleven participants out of 12 employ at least two languages in their daily lives. For some of them, there are gender-affirming words that they carry from one language directly into another. For example, Elie uses the English address form dude in reference to a close non-binary friend when speaking French. Likewise, Valentine makes use of singular they in both English and German, as in (11). (11) a. Wo ist they? ‘Where are they’? b. Ich mag them. ‘I like them’.

(Valentine, 22.08.2020)

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In Valentine’s own words, they do it for the following reasons: (12) English is very frequently used at home and at work and I find the pronoun they to be easy to understand. It feels intuitive to me, so it feels right to use even while speaking German. (Valentine, 22.08.2020) For some participants, English is the language in which they began formulating their understanding of their non-binary gender, as was the case for Skye and Nova, whose first languages are not English. For example, Nova shared that their queer lexicon – and by extension their queerness – is shaped by English. And Ari uses both they and he in English, but prefers to use he because he feels it better mirrors the reality imposed by his first language, Hebrew, which only allows for binary pronouns, as he comments in (13). (13) Some gender queer people rotate the use of ‘she’ and ‘he’ in Hebrew, because even the subject form ‘I’ is gendered. But I feel like ‘he’ is more active. He is important because it expresses my transition and position as someone who isn’t cisgendered. I also get misgendered on a daily basis and have no desire to ‘pass’ as a cis man, so it’s important to keep using a pronoun that not everyone assumes I use. I like being in this ambiguous place that is definitively not cis nor aspiring towards it. (Ari, 01.08.2020) Ari went on to say he actually likes, or rather appreciates, how binary Hebrew is because it cannot mask – but rather can reveal – transphobia and thereby enables one to confront it, if they wish to, as he shares in (14). (14) Language is a tool revealing culture and society and its norms. While having the option of using ‘they’, Hebrew shows the ugly truth, it makes bare what people might actually want to call someone instead of using something neutral and ambiguous. (Ari, 01.08.2020) Ari shared with us that once he had chosen a woman to sublet his apartment in Tel Aviv, where he lives part-time. In his conversation with the woman, Ari would ‘he’ himself using the masculine pronoun and she would reply by consistently ‘sheing’ him. Such examples share something about the emotional quality of language and the role that English plays for some people in expressing their gender. It highlights a reciprocal relationship between language and feelings, grammar and self-identity, and it also suggests that the use of non-binary pronouns is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For another language use strategy, the participants, whose first languages are Hebrew, French, and Spanish, reported using binary pronouns in their languages interchangeably. For example, Frances said that they sometimes employ the pronouns él ‘he’ and ella ‘she’ in Spanish interchangeably in self-reference. However, it is important to note that such use of pronouns is usually only applied in the presence of other queers and, especially, other non-binary trans friends (Skye referred to such a circle of people as the ‘bubble’; Skye, 25.07.2020).

5.4  Écriture Inclusive and language reform Turning to the issue of multilingualism, an important preference for some of the participants was to use Écriture Inclusive (‘Inclusive Writing’, translated from French) (Alpheratz 2018). A central part of Écriture Inclusive is creation of and widening the use of gender-neutral neopronouns, since there is no good equivalent for singular they in French (Liberman 2017, Papadopoulos 2021a). One variation is a mix of il ‘he’ and elle ‘she’ to create the gender-neutral pronoun ielle, the other gender-

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neutral variants are iel, al, and ol, among others (Caño 2019, Knisely 2020). Because adjectives in French generally agree in grammatical gender with the referent’s gender, many of them end in -e with feminine referents, as shown in bold in (15a). In Écriture Inclusive, in the case of a gender-neutral referent, the feminine suffix -e is added after a period, as in (15b). (15) a. Elle est excitée. ‘She is excited’. b. Iel est excité.e. ‘They (gender-neutral) are excited’. (Elie, 01.09.2020) Those French adjectives that do not end in -e with feminine referents and have a different suffix also change the writing of the suffix in Écriture Inclusive. For example, Elie noted that the adjective anxieu​ .x​​.se ‘anxious’, used with a gender-neutral referent, would sound like the feminine form, but is written using two periods, such as: Iel est anxieu​.x​​.se ‘They (gender-neutral) are anxious’ (compare with the standard use of written French: anxieuse ‘anxious (feminine)’ and anxieux ‘anxious (masculine)’). Frances and Drew pointed out similar efforts in Spanish, such as the increasingly used term Latinx ‘Latin’ (gender-neutral) (Papadopoulos 2021b). Frances felt that Spanish needs reinvention because masculine is the default gender in the language, like in French. One way to subvert this is to use the feminine form as a default. However, a potential use of the generic pronoun she shares many of the same pitfalls of the generic he, insofar as it excludes those not addressed by she. Frances sometimes uses the gender-neutral suffix -i on Spanish adjectives (Papadopoulos 2019), such as guapi ‘beautiful’ (compare with the standard adjective use: quapa (feminine) and guapo (masculine)). However, Frances felt that they could not consistently employ the suffix -i because it simply ‘feels too cute’ and sometimes would interfere with a message they wanted to convey. Frances thought that this suffix made their speech sound more playful, less serious, and perhaps came across as deliberately facetious. Frances also noted that the plural suffix -es can be used as a gender-neutral suffix in Spanish, for example, ¡Bienvenides a todes!, ‘Welcome everyone!’ (gender-neutral) (compare with the standard use: ¡Bienvenidos a todos! for the masculine plural and ¡Bienvenidas a todas! for the feminine plural). In this example, we observe that the gender-neutral suffix is added to both an adjective (bienvenides) and a pronoun (todes). Another gender-neutral suffix commonly employed in Spanish is -x (López 2019), as in Latinx (gender-neutral). Its origin is debated, but some say it was influenced by indigenous Latin American peoples and queer communities (Santos 2017). Frances pointed out that many academics in Argentina use this suffix, but it is still not seen by a wider audience as an acceptable grammatical form in Spanish. Frances reported that some years ago a professor in Argentina was fired for using this suffix and that its use in professional contexts is still hotly debated in Latin America. In the case of languages that do not have gender-marked pronouns, the participants noted various ways to express gender in pronouns. For example, Deniz, who speaks predominantly Turkish, observes in (16): (16) There are no gendered pronouns in Turkish and people don’t commonly ask for pronouns. To ask about where someone is, it’s the same regardless of whether that person uses ‘she’, ‘he’, or ‘it’ pronouns. Just: O nerede? ‘Where is she/he/it?’. Whenever I meet someone I say in English ‘I use they’, but I still have no concept of pronouns. [because of how unfamiliar it is to a Turkish speaker] (Deniz, 28.08.2020) In another language, Thai, Skye observed that one can easily avoid using a pronoun (or one can use a default masculine pronoun). Skye explained that pronouns in Thai express an emotive quality 475

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rather than accurately signify someone’s gender and that they are highly dependent on the formality of an occasion and the relationship between speakers. However, one can still use gendered language pejoratively and, as such, grammatical gender can still be harnessed for transphobic ends, although Skye noted that not all misgendering is intentionally transphobic. For example, Skye’s parents use a masculine pronoun when referring to them, even though they see Skye as their daughter. In this case, it has little to do with their parents intentionally using language to affirm or reject their child’s gender, but rather because that pronoun is informal and familiar. In spoken Mandarin, there is no phonetic distinction in gender in the third person pronouns (both in the singular and in the plural) (Cheng 2016). The pronoun ‘tā’ 他/她 is for the third-person singular and ‘tā men’ 他們/她們 (the traditional version) is for the third-person plural. As Nova points out, this property of the spoken language creates opportunities to remain ambiguous with respect to gender and thus, communicating in Mandarin, they can be referred to in a gender-neutral way. These different language strategies give the participants who speak Turkish, Thai, and Mandarin the option to talk about themselves in a way that does not identify their gender. In summary, we observe that in terms of using pronouns, there are multiple practices motivated by different affective reasons and personal preferences. For example, in English (and other languages, where language mixing occurs, such as in German), the non-binary singular pronoun they is preferred, while in other languages, such as French, innovative gender-neutral pronouns are employed. Such pronouns are often a fusion of the already existing binary pronouns, such as ielle (a mix of il ‘he’ and elle ‘she’). As noted by some participants, binary pronouns can also be used in reference to the self, like in Hebrew, French, and Spanish. In terms of the other grammatical categories, such as nouns and adjectives, gender-neutral familial terms are formed by fusing two existing binary terms, such as thunkle (a mix of ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’) and Tonkel (a mix of Tante ‘aunt’ and Onkel ‘uncle’) in English and German, respectively. And non-binary adjectives can be created using gender-neutral suffixes, such as the suffix -i in guapi ‘beautiful’ in Spanish. All these innovations make space for people to occupy non-binary positions. With regard to Ackerman’s (2019) model of gender, we observe (1) either systematic avoidance of the binary grammatical gender features [fem] and [masc], or (2) in the case of the binary pronouns, the interchangeable use of them.

