Oeoe's C-level Paper in English Linguistics dealt with singular they and the reference of third-person pronouns.
Abstract
This paper deals with the use of third-person pronouns with generic reference to compound indefinite pronouns in spoken British English. Previous research on this topic shows a decline in the use of the masculine generic he, which some may consider sexist, and an increased use of the gender-neutral they, which is one of the proposed nonsexist alternatives to generic he. The paper contains two introductory sections which give appropriate background information on language and gender, sexist and nonsexist language and pronominal reference. In the third section, the findings of the study are presented. The study was carried out by investigating the frequency of the third-person pronouns he, she and they with reference to the indefinite compound pronouns (e.g. anybody) in spoken British English. The data were collected from the British National Corpus, a corpus of contemporary British English. The study shows that they is used in a clear majority of the cases (about 95 percent), and that generic he is very infrequent, even in formal registers. This paper also suggests that contemporary grammars probably lag behind actual usage by stating that they used singularly and generically is a feature of informal language only.