Seishun! Telephone! Lunch Lunch Lunch
Recommended listening. Okay… That was a really corny post title. So sue me. XD In this next installation of