6. Conclusions We have analyzed different grammatical gender forms, focusing on the individual pronoun choice in a small sampling of the multilingual LGBTQIA+ community in Berlin, Germany. We have shown that this community employs a great variety of ways to express non-binary gender identities, such as: (1) fusing of two gender binary forms to create a single gender-neutral form (a strategy used in both nouns: Tonkel, and pronouns: ielle); (2) adding innovative gender-neutral affixes (in both adjectives and pronouns: Bienvenides a todes); (3) using language mixing with English (in nouns: dude, and pronouns: they); (4) employing binary gender categories interchangeably (in nouns: girlfriend/boyfriend, pronouns: she/he, and adjectives: beautiful/handsome); and finally, (5) avoiding binary gender forms altogether (in all grammatical categories). It is striking to observe that pronouns, being closed class words, systematically employ all possible gender-neutral strategies across languages, as shown above. In addition, pronouns make use of another significant gender-neutral strategy, namely, the creation and employment of entirely novel lexical items that are not a mix of the existing gender-binary forms, such as, for example, gender-neutral pronouns, al and ol, in French. This makes them different from the other grammatical categories, investigated in this study. Although our data come from a small group of 12 individuals, our findings support all types of cross-linguistic pronominal innovations, as identified in Rott (2023), namely: (1) re-semanticised pronouns (singular they in English and German as a form of language mixing); (2) re-pragmatised pronouns (using gender-binary pronouns interchangeably in Hebrew, French, and Spanish); (3) disruptive pronouns (al and ol in French); and 476

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(4) re-combinative pronouns (iel/ielle in French). In addition, as our data illustrate, other grammatical categories, such as nouns and adjectives, also employ most of Rott’s innovation strategies including (1) re-semanticised forms (e.g., calling a partner ‘girlfriend’/’boyfriend’ without adhering to the conventional binary meanings associated with these words); (2) re-pragmatised forms (the interchangeable use of conventional gender-binary nouns and adjectives); and (3) re-combinative forms (a mix of two existing gender-binary familial terms to create a novel gender-neutral term). We have also identified different attitudes, preferences, and needs that motivate the discussed language practices. One such example is the preferred use of gender-neutral language in self-reference and in reference to other people (queer or not), including a large preference for singular they. Another is the use of linguistic binary forms, including binary pronouns, that are employed by non-binary speakers but only in an environment which is safe for them, such as with other queers and close friends. It is not simply the presence of non-binary language, but how it was used by different speakers that became salient through discussion with our participants. We have discussed only some of the ways to queer language in order to express non-binary identities. Linguistic innovations are integral to Berlin queer communities in producing new roles, positionalities, and ways of establishing the community membership. As the use of gender-neutral language becomes more widely employed, some non-binary people may have the chance to be read as they are (for those for whom it is the goal) by cisgender heterosexual society because the monikers of their identity will be known to a wider demographic. We are very grateful to our participants and see their participation as an act of trust in spite of the power dynamics associated with academic interview sessions. It has been a privilege to document their use of language and to share it with others.

7.  Future directions For further research, we propose to investigate individual pronoun choices in relation to multilingualism. As this study has shown, queer communities can be highly multilingual and multicultural with many different languages spoken by its members. The question arises as to how the daily use of multiple languages can affect pronoun choices in the primary and secondary languages of communication. Another important topic is to explore the feelings and emotions related to individual pronoun preferences. For example, would a choice of a pronoun correspond in any way with the emotional state of a speaker? If such a correspondence exists, it would be very interesting to analyse which pronouns would be associated with which emotional states of the speakers.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by a DFG research grant to Olga Steriopolo (STE 2361/4-3), who was the Principal Investigator of this project.

References Ackerman, L. (2019). Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1): 1–27. Alpheratz. (2018) Grammaire du français inclusif. Chateauroux: Vent Solars. Baron, D. (2020). What’s your Pronoun? Beyond He and She. New York: Liveright. Borba, R. and Ostermann, A.C. (2007). Do bodies matter? Travestis’ embodiment of (trans)gender identity through the manipulation of the Brazilian Portugues grammatical system. Gender and Language 1(1): 131–147. Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Callaway, K. (2022). From ey to ze: Gender-Neutral Pronouns as Pronominal Change. Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Georgia, USA.

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Olga Steriopolo and Harley Aussoleil Caño, M. (2019). Language, Queerly Phrased: A Sociolinguistic Examination of Nonbinary Gender Identity in French. Undergraduate Honours Thesis, The State University of New York. Cheng, T.-W. (2016). Radical equity: A case study of the use of Chinese third-person pronouns in Taiwan’s third grade social studies textbooks. International Communication Studies 25(3): 99–111. Conrod, K. (2019). Pronouns raising and emerging. Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Washington, USA. Hall, K. and O’Donovan, V. (1996). Shifting Gender Positions among Hindi-Speaking Hijras. In V.L. Bergvall, J.M. Bing and A.F. Freed (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. London: Longman, pp. 228–266. Hekanaho, L.E. (2020). Generic and Nonbinary Pronouns: Usage, Acceptability and Attitudes. Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Helsinki, Finland. Hellinger, M. and Buβmann, H. (eds) (2001). Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hellinger, M. and Buβmann, H. (eds) (2002). Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hellinger, M. and Buβmann, H. (eds) (2003). Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johnsen, O.R. (2008). ‘He’s a big old girl!’: Negotiation by gender inversion in gay men’s speech. Journal of Homosexuality 54: 150–168. Knisely, K.A. (2020). Le français non-binaire: Linguistic forms used by non-binary speakers of French. Foreign Language Annals 53(4): 850–876. Konnelly, L. and Cowper, E. (2020). Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1): 40. Konnelly, L., Bjorkman, B. and Lee, A. (2022). Towards an engaged linguistics: Nonbinary pronouns as a site of advocacy in research and teaching. Journal of Language and Sexuality 11(2): 133–140. Liberman, M. (2017). Écriture inclusive. Language Log. Available at https://languagelog​.ldc​.upenn​.edu​/nll/​?p​ =34912. Lindlof, T.R. and Taylor, B.C. (2002). Qualitative Communication Research Methods (second edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Loughlin, A. (2021). Frequency of singular they for gender stereotypes and the influence of the queer community.  A presentation at the conference: The 27th Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference (virtual), California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, 23.05.2021. López, Á. (2019). Tú, yo, elle y el lenguaje no binario. La Linterna del Traductor 19: 142–150. Michelson, K. (2015). Gender Across Languages Vol. 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Motschenbacher, H. (2010). Female-as-norm (FAN): A typology of female and feminine generics. In M. Bieswanger, H. Motschenbacher and S. Mühleisen (eds) Language in Its Socio-Cultural Context: Explorations in Gendered, Global and Media Uses. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 35–67. Motschenbacher, H. (2016). A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics: Initial considerations. In J. Abbou and F. Baider (eds) Gender, Language and the Periphery: Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 65–88. Papadopoulos, B. (2019). Morphological Gender Innovations in Spanish of Genderqueer Speakers/Innovaciones al género morfológico en el español de hablantes genderqueer. Undergraduate Thesis, The University of California, Berkeley, USA. Papadopoulos, B. (2021a). Queer speakers and gendered language: A new linguistic gender typology. A presentation at the 27th Annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, May 23, 2021, University of California, Berkeley. Papadopoulos, B. (2021b). How to make a Gendered Language Inclusive: Sensitivity to Gendered Personal References in Global Spanish. Master Thesis, The University of California, Berkeley, USA. Rodríguez, N. and Ryave, A. (2002). Systematic Self-Observation (Series: Qualitative research methods series – Volume 49). London: Sage. Rott, J.A. (2023). Integration and disruption: A preliminary typology of pronominal innovation strategies. A presentation at the seminar ‘Grammatical and Social Facets of Gender’, February 16, 2023, ZAS, Berlin. Santos, C.E. (2017). The history, struggles, and potential of the term Latinx. Latina/o Psychology Today 4(2): 7–14.

Further reading Bjorkman, B. (2017). Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2 (1): 1–13.

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Individuals’ pronoun choice Conrod, K. (2020). Pronouns and gender in language. In Kira Hall & Rusty Barrett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality (online edition, Oxford Academic, 10 July 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.63, accessed 2 Mar. 2023. Dunne, P. and Mulder, J. (2018). Beyond the binary: Towards a third sex category in Germany? German Law Journal 19(3): 627–648. Knisely, K.A. and Russell, E.L. (eds) (Forthcoming). Redoing Linguistic Worlds: Unmaking Gender Binaries, Remaking Gender Pluralities. Multilingual Matters. Konnelly, L. (2021). Nuance and normativity in trans linguistic research. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10(1): 71–82. Milani, T. (2018). Queering Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Sheffield: Equinox. Miltersen, E.H. (2018). De, den, hen, and the rest a pilot study of the use of gender-neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns in Danish. Journal of Language Works 3(1): 31–42. Moulton, K. et al. (2020). Singular they in context. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5 (1). 1–13. Simpson, L. and Dewaele, J.-M. (2019). Self-misgendering among multilingual transgender speakers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 256: 103–128. Vaid-Menon, A. (2020). Beyond the Gender Binary. New York: Penguin Workshop.

