Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
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Listen here to Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for both going back to the 14th century. More recently, people have also been using singular they to refer to a specific person, as in “Alex left their umbrella”.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Kirby Conrod, a linguist who wrote their dissertation about the syntax and sociolinguistics of singular they. We talk about Kirby’s research comparing how people use third person pronouns (like they, she, and he) in a way that conveys social attitudes, like how some languages use formal and informal “you”, specific versus generic singular they, and how people go about changing their mental grammars for social reasons.
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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
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Kirby Conrod (website)
Raymond 2016 on the T/V distinction
Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference by Lauren Ackerman
Ackerman 2018: Our words matter: acceptability, grammaticality, and ethics of research on singular 'they’-type pronouns
Bjorkman 2017: Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English
Konnelly 2019: The future is “they”: The morphosyntax of an English epicene pronoun
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Here’s the link again to Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!
Lauren & Gretchen