THE EPICENE PRONOUN A 2eisel, : zt nd Fred: .N CONTEMPORARY NEWSPAPER Maternal - Padianis PROSE 2 Perfor MARK BALHORN sis 8 University of Wisconsin-Steuens Point standard eae ‘ansTaacT This article is about the use of plural third:person pronouns with gram- snaticaly singular, indefinite, genevie antecedents in the prose of current USS. ee newspapers. After a review of suidies ofthe statistical prominence of usage patterns peaking Such a8 A CRIMINAL is a criminal no mater what THtEY wearin spoken English and | the presence of such patterns in writen English since the genderneutral language a reform movement of the 19708, an argument is made for why they is an effective } and at times optimal choice 2s an epicene pronoun, Then, a systematic sampling of pronoun chainsin contemporary newspapers is used to investigate the effect of such | Factors as quoted versus nonquoted text, writers’ tex, and antecedent type on rates i ‘of they usage relative to two other epicene alternative: historically prescribed he and Trin raus r997 tse of Me, Miler, Swit, and Maggio published a fo loyup toMillerand Swifts anil, ‘eSexing the English Language, which had been published inthe magazine's inaugural sue in 1972. Inthe fst article, they had pointed out the inberent sexism inthe language, focusing ratish” ‘on such things as the pointedly male specification in the names of certain. occupations, such as mailman and fireman; the use of -man- compounds in i Speech P Coe ‘words, such as mankind and fresiman; and the use of hein reference to generic, antecedent NPs unspecified structurally or notionally for gender, as in the snag sentence A PATTENr really has no metric to measure the care iz is receiving. They then demonstrated ways to avoid this apparent sexism and advocated wider Varia. use of nonsexist language. The purpose of the 1997 article was to trumpet 7 the success of their and others’ calls for such Ianguage reform since the 1970s and to point out residual patterns of sexist language use. Ameaan Spek, Vol. 84, No.4, Winter 2009 OF 10.1225/00091885.2009 031 (Copyright 2009 by the American Dislet Sociesy 391Soe PEE eee ee ee ae ee ee eee Although the article was published in the popular press and therefore did not offer much in the way of empirical or statistical support, many of the 1.997 claims appear from today's perspective to be accurate both aneedot ally and statistically. An obvious example would be names for occupations. Although older Americans like me might use the terms mailman and fireman in casual conversation, Ihave not heard an actual leter carvier or firefighter se these terms in years despite the fact that che majosity fewer carviers and firefighters are stil male. Moreover, a search via ProQuest of terms for letter carriers and firefighters from a sampling of article abstracts in newspapers indicates that usage has changed in the written medium as wel. In regard to firefighters, for example, a search of five prominent U.S. newspapers from 1954 10 1959 shows freman used 93% of the time to indicate and firefighter ot fire fighter used only 7%. Ina search of five comparable news- papers from 2006, the proportion is the exact opposite; jrefighter comprises (90% of the refeiences and firenan only 10%. Likewise, use ofthe, the, ther, and themselves in association with singular ‘generic antecedents has become more common in published written English {generally For example, Frdmann (1995), looking at a corpus of published texts from the 1970s and 1980s that included newspapers, magazines, and books of both fiction and nonfiction, found that while he was the most fre- occupation ‘quent pronoun to accord with compound, indefinite pronoun antecedents (cveryone/body, someons/body, anyone], no onefbedy), they was “widespread and freely used” (go)2 Laitinen (2002) made similar observations in his investigation of the written part of the British National Corpus. One can even find examples of they according with grammatically singular, generic antecedents in academic texts: 1. Australians inereasngly elaim that they can identify 4 mow AUSTRALIAN'S regional origin by unakaccent. [Balgar W Schneider, “The Dynamics ofNew Englishes,” Language 79 (2003): #70] “That gender-neutral language reform as part of a much broader aware- ness of sexism in society generally could have had such an influence on the current lexicon is, I suppase, not so astounding. Afterall, lexical innovations like the substitution of fefghterfor fireman concern namesfor things, content ‘words that are amenable to conscious manipulation by speakersand writers who wish fo make their language use consistent with their politcal, social, ‘or professional beliefs. But the more abstract, functional units and systems {of language would seein to be less malleable to our good will. Even ifone | makes the doubtful assumption that writers were on board with the women’s * movement—men, women, young, 014, politically left, politically right—how could the linguistically naive take part in “reforming” a component of theSea ee oe eee Seer eee eee ee ere eee eer ae grammar that is, from one theoretical perspective, » computational func- tion subject to quantifier scope and binding conditions (Chomsky 1986) and, from another, a complex of multiple mappings whereby pronominals both link with and simultaneously create the referent (Barlow 19y2)? Such | ‘operations seem too abstract and psychologically deep to be consciously | me communication, Moreover, despite Miller Swift eutral manipulated in re and Maggio’s (1997) claims to the contrary, the push for gendi Janguage reform did not result in style books and college handbooks endors- ing use of epicenc they. In the Associated Press Stlebook, the only mention of generic pronouns isa single, cryptic line under the entry for everyone: "Note that everyone takes singular verbs and pronouns” (Goldstein 2007, 89). In regard to college handbooks, Sklar (1988) and also Zuber and Reed (1993) point out that although avoidance of he did become a topic addressed in manualsof the late 1970s and 1980s, use of they was seldom a recommended strategy: Even today, the American Philosophical Association's Guidelines for Non-Sexist Use of Language do not lst the plural pronoun series as one of their seven preferred strategies for avoiding fe; rather, one example of ‘ley appears far down on the page and is prominently labeled: "CONTRO- VERSIAL (FOR INFORMAL CONTEXTS ONLY)" (Warren 2009). Thus, it remains the case that although hes no longer prescribed, they has never been waly “legalized.” Given the resistance of style books to use of they and the complex, sub- conscious processes involved in pronoun-antecedent relationships, perhaps a better way to explain the sudden resurgence of dey in published English is that they has been the default epicene pronoun in English for some time and its statistical prominence relative to he in current published English is not innovation but “restoration” in the absence of direet preseriptive pres ste favoring he. First of all, attestations of epicene dey in written English from Chaucer to today have been often noted: Poutsma (1916), Leonard (1932), Abbot (1984), Sklar (7988), Curzan (2008), Balhorn (2004). Other recentstudies, most notably Matossian’ (1997), Newmar (1997), and Pauwels (2001), show they to be overwhelmingly more common than he in spoken English. Moreover, Stinger and Hopper (1998). in an examination of informal spoken English from the 1960s to the 1990s, found no examples whatsoever of generic heand in conclusion “question whether gemeric he has ever appeared as an unmarked usage in English conversational interaction since ic is so rare in our data” (209). It seems that they really has been the generic pronoun on the tip of our tongues and pens for some time, which ‘explains why, once the women's movement pointed out and publicized the sexism of hig they has so quickly asserted itself in written English. Much 2s Jou, once an exclusively plural second-person pronoun, is now used to indi-