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33 MISGENDERING IN THE MEDIA Kat Gupta

1. Introduction In this chapter, I examine the function of pronouns in shaping our perceptions of transgender people’s genders. I focus on the representation of transgender people for two reasons. First, as I will discuss, changing one’s pronouns is a common component of social transition. Second, use of the wrong gendered pronouns is a form of misgendering – an act of undermining an individual’s identity, often due to a lack of belief in the validity of transgender people’s gender identities. As I discuss in this chapter, a large percentage of transgender people report that media transphobia negatively impacts their mental health (Stonewall 2018, Trans Actual 2021). Transgender people are very conscious of the way that transphobic rhetoric in the media informs friends, family members, colleagues, and medical staff, and that this can lead to physical, verbal, and mental abuse from them. By informing and shaping broader social attitudes, transphobic media has real-world consequences. Transgender people are people who ‘move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender’ (Stryker 2017: 1). The category of ‘transgender’ includes trans women and trans men who transition between binary genders as well as those who identify outside the gender binary. Many – but not all – transgender people seek social, medical, and/or legal transition to better reflect who we are. I use ‘social transition’ to mean changing one’s name and pronouns in everyday life, ‘legal transition’ to mean legally changing one’s gender and name and replacing documentation such as passports and birth certificates to reflect these, and ‘medical transition’ to mean accessing medical treatment such as hormone therapy and surgeries. It is important to note that not all trans people will – or indeed can – transition, or may transition in some aspects but not all, i.e., transitioning socially but not legally or transitioning socially and legally but not accessing medical interventions. Not all transgender people will seek medical interventions or, indeed, be able to access them. Legal recognition may not be possible: at the time of writing, legal recognition for non-binary people is limited, with only a handful of countries (e.g., Argentina, Australia, Malta, and New Zealand) issuing passports or other legal documentation recognising people who do not identify as male or female. There may also be barriers to social transition, such as lack of acceptance from friends and family, the potential for problems in the workplace, or living in a community where deviation from cisheteronormative gender norms is not tolerated.

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Changing the pronouns that one uses can be an important part of transition. In languages with systems of gendered pronouns, personal pronouns are used to communicate and recognise someone’s gender (or lack of gender). In her reflection How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story, Donna Minkowitz (2018) discusses her reporting of the murder of Brandon Teena, a transmasculine person who was raped and murdered in Nebraska, USA, in December 1993. Teena most consistently presented as masculine, described himself in masculine terms, and used masculine pronouns. In her original story, Minkowitz framed his rape and murder as an attack on a gender non-conforming woman. In her 2018 reflection, she observes that her understanding of Teena as a butch lesbian fundamentally misunderstood who Brandon Teena was and, therefore, the nature of his violent death. This lack of understanding is reflected in the pronouns that she used for Teena: she and her. As Minkowitz (2018) explains, Where I went wrong was to deny transness as a real possibility for who Brandon would have become – and, in fact, the possibility he mentioned most often in the later years of his life, and the way in which he most consistently told his intimates he wanted to be seen. Pronouns are intimately involved with being seen or not seen. As Feinberg (quoted in Minkowitz 2018) notes below, changing one’s chosen pronouns also comes with high stakes, particular if the individual is ‘read’ as transgender as a result. It’s not so much how I see Brandon Teena, as how Brandon Teena saw himself. I use the pronoun ‘he’ because a), it’s the pronoun Brandon Teena chose, but b), it’s ultimately what he died for As the data I use in this chapter demonstrates, transgender people’s pronouns may come under intense scrutiny. The use of pronouns that the transgender person has rejected is a denial of identity and agency, and it is, in itself, a form of violence. While symbolic, this violence both causes psychological distress to trans people and, as I discuss later in this chapter, serves to delegitimise and erase trans people’s existence. I begin this chapter by surveying the existing material on misgendering in the media. I then move to exploring case studies of the UK press representation of two transgender women, Lucy Meadows and Chelsea Manning. Using corpus linguistic approaches, I focus on the pronouns used to reference them and focus on patterns of use. Corpus linguistics uses the concordance line, a powerful tool for identifying and presenting these patterns of use. I argue that media misgendering can be more subtle than simply using previous names and photos from before or earlier in an individual’s transition. Instead, I demonstrate that pronouns – and, in particular, the use of the wrong pronouns in selected quoted material – are used to undermine an individual’s identity.

2.  Critical summary of issues and topics Pronouns are intimately connected with how we are perceived by others. Billiard (2016, also see Olveira-Araujo 2022) examines how trans people’s identities are validated in news discourse in mainstream US media and identifies 15 strategies organised into four main themes: (1) misnaming and misgendering; (2) misrepresentations of transgender identity; (3) use of the transgender ‘trickster’ trope, and (4) sexualisation of the transgender body (Billiard 2016: 4196). Pronoun use forms one of these 15 strategies: use of the individual’s preferred pronouns legitimise their identity, while use of pronouns reflecting the individual’s assigned sex at birth delegitimise their identity. Billard demonstrates that misgendering through pronoun use does not occur in isolation, but is part of a wider repertoire of strategies used to undermine the reality of a transgender person’s lived experience of gender. 481

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However, pronouns can be challenging to study because they require an anaphoric or cataphoric referent. As such, research methods that allow this close attention to the text are needed. This tends to be (critical) discourse analysis when a small number of texts are examined and discourse analysis is sometimes used in combination with corpus linguistic approaches when the researcher wishes to explore a greater number of texts. Corpus tools are very good at locating strings of characters and thus can quickly and accurately identify all pronouns in a set of texts; however, manual identification of the referent is necessary to correctly assign a referent to each pronoun. This is a more challenging prospect when an individual may be referred to using different sets of gendered pronouns, singular they or neopronouns such as zie/hir or ey/em at different points in their lifespan or in different contexts. A number of transgender people may choose to use a combination of gendered and nongendered pronouns – for example, both she/her and they/them, or he/him and zie/hir – in different contexts. As such, extremely careful work to identify the referent is necessary. In this section, I discuss how the use of misgendering through pronoun use delegitimises an individual’s identity. I focus on two aspects: pronoun use as erasing an individual’s gender identity and pronoun use as a process of fixing a potentially fluid gender identity within a binary system of stable gender.

2.1  Pronouns as a site of erasure Wayne (2005: 87) locates pronouns as a particular site for erasure, nonsignification, and violence, observing that ‘[i]f transgendered people cannot speak they are nonetheless spoken to and about, and here pronouns not only fail to signify but can lead to violence against the subject who is estranged within the binary sex/gender system’. Key to misgendering through erasure is a belief that, when determining someone’s ‘real’ or ‘true’ gender, biological sex as expressed through their assigned sex at birth takes precedence over how an individual experiences and shapes their gender (Schilt and Westbrook 2009: 441). How a trans person moves through the world as a gendered being – in friendships, relationships, work and leisure – is deemed less real than the sex that they were assigned at birth. The most common form of misgendering through pronoun use is through using pronouns that do not reflect the individual’s gender identity and that instead reflect the individual’s sex assigned at birth. This is especially clear in case studies of news reporting focusing on individuals, including Brandon Teena (Sloop 2000, Squires and Brouwer 2002), Christine Daniel (Pieper 2015), and Chelsea Manning (Capuzza 2014, 2015, Cloud 2014). People whose bodies challenge an apparently straightforward biological gender binary come under particular social and media scrutiny: this is reflected in the amount of academic work examining how the athlete Caster Semenya has been discussed in the press (Amy-Chinn 2011, Vannini and Fornsller 2011, Sloop 2012, Winslow 2012, Capuzza 2014). Other work on trans representation examines broader patterns rather than individuals: misgendering as expressed through use of names, pronouns, and grammatical forms is a key pattern discussed by these authors. This body of work includes material focused on particular types of news event, such as Schilt and Westbrook’s (2009) work on the murders of trans women, and representation over a particular time period in a country’s press (e.g., Baker 2014, Capuzza 2015, Åkerlund 2019, Zottola 2021, Olveira-Araujo 2022). There are subtle but important differences in how transphobia and the denial of lived experience are utilised against specifically trans women. Serano (2007) identifies that transmisogyny, an intersection of transphobia and misogyny, results in violence especially against trans women. Westbrook examined ‘7,183 individual news stories about 232 homicides’, published in the US mainstream news media between 1990 and 2005 about the murders of people described as ‘doing gender so as to possibly be seen as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth’ (Schilt and Westbrook 2009: 447). She found no examples in her data of cis women responding with deadly violence to trans men; instead, 482

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her data showed that, for the most part, trans women died at the hands of cis men. Her data showed that journalists tended to frame violence against trans women as ‘resulting from private, sexual interactions in which the perpetrator feels “tricked” into homosexuality by “gender deceivers”’ (Schilt and Westbrook 2009: 452). In order to justify this violence, the transgender victims are portrayed as male in terms of descriptions, names, and pronouns. Their female identities are erased, glimpsed only in descriptions of ‘crossdressing’ and wearing women’s clothing. In their analysis of media coverage of Brandon Teena and Sean O’Neill, Squires and Brouwer (2002: 283) observe that, in expressing a male gender, both Teena and O’Neill were ‘charged with performing a privileged identity … in order to mask non-privileged identities’ and therefore not merely engaged in deception but claimed a masculinity that was not theirs. While feminine pronouns tended to be used to refer to both O’Neill and Teena to undermine their masculine identities and presentations, masculine pronouns were used when discussing their relationships with cisgender women. Squires and Brouwer (2002: 298) note that this preserves the impression that these women believed that they were in heterosexual relationships with cis men and thus were not lesbians. It is crucial to identify the purpose served by any pronoun use, even when they are ostensibly the correct ones. In this case, the preservation of heterosexuality was prioritised over a commitment to understanding transgender people solely in terms of sex assigned at birth.

2.2  Pronouns as limiting possibilities Pronoun use can also solidify a gender that is fluid or in flux. Some transgender people, especially but not limited to genderfluid and some genderqueer people, may use different pronouns to indicate that their gender is not fixed or stable. Other transgender people may choose to use different pronouns depending on social context, e.g., whether they are open about their transgender identity. When reporting on the death of a trans person, it may not be known which pronouns an individual preferred in life. In their article Fixing Gwen, Barker-Plummer (2013) examined newspaper reporting of the murder of Gwen Araujo, a transgender 17-year-old Californian. By examining 212 news articles written about the case between October 2002, when Araujo was murdered, and June 2006, when the last of hir murderers was sentenced, Barker-Plummer identifies strategies used to accomplish their ‘persistent tendency to contain and restrict gender meanings and to recuperate critical gender challenges back into conventional binary categories’. Initially, newspaper reporting used masculine pronouns and masculine names; however, ‘the coverage of Araujo shifted significantly over time and s/he went from being presented as a cross dresser (‘the boy who dressed as a girl’) to a ‘transgender teen,’ from ‘Eddie’ to ‘Gwen,’ and from ‘he’ to ‘she’ quite quickly’ (Barker-Plummer 2013: 715). Crucially, Araujo was only recognised as a victim of a hate crime – a manifestation of systematic rather than individual violence – after they were recognised as always a girl and not, therefore, troubling the boundaries of binary gender by refusing to be easily categorised. ‘Fixing’, therefore, carries two meanings: that what is perceived to be broken shall be repaired and rehabilitated and that what is messy, unstable, queer, and alive is to be pinned down and stabilised with no room for fluidity.

3.  Two case studies: Trans women in the UK press To illustrate some of the issues raised in this chapter, I examine two case studies. I focus on the UK media representation of two transgender women in 2012–2013: Lucy Meadows and Chelsea Manning. Their stories were reported in news media at a time when there was intense public and political interest in UK press culture. The UK context is significant because a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press, chaired by Lord Leveson, took place in 2011–2012. While this initially focused on so-called phone hacking, the inquiry expanded in scope to address freedom of the press, ethical and unethical practices, competing public interests, issues 483

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of data protection, and the relationship between the press and politicians, the police, and regulatory bodies. The UK organisation Trans Media Watch (TMW) made two written submissions and one oral submission to the Leveson Inquiry (Trans Media Watch 2011). TMW is a ‘charity dedicated to improving media coverage of trans and intersex issues’ which ‘want[s] to see an end to the prejudice, bigotry and hate routinely directed at trans people and [wants] the media to play its role – no longer fuelling these things’ (Trans Media Watch, n.d.). TMW’s submissions identified two aspects of negative media representation: ‘the creation and sustainment of a climate of ridicule and humiliation’ and ‘singling out individual transgender people and their families for sustained personal intrusion’. They identified four key ways in which this climate was created and sustained:

• • • •

Routine use of previous names; Routine use of ‘before’ photos; Demeaning and intimidating language for comic effect; Misgendering.

The Leveson Inquiry report (Leveson 2012: 448) highlighted TMW’s evidence, noting that: transgender people are subject to disproportionate and damaging press attention simply by dint of being members of that group, rather than in consequence of anything they might have said or done, and because of what they describe as an obsession in parts of the British press with ‘outing’ members of the transgender community. This climate of ridicule and humiliation has an effect on trans people. Surveys conducted by Trans Media Watch (2011) and McNeil et al. (2012) offered an insight into the mental health of British transgender, non-binary, and agender respondents and, in particular, the effect of negative press reporting. McNeil et al. (2012) found that transgender respondents linked representations of trans people in the media to negative reactions from family and friends (34%); verbal abuse (21%); negative reactions at work (19%); negative reactions from service providers, including health-care providers (12%); physical abuse (8%); and serious ongoing family problems/complete family breakdown (5%). These issues have not improved – instead, they have worsened. Stonewall’s (2018) LGBT in Britain - Trans Report and Trans Actual’s (2021) Trans lives survey 2021: Enduring the UK’s hostile environment both highlight trans people’s experiences of discrimination and inequality. Trans Actual (2021: 5) notes the pervasive effects of media transphobia on trans individuals. Of the participants surveyed:

• 99% have experienced transphobia on social media, and 97% reported witnessing transphobia in digital and print media;

• Media transphobia was identified as impacting transphobic street harassment (93%), treatment by family members (85%), treatment by colleagues (81%) and treatment by friends (70%);

• Over 70% felt that media transphobia impacted their mental health to some extent, with nearly two thirds reporting that it impacted them ‘moderately’ or ‘very much’.

It is clear, therefore, that media transphobia has real-world consequences. Media representation of trans people that portrays trans people as dangerous, predatory, inauthentic, or mentally ill, such as that identified by Baker (2014), affects trans people’s interactions with others, whether these are strangers on the street, colleagues, friends, or family members. 484

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3.1  Lucy Meadows and Chelsea Manning Lucy Meadows and Chelsea Manning’s stories were both high profile and widely reported in the United Kingdom. As Figure 33.1 shows, news stories about both women were published in 2013, and the timelines of their stories intersect. Lucy Meadows was a primary school teacher whose transition was announced in a school newsletter in December 2012, was reported in the local press, and was subsequently picked up by the national press. She was found dead at her home on 19 March 2013. The coroner leading the inquest into her death made a verdict of suicide but condemned the media response as intrusive, sensational, and a factor in the distress she experienced in the months leading up to her death. Prior to her transition, Chelsea Manning was a US Army intelligence analyst. She was arrested for leaking classified information about the United States to WikiLeaks. She was subsequently tried on 22 offences, was convicted of 17 offences on 30 July 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison on 21 August 2013. Manning announced her female identity in a statement released on 22 August 2013. In February 2015 her pronoun choice was changed in official documents. Crucially, both women were largely unable to speak on their own behalf. Meadows died by suicide in March 2013 and much of the reporting about her occurred after her death. Manning was first on trial then a prisoner, and thus her wishes were primarily communicated through her legal representatives. As such, both women were unable to challenge their representation in the press themselves, whether through formal legal challenges, news interviews or statements, or self-produced material on social media and blogs. The press treatment of both women included the misuse of pronouns. I identify three main contexts that account for the use of masculine pronouns: the newspaper’s choice of reporting pronoun, direct quotations, and journalists’ repetition of quotations.

3.2  The corpora Three corpora were collected using Nexis: two focused corpora of UK regional, online, tabloid, and broadsheet news containing articles about Lucy Meadows and Chelsea Manning, respectively, and one reference corpus containing general UK online, tabloid, and broadsheet news articles from the same period. The time period examined was October 2012 to October 2013. The search criterion for the focused corpora was that the article must contain the individual’s name in the title or body of the article. This was to ensure a focus on the individual woman rather than more general news articles about transgender issues. It is important to note that, as a result, the texts included are opportunistic and are not balanced in terms of tabloid vs. broadsheet, regional vs. national, or publication. Table 33.1 summarises the size of these corpora.

Figure 33.1  Timeline of events

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Number of texts Number of words

Lucy Meadows corpus

Chelsea Manning corpus

General news corpus

166 108,643

135 81,612

7000 3,954,808

Table 33.2 Frequency of gendered pronouns before and after Meadows’ death Pronoun

her she he his him Total feminine pronouns Total masculine pronouns

Total frequency

Before death

After death

Raw frequency

Percentage

Raw frequency

Percentage

670 471 160 153 53 1141 366

6 20 121 90 50 26 261

0.9 4.3 75.6 58.8 94.3 2.3 71

664 451 39 63 3 1115 102

99.1 95.6 24.4 40.4 5.7 97.7 27.9

The texts identified by searching for Lucy Meadows focused on Meadows herself. Chelsea Manning was frequently mentioned in passing in the context of information security, whistleblowing, and transgender rights such as Pride marches and events, other trans women, the US ban on trans people serving in military forces, US recognition of trans veterans, and gender-neutral pronouns. Of the 425 news texts mentioning Manning, only 135 texts discussed Manning’s case in depth or were authored by Manning herself. The texts were analysed using WordSmith Tools 7 (Scott 2016).

4.  Lucy Meadows There are 2515 third-person singular gendered pronouns (she, her, he, him, his) in the Lucy Meadows corpus, of which 1507 are used to describe Meadows herself. The female pronouns she and her are largely used in reference to Meadows, with some reference to cis women and other trans women. Significantly, gendered pronoun use shows a very clear trend, as indicated in Table 33.2. As Table 33.2 shows, it was rare for news articles about Meadows to use feminine pronouns to refer to her while she was alive. Only six (0.9 percent) of the 670 occurrences of her and 20 (4.2 percent) of the 471 occurrences of she used to describe Meadows came from articles published before her death. Instead, there is a striking tendency for the masculine pronouns he, him, and his to be used. These masculine pronouns continued to be used after her death, albeit less frequently. It was only after Meadows died that feminine pronouns predominate: 664 (99.1 percent) of the occurrences of her and 451 (95.6 percent) – were used to describe Meadows after her death. What this quantitative evidence shows is that while she was alive and able to read the press coverage of her transition, media pronoun use represented Meadows as male a total of 261 times. Pronouns reflecting Meadows’ female identity occurred a mere 26 times. It is only in the reporting of Meadows’ death and subsequent events that feminine pronouns predominate. These shifts in pronoun choice demonstrate a striking change in the way Lucy Meadows was represented in the press. However, quantitative data tells only a partial story; it is necessary to analyse how these pronouns are used in context. The following three subsections address this by discussing three main patterns in masculine pronoun use: the newspapers’ choice of reporting pronoun, direct quotation, and repetition. 486

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4.1  Newspaper choice of reporting pronoun In this section I focus on pronoun use when reporting Meadows’ words and actions, for example in ‘he told staff and parents he was changing sex’. In this sentence, he appears to reflect the journalist’s reporting of Meadows’ gender rather than Meadows’ understanding of her own gender. The copula be is used to refer to the past and the future; was describes a past state of being while will describes future intentions and possibilities. This is especially revealing in the context of gender transition: was describes a potentially unhappy, difficult, and/or dysphoric past while will creates potential of a trans future alight with trans possibilities (c.f. Pearce 2018, Pearce et al. 2020: 4–6). In the corpus, he was and he will are used to paraphrase Meadows’ own explanations to her pupils, the school’s announcement and explanation to parents, and some speculation about her future medical treatment.​​ The usage in Concordances 1 and 2 reflects the newspapers’ understanding of Meadows’ identity rather than Meadows’ own voice and her employer’s supportive and well-phrased announcement. The notice in the school newsletter accounts for most of the 20 occurrences of she before the reporting of Meadows’ death. It reads: ‘Mr Upton has recently made a significant change in his life and will be transitioning to live as a woman. After the Christmas break, she will return to work as Miss Meadows’. While this statement uses both masculine and feminine, it elegantly shifts between them. Meadows’ past presentation as male is acknowledged through the reference to a previous name and the pronoun his; however, the school announcement follows this with ‘she will return to work as Miss Meadows’, thus indicating her future intentions, potential, and possibilities. If the newspaper reporting followed this usage, we might expect he was and she will. Instead, there are four occurrences of

1

y Meadows. He explained to pupils that

he was

a “born with a girl’s brain in a b

2

y Meadows. He explained to pupils that

he was

born with a girl’s brain in a boy

3

Nathan Upton, 32, says he always knew

he was

born into the wrong sex. Yet he ma

4

Nathan Upton, 32, says he always knew

he was

born into the wrong sex. Yet he ma

5

Nathan Upton, 32, says he always knew

he was

born into the wrong sex. Yet he ma

6

s at the Church of England school that

he was

born “with a girl’s brain in a boy

7

l teacher, 32, who announced to pupils

he was

changing sex is found dead at home

8

l teacher, 32, who announced to pupils

he was

changing sex is found dead at home

9

A TEACHER who told staff and parents

he was

changing sex and coming back to sc

10

eacher who told parents and colleagues

he was

changing sex and coming back to sc

11

A TEACHER who told staff and parents

he was

changing sex and coming back to sc

12

eacher who told parents and colleagues

he was

changing sex and coming back to sc

13

e calling him Miss Meadows. He told us

he was

going to become a girl after Chris

14

calling him Miss Meadows. “He told us

he was

going to become a girl after Chris

Figure 33.2  Concordance 1: occurrences of he was

1

rimary school teacher has told parents

he will

come back next term as a WOMAN. N

2

primary school teacher has told pupils

he will

return after the Christmas holida

3

primary school teacher has told pupils

he will

return after the Christmas holida

4

he has a sex change op at Christmas.

He will

return to the primary school in t

5

s continuing sex change. It is thought

he will

undergo hormone therapy and a ful

6

s continuing sex change. It is thought

he will

undergo hormone therapy and a ful

Figure 33.3  Concordance 2: occurrences of he will

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he will when reporting this announcement and two occurrences of he will when speculating about Meadows’ medical transition, indicating a male future for Meadows and a lack of recognition of her trans future.

4.2  Direct quotation The second strand to this analysis focuses on the use of direct quotation. In choosing to directly quote some interviewees, the newspaper makes a decision about who to quote and whose point of view should be reproduced to a wider audience. As Table 33.3 shows, direct quotations accounted for a significant percentage of uses – a minimum of 42.6 percent in the case of he and a maximum of 70 percent in the case of him. People quoted in the news texts include Meadows’ primary school pupils, parents of children at the school, and Meadows’ former wife’s parents. These interviewees bring with them different levels of awareness and support. Some interviewees, notably Meadows’ former father-in-law quoted in the Daily Mail on 19 December 2012 soon after news of her transition was reported, are clearly supportive of Meadows but are not yet using the appropriate pronouns: (1) He is a lovely person as well and we will support him no matter what [. . .] If he was a rubbish teacher then they would not have stood by him. All the time he has been teaching as a he or she, everybody has said what a good teacher he is. When we first heard it was a shock yes but we are going to stand by him (2) A grandparent praised Meadows as ‘brave’, again using masculine pronouns: ‘A grandmother, collecting her seven-year-old granddaughter from the school, said: ‘It has been handled very sensitively by the school and I think it’s a very brave thing for him to do’. Similarly, a mother of a pupil also uses masculine pronouns while describing Meadows in a positive way: (3) One mother was quoted by the Mail as saying: ‘My children are happy. I don’t see anything wrong with it. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last’. This quote normalises Meadows’ transition as something that takes place within the bounds of the familiar, as something with precedent and as something likely to happen again. These uses of masculine pronouns are naïve uses: while the quoted speaker uses the incorrect set of gendered pronouns, their language at the level of the utterance indicates support for Meadows. However, not all parents and grandparents were supportive. Four statements from one parent, Wayne Cowie, appear in the corpus and, as I discuss in the next section, have additional presence through repetition in other articles.

Table 33.3 Frequency of masculine pronouns in direct and indirect quotes Pronoun

Direct quotes

Indirect quotes

Percentage accounted for by quotes

he his him

60 71 27

9 20 10

42.6% 58.3% 70%

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(4) Wayne Cowie, whose ten-year-old son has been taught by Mr Upton for three years, said his children were worried and confused. ‘My middle boy thinks that he might wake up with a girl’s brain because he was told that Mr Upton, as he got older, got a girl’s brains’, (5) Dad-of-three Wayne Cowie said: ‘I didn’t think I’d need the birds and the bees talk with my sons until they were at high school, and now they are coming home asking about transsexuals. ‘My lad is very confused and upset about it. He should have taken a couple of years off to sort himself out’. (6) Wayne Cowie, 35, a father of three who has a child at the school, said: ‘I have not forced my way of life on to him so why is he forcing his on to my kids? He went for the job as a man. The kids are all going to be laughing and giggling at him. He is still Mr Upton but in a dress. He should start a new life in a new place and at a new school’. (7) Talking about Mr Upton, Mr Cowie said: ‘I have not forced my way of life on to him so why is he forcing his on to my kids? We all knew what he was. My partner saw him dressed as a woman. This has been forced upon us. I can’t fault the school but I’d like to see how it’s doing in a year’. Cowie uses a variety of strategies to undermine Meadows’ identity: he mocks her appearance by invoking the transmisogynist trope of trans women merely as men in dresses (c.f. Baker 2014), he invokes the figure of the child as an innocent who must be protected from the adult concerns of sex, with which transgender people are inextricably linked (c.f. Gill-Peterson 2018), undermines her transgender identity through describing it as a ‘way of life’, and identifies her in terms of a male gender through pronoun use. Similar strategies are used by other parents who are not supportive of Meadows: (8) A mum said: ‘It’s his life, but he can dress as a woman in his own time. It’s just going to confuse the children.’ And another said he should have changed schools. She said ‘I think he should have left St Mary’s and joined another school with his new name for a fresh start’. Like Cowie, these parents express a belief that being transgender is a lifestyle choice that can be confined to one’s evenings and weekends and, again, consistently use masculine pronouns. As summarised in Table 33.3, quotes account for a significant percentage of masculine pronouns in this corpus. It is important to recognise that journalists make choices about who they quote and, therefore, whose use of pronouns are disseminated to an audience. The selection of quotes I have discussed here enables journalists to position Meadows as male in the guise of reflecting local opinion about her. By examining these quotes in more detail it becomes apparent that some speakers are supportive of Meadows; however, the cumulative effect of such quotes is that Meadows is only recognised as female in pronoun use after her death.

4.3  Repetition Directly connected to the issues of direct quotation is that of repetition. Quotes are recycled extensively across a number of days – even months – and across different newspapers, across both print and online platforms and in both news reports and commentary. One 10-year-old pupil’s comment, ‘He spoke to us and said he’s going to be changing’ was found five times in the corpus. This comment was initially printed in the Lancashire Telegraph on the 19 December 2012, before being reproduced in the Daily Mail (20/12/2012), the Irish Daily Mail (20/12/2012), and the MailOnline (20/12/2012 and 12/03/2013), thus establishing its spread across different regions, news platforms, and time periods. 489

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Similarly, Cowie’s statement of ‘My middle boy thinks that he might wake up with a girl’s brain because he was told that Mr Upton, as he got older, got a girl’s brains’ was found six times in the corpus, all in articles published by the Daily Mail or MailOnline. This statement was repeated twice in the MailOnline on 20 December 2012 – once in a report attributed to James Tozer and Nazia Parveen and once in Richard Littlejohn’s commentary (see below), before being used in the Daily Mail (20/12/12), the MailOnline (21/12/2012), the Daily Mail (21/12/2012), and the Daily Mail (12/03/2013). The most repeated set of words in the corpus was the title of a commentary by Richard Littlejohn, a Daily Mail columnist, who wrote, ‘He’s not in the wrong body . . . he’s in the wrong job’. This phrase occurred 23 times but at different points in the news narrative and in different contexts. The commentary was published on 20 December 2012 on the MailOnline before being printed by the Daily Mail on 21 December 2012. This shows how an article can target print and online audiences while also entrenching a position. This commentary was prominent in the corpus because it did not fade into obscurity and the title was quoted in the aftermath of Meadows’ death. The first news publication to quote Littlejohn was the website Liberal Conspiracy on 21 March 2013 in a piece titled, ‘Lucy Meadows, and the tabloids that harassed her’. On 22 March 2013 the Independent quoted the title in one article and the Guardian quoted it in two, one reporting Meadows’ death and one reporting on the petition to fire Littlejohn for his comments. On 23 March 2013, the Independent, the Independent’s online coverage, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian quote the phrase in the context of Meadows’ death and emerging concerns about press ethics. The Independent reports on ‘intrusive press coverage’ and the Guardian argues that Meadows ‘was ‘monstered’ by media after transition became public’. The third stage of quoting Littlejohn’s title occurred when the coroner leading the inquest into Meadows’ death quoted it in his remarks. On 29 May 2013 the Huffington Post quotes it in their report on the inquest and the Guardian quotes it in when observing that ‘Daily Mail [was] singled out [by the coroner] over “ridicule and humiliation”’. It is clear from the context that these reports quote Littlejohn’s title as an example of egregious transphobia: he is described as ‘a polemicist’ with a ‘prurient interest in transsexual people as far as asking how they take a pee’ going ‘on the offensive’, who ‘accused’ Meadows of not caring about the children she taught. However, by reproducing this quote in order to critique it, news outlets reproduce the text that they condemn. Repetition, therefore, contributes to the wider circulation of negative discourses about trans people and may therefore affect public understandings. As this data shows, particularly in combination with selective quoting, use of misgendering pronouns can be widely disseminated across different newspapers, platforms, regions, and time periods. This is particularly striking in the case of Littlejohn’s comments about Lucy Meadows that were reproduced in May 2013, almost six months after they were first published. Reproduction of such obvious transphobic comments, even if to condemn them, risks legitimising them and may serve as a reminder that Meadows’ gender was subject to hostility and rejection.

5.  Chelsea Manning The pronouns used to refer to Chelsea Manning pattern in a very different way to those used for Lucy Meadows. I argue that this is due to two reasons. First, Manning’s sentencing and announcement of her female identity came after the inquest into Meadows’ death and the explicit discussion of the role of media transphobia. With heightened awareness of the mistakes made when initially reporting Meadows’ experiences, journalists and news editors may have been keen to avoid making the same mistakes and/or may have been more aware of potential professional and social condemnation that may follow hostile reporting. Second, information about Manning was largely released through her legal team, who consistently used the correct pronouns. There was limited opportunity to interview 490

Misgendering in the media Table 33.4  Feminine pronouns

she her

Chelsea Manning

Other trans women

Cis women

Uncategorised

Total

722 739

23 16

29 18

2 2

776 775

93% 95.3%

3% 2.1%

3.7% 2.3%

0.3% 0.25%

Table 33.5  Masculine pronouns

he him his

Chelsea Manning

Other trans women

Men

179 40 195

3 2

234 5 48

42.8% 89% 79.6%

0.7% 0.8%

56% 11% 19.6%

Uncategorised

Total

2 -

418 45 245

0.47% -

other people about Manning, and so her legal team’s comments comprise the majority of quoted material. As Table 33.4 shows, the feminine pronouns occurring in this data tend to be used in reference to Manning herself. There is some mention of other women, both cis and trans, but these make up a minority of referents. Table 33.5 indicates that masculine pronouns are used to refer to Manning. However, it is again important to examine these in context.

5.1  Newspaper choice of reporting pronoun As with Lucy Meadows, occurrences of masculine pronouns may be due to the newspaper’s choice of reporting pronoun. The masculine pronouns collocate with verbs indicating intention (he intends), indicating desires (he wants, requested that his), or indicating the introduction of new information (he announced, he revealed). Again, these usages reflect the newspapers’ understanding of Manning’s gender rather than the pronouns that she has chosen to use and, presumably, has instructed her legal team to use. He wants occurs four times as ‘A statement from Manning, read on NBC News’s “Today” programme, said that as he makes the “transition” into the next phase of his life, he wants “everyone to know the real me”’. and appears on telegraph​.co​​.uk on 22 August, 23 August, and 29 August 2013, showing that a statement may be reported both at the time it is released and some time afterwards. He intends is used to express Manning’s desire for, and intention to create, a future in which she is able to live as a woman and be recognised as such. It occurs in two sentences: ‘BRADLEY Manning, the US army private jailed for 35 years for leaking classified documents, yesterday revealed he intends to live out the rest of his life as a woman’ was reported in the Express and Express Online on 23 August 2013. The sentence, ‘Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, said he had not indicated whether he intends to have sex reassignment surgery’ occurs four times in the Daily Mirror (national edition), Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland edition), and Daily Mirror (Ireland edition) on 23 August 2013. This sentence is immediately followed by a quotation from Coombs in which he uses feminine pronouns: ‘He added: “The ultimate goal is to be comfortable in her skin and to be the person that she’s never had an opportunity to be”’. It is interesting, therefore, that the newspapers do not follow Coombs’ lead. A second set of sentences focus on Manning’s explicit requests for supporters to use feminine pronouns to refer to her. A quote from her statement, ‘I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun – except in official mail to the confinement facil491

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ity’, appears 29 times in the corpus. However, despite Manning’s clearly stated request for the use of feminine pronouns to refer to her, three newspapers chose to continue their use of masculine pronouns when paraphrasing her statement. ‘Manning requested that his supporters now refer to him as “she”’ appears on telegraph​.co​​.uk on 22 August 2013 and in the Daily Telegraph on 23 August 2013. ‘In a statement read out on NBC television’s Today show, the 25-year-old asked that everyone refer to him by his new name and use the feminine pronoun when talking to or about him as he embarked on a new life as a woman’ appears in The Times (Ireland edition) and The Times (London edition) on 23 August 2013. ‘The statement asked supporters to refer to him by his new name and the feminine pronoun and was signed Chelsea E. Manning’ appears in the Daily Mail on 23 August 2013. Manning’s statement clearly expresses her wish to live as a woman and her request that other people use her chosen name and the appropriate pronouns. In this context, the decision to use masculine pronouns is as odds with Manning’s stated wishes. Using pronouns that Manning herself explicitly rejects imposes the writer’s understanding of Manning’s gender upon her. A similar pattern can be observed in Concordances 3 and 4. The use of announced and revealed indicates that Manning is introducing new information – in this case, about her gender and the gender-affirming medical care she seeks. Again, Manning clearly states her wishes; using feminine pronouns would be consistent with this and the future that she would like to create for herself. The use of he therefore points towards Manning’s past, when she was perceived as male, rather than her future as a woman.​​ A second set of concordance lines focuses on communicating Manning’s change in how she wished to be known. Concordances 5 and 6 use feminine and masculine pronouns in quote marks, indicating that these serve as linguistic examples to demonstrate the correct pronouns. These, therefore, seem to be functioning differently to pronouns that directly refer to Manning and instead indicate what Capuzza (2015) identifies as metareporting, or news reporting on reporting practices.​​ As the examples discussed in this section show, there is a disconnect between the pronouns that Manning requested that people used to refer to her and the pronouns that journalists and editors actually used. However, it is important to recognise that some of these occurrences are present as linguistic examples. These are usually orthographically marked through the use of quote marks. What these indicate is a discourse about the use (and misuse) of pronouns themselves. Manning’s choice of pronouns was resisted by the military: as The Guardian reports on 5 March 2015, a court order from the US army Court of Criminal Appeals instructed the military to refer to Manning in future formal papers as either ‘Private First Class Manning’ or by using feminine pronouns. Previously, the US government had filed a formal objection to Manning’s request to be referred to as a woman in future official filings; government lawyers ‘pointedly referred to the soldier as Bradley, and said that “unless directed otherwise by this honourable court, the government intends to refer to [Manning] using masculine pronouns”’ (Pilkington 2015). Pronouns, therefore, became 1

ligible for parole after just seven. Now

he has announced

he wants to begin hormone t

2

ligible for parole after just seven. Now

he has announced

he wants to begin hormone t

3

ligible for parole after just seven. Now

he has announced

he wants to begin hormone t

4

ligible for parole after just seven. Now

he has announced

he wants to begin hormone t

Figure 33.4  Concordance 3: occurrences of he has announced 1

ocuments on WikiLeaks yesterday revealed

he is to become a woman

... and wants to

2

ocuments on WikiLeaks yesterday revealed

he is to become a woman

... and wants to

3

ocuments on WikiLeaks yesterday revealed

he is to become a woman

... and wants to

4

ocuments on WikiLeaks yesterday revealed

he is to become a woman

... and wants to

Figure 33.5  Concordance 4: occurrences of he is to become a woman

492

Misgendering in the media 1

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

2

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

. Hours later, an Army spokesman responde . Hours later, an Army spokesman responde

3

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

. On Thursday, Manning’s lawyer David Coo

4

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

. On Thursday, his lawyer David Coombs de

5

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he

‘. On Thursday, Manning’s lawyer David Coo

6

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

. On Thursday, Manning’s lawyer David Coo

7

as Chelsea and as

a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

. On Thursday, his lawyer David Coombs de

Figure 33.6  Concordance 4: Occurrences of a ‘she’ rather than a ‘he’

1

d to by everyone

as “she” and no longer “he”

. A day after Manning was sentenced by

2

d by everyone to

as “she” and no longer “he”

. One day after she was sentenced by

3

d by everyone to

as “she” and no longer “he”

. One day after she was sentenced by

Figure 33.7  Concordance 4: Occurrences of as ‘she’ and no longer ‘he’

a site of contestation: using feminine pronouns recognised Manning’s asserted identity as a woman and perhaps some understanding of the strain she was under as a trans woman unable to come out within the confines of the military. Using masculine pronouns, however, was deeply tied to the US government and military understanding of her as a traitor who deserved punishment. The corpus shows some early traces of this. An article published by telegraph​.co​​.uk quotes the Human Rights Campaign’s statement: ‘As she requested in her letter, journalists and other officials should use her chosen name of Chelsea and refer to her with feminine pronouns. Using the name Bradley or male pronouns is nothing short of an insult’.

5.2  Direct quotation In contrast to the Lucy Meadows texts, direct quotations account for relatively few occurrences. As a primary school teacher in a town, Meadows was deeply immersed in everyday life; in contrast, Manning had been detained for almost three years by the time she stood trial. During and immediately following her trial, she was only able to communicate through her legal team. There was therefore limited scope to interview colleagues, friends, current or former partners, and family members. One quote is from Manning’s uncle, Kevin Fox. His words, ‘To be honest, he shouldn’t have been given any time at all. In my eyes, he is a hero’ were published on 22 August 2013 on MailOnline. Like examples from Meadows’ family, this appears to be a naïve usage: a quote expressing support but using the pronouns that the family member has historically used to refer to the individual. A second quote from David Coombs, Manning’s defence attorney, is also present in the corpus. Taken from a press conference following sentencing on 21 August, Manning had not yet announced her wish to be referred to with female pronouns; as such, using male pronouns in reference to Manning probably reflects her wish to not publicly come out as transgender until after her trial. Coombs expresses his support for Manning, saying ‘I’m hoping he gets out in the near term and he can go on with his life and be productive. This doesn’t have to define him’. Significantly, Manning’s legal team use feminine pronouns consistently to refer to her after she announced her identity as a trans woman.

5.3  Repetition As the data above showed, there was also some use of repetition. Part of this is due to the fact that, when this news story broke, Manning had just been sentenced to prison and thus was unable to 493

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communicate with the press except through a short statement and her legal team. There is some evidence of repetition of statements from Manning herself or her legal team: Manning’s statement in which she requests that her supporters use feminine pronouns demonstrates this: it was quoted 29 times, largely on 22 and 23 August 2013 and in The Guardian, Guardian​.com​, The Express, Express Online, Daily Mirror, MailOnline, The Sun, The Independent, Independent​.co​.u​k, i-independent, and telegraph​.co​.u​k. As these publications reveal, Manning’s statement was reported in both print and online, thus reaching (potentially) different and broader audiences.

6.  Future directions As discussed earlier, recent reports from Stonewall (2018) and Trans Actual (2021) show that trans people are anxious about media representation of trans people, and identify inaccurate and/or hostile media coverage of trans people and issues as leading to aggression and violence from family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. It is crucial that further research be conducted on the mechanisms of media transphobia, of which pronoun use is a part. Trans women are subject to transphobia as trans people, misogyny as women, and transmisogyny, which, as Serano (2007) describes, is the way in which transphobia and misogyny intersect to specifically penalise trans women not simply for their failure to conform to gender norms, but because of the specific direction of their gender transgression. Because femininity and femaleness are considered inferior to masculinity and maleness, people who choose to give up masculinity are viewed with derision. This shapes trans women’s experiences from violence to pathologisation to, as I have shown here, misgendering. It is essential that further work be conducted in this area to better identify the strategies used to undermine specifically trans women’s identities. There is little research on how transgender men, non-binary, agender, and otherwise gender nonconforming people are misgendered through pronoun use. It has been previously difficult to do so due to the relative invisibility of transgender men and non-binary people. However, recent years have seen more public figures and celebrities come out as transgender and make changes to the pronouns that they wish people to use in reference to them. These include Elliot Page (he/him and they/them), Chella Man (he/him), and Sam Smith (they/them). Celebrities offer useful case studies particularly when, like Elliot Page, they were already high profile and their transition was itself newsworthy. However, just as important is the need to explore how non-celebrity transgender people are represented. As I have discussed in the case study of Chelsea Manning, it is more likely that the correct pronouns will be used if communication is mediated through a legal or press relations team rather than interviews with members of the general public. It is also important to note that celebrities are more likely to have the legal and financial resources to challenge misgendering. Evidence from the United States (Ciprikis, Cassells, and Berrill 2020, McKinsey and Company 2021) suggests a significant employment and wage gap, with trans people being both less likely to be unemployed and to earn less than cisgender employees. As such, many trans people lack the material resources to object to poor media misrepresentation and misgendering can go unchallenged. It is crucial for journalists and news editors to be alert to the processes of media misgendering so that they can strive to avoid it. Similarly, it is essential that LGBTQ advocacy, press regulation, and media complaints organisations are aware of the mechanisms of media misgendering so that they can recognise and challenge it.

References Amy-Chinn, D. (2011) Doing epistemic (in)justice to Semenya. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 6(3): 311–326. Åkerlund, M. (2019). Representations of trans people in Swedish newspapers. Journalism Studies 20(9): 1319–1338.

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Misgendering in the media Baker, P. (2014). ‘Bad wigs and screaming mimis’: Using corpus-assisted techniques to carry out critical discourse analysis of the representation of trans people in the British press. In C. Hart and P. Cap (eds) Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 211–236. Barker-Plummer, B. (2013). Fixing Gwen: News and the mediation of (trans)gender challenges. Feminist Media Studies 13(4): 710–724. Billard, T. (2016). Writing in the margins: Mainstream news media representations of transgenderism. International Journal of Communication 10(2016): 4193–4218. Capuzza, J.C. (2014). Who defines gender diversity? Sourcing routines and representation in mainstream U.S. news stories about transgenderism. International Journal of Transgenderism 15(3–4): 115–128. Capuzza, J.C. (2015). What’s in a name? Transgender identity, metareporting and the misgendering of Chelsea Manning. In L. Spencer and J. Capuzza (eds) Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories. London: Lexington Books, pp. 173–186. Ciprikis, K., Cassells, D. and Berrill, J. (2020). Transgender labour market outcomes: Evidence from the United States. Gender Work and Organization 27: 1378–1401. Cloud, D.L. (2014). Private Manning and the chamber of secrets. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1(1): 80–104. Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Knisely, K. and Paiz, J.M. (2021) Bringing trans, non-binary, and queer understandings to bear in language education. Critical Multilingualism Studies 9(1): 23–45. McKinsey and Company. (2021). Being transgender at work. Available at https://www​.mckinsey​.com​/featured​ -insights​/diversity​-and​-inclusion​/being​-transgender​-at​-work (accessed 22 February 2022). McNeil, J., Bailey, L., Ellis, S., Morton, J., and Regan, M. (2012). Trans mental health study 2012. 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Further reading Gupta, K. (2019). Response and responsibility: Mainstream media and Lucy Meadows in a post-Leveson context. Sexualities 22(1–2): 31–47. LaJeunesse, C. (2021). How to use pronouns with an inclusive mindset. The Better Content Centre. Available at https://resources​.clearvoice​.com​/blog​/how​-to​-use​-pronouns/ (accessed 4 April 2023).

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INDEX

Abortion 399 Acceptability 191, 266, 268, 429, 454ff, 489 Accusative 16ff, 31ff, 46, 80, 107, 167, 185, 190, 211, 261, 427 Activist 318, 394ff, 465, Affix 11, 19, 47, 63, 422ff, 441, 476 Amplitude 90 Anaphor 10, 37, 45, 61, 93ff, 167, 172, 201, 214, 226ff, 262, 329, 400, 482 Animacy 15, 193, 310, 394ff Animals 15, 45, 53, 303, 321, 335ff, 394ff, 439, 442, Antconc 231, 322, 337, 366 Antifa 319 Apposition 49, 141 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) 168 Binding 8, 18, 160, 172ff, 214ff, 226 Blogs 76, 78 Borrowing 32, 44, 49ff Causality 62, 104, 122ff, 283, 326 Cisgender 80, 457ff, 465ff, 483 Classroom 217, 226ff, 417, 462 Clinical 108, 277 Clusivity 8, 12, 137 Collocate 324ff, 334ff, 336ff, 491ff Collocation 266, 270, 322ff, 337ff Colloquial 39, 51, 54, 69, 149, 155, 158, 190, 259ff Compound 11, 23, 46, 48, 50, 61ff, 153, 266 Concordance 322ff, 337, 366, 481ff Crosslinguistic 47, 148, 160ff Dative 31ff, 46, 158, 161, 192, 211, 212, 427, Deaf 169, 202ff Definite 18, 37ff, 46ff, 64, 110, 175, 413, 450ff, 467 Deictic 45, 59ff, 135, 142ff, 167ff, 203ff, 227, 263, 304, 329 Deixis 61ff, 136, 142ff, 199ff, 226, 304, 365, 395



Demonstrative 1, 9, 14, 45ff, 58ff, 93, 135, 142, 167, 193, 199ff, 218, 226ff, 304, 339, 345ff Depression 274ff, 352ff Dialect 9, 15, 30ff, 46ff, 64ff, 152ff, 189, 243, 259ff, 305, 396, 401, 427 Dichotomy 318, 329, 341, 351, 358ff, 378 Discrimination 319, 321, 334, 357, 397ff, 484 Efficacy 105, 280ff Elicited 92ff, 189ff, 195, 205, 293, 460, Email 74ff, 439 Epicene 45, 53, 398, 411ff, 421ff, 450ff, 489 Exophoric 200, 205, 263 Eyetracking 123ff, 176, 414, 459 Feminist 334, 394ff, 412, 429, 442, 453, 468 Formality 11ff, 148, 227, 244ff, 360, 380, 414, 476 Formulaic 256, 382ff Genderless 37, 400, 415, 421ff, 445 Gender-neutral 1, 53, 82, 97, 120, 123, 255, 351, 379ff, 402, 416, 443ff, 437ff, 443, 450ff, 466ff, 486 Generative 16, 70, 161, 178, 213 Gestures 122ff, 156, 199ff, 270, 388 Grammarians 53, 258ff, 412 Grammaticalization 50, 58ff, 152, 163, 204, 306 Health 2, 285, 293, 335, 351ff, 400, 453, 468, 480ff Heritage 183, 187, 192ff, 206, 324ff Homophonous 19, 67, 184 Honorific 62, 66ff, 137, 142, 226, 484 Hypercorrect 2, 30, 39, 265ff, Idiosyncratic 77, 161ff, 322, 343, 422, 452 Imposter 26, 136, 140, 148ff Inanimate 15, 45, 54, 66, 183, 200, 394ff, 460 Incongruent 90, 93ff, 136, 144

497

Index Indefinite 3, 37ff, 45ff, 58, 110, 337ff, 345, 369, 396ff, 411ff, 442ff, 451 Indexical 23ff, 135ff, 202, 304ff, 375 Inflection 17, 33, 36, 52, 62ff, 107, 127, 184, 246, 258, 262, 424 Ingroup 317ff, 334ff Innate 70, 232ff, 319 Intensifiers 45, 48ff, 61, 71, Interlocutor 243ff, 307ff, 317, 379, 417, 460 Internet 74ff, 149, 153ff, 245, 250, 401 Interrogative 3, 45ff, 167ff, 396 Intervention 24, 44, 52ff, 274ff, 299, 309, 351, 361, 480 Intimacy 35ff, 51, 140, 246, 252ff, 350, 379 Kin 19ff, 136ff Language change 2, 30, 44, 48, 51ff, 453ff Law 259, 319, 322ff, 365ff Learners 173, 190, 205ff, 226ff, 246, 380ff, 415ff LGBT(QIA+) 438, 465ff, 484, 494, Likert 3, 250, 456ff, 461 Linguistic insecurity 196, 263, 266ff Loci 8, 24ff, 116, 145, 200ff, 462 Locus 17, 24, 143, 162, 192, 199ff, 395 Memory 93ff, 104ff, 130, 171ff, 279, 281, 367 Metalinguistic 80ff, 137, 196, 244, 462 Misgendering 80, 450ff, 474ff, 480ff Mismatch 94ff, 99, 127, 150, 460 Monolingual 182ff, 206, 216 Morpheme 22, 59ff, 156, 213, 422, 426, 432, 445 Multimodal 82, 270 Narrative 77, 106ff, 127, 150ff, 175ff, 201, 205ff, 264, 279ff, 329, 350, 376, 490 Negative self 149, 276, 279ff Neuter 30ff, 46ff, 394ff, 439ff, 467 Nominative 8, 14, 31ff, 40, 46ff, 80, 108, 167, 211ff, 261 Nonbinary 82, 123, 416, 450ff, 465ff Nvivo 337 Omission 106, 187ff, 290ff, 386 Outgroup 317ff, 334ff, 351, 356, 441 Phi-features 9, 13, 108, 115, 186ff Politeness 2, 13, 45ff, 67, 79ff, 140, 243ff, 260, 267, 361, 379ff, 387 Possessive 3, 26, 29, 33, 45ff, 53, 138, 143ff, 155, 167ff, 261, 266ff, 325, 335ff, 345, 354, 381 Postverbal 141, 192

Pragmatic 9, 14, 23, 31ff, 59ff, 70ff, 77ff, 107, 110, 136ff, 148, 172ff, 182, 187ff, 200, 213ff, 220, 243ff, 258ff. 290, 305ff, 371ff, 454, 467 Predicate 18ff, 45, 184, 204 Prescriptive 30, 40, 53, 258ff, 412, 434, 438ff, 452ff Preverbal 64, 141ff, 173, 191 Priming 95, 99ff, 131, 190, 196 Proclitic 19, 69, 141, 426, 427, 430ff, Pro-drop 1, 63, 83, 97, 115, 127, 290ff, 379, 386ff, Proficiency 194ff, 226ff, 351ff, 416 Pronunciation 36, 46, 60, 67, 122ff, 155, 259ff Protest 317ff, 402 Prototypical 37, 158ff Queer 454ff, 464ff, 483 Racism 318ff, 333ff, 357, 468 Reconstructed 45ff, 65ff, 71 Reflexive 3, 8ff, 20ff, 29, 31ff, 45ff, 61, 90, 105, 145, 160, 167, 172ff, 185ff, 210ff, 214ff, 261ff, 270, 337ff, 461, 473 Register 13, 30, 36ff, 52, 74ff, 150ff, 161, 192, 261ff, 304ff, 414 Resolution 89ff, 107, 122ff Reversals 168ff, 202, 323ff Sapir-Whorf 51, 289, 444 Schwa 430ff, 439 Semiotic 137, 145, 199, 304, 367, 446ff Sociopolitical 245, 321, 365ff Stance 76, 218, 263, 303, 309, 319, 336, 340ff, 391, 403 Stereotype 89, 93ff, 322, 335ff, 395, 413ff, 421, 429, 456ff, 470 Stylistic 36, 54, 149, 155ff, 258ff, 411 Suffix 14, 52, 64, 371, 439, 442, 475 T/V 1, 13, 25, 51, 243ff, 361 Taxonomy 163, 231, 469 Technology 74ff, 145, 302ff, 383 Topos 321ff Transgender 77ff, 400, 450ff, 465ff, 480ff Transphobia 3, 334, 458ff, 470ff, 480ff Typology 7ff, 136, 163, 186 Ungrammatical 36, 52, 89ff, 110ff, 151, 190ff, 214ff, 414, 428, 454ff Universals 7, 47, 213, 456, 461 Untriggered reflexives 263 Violation 91ff, 214ff, 290ff Violence 319, 322, 327, 470ff, 481ff Wmatrix 322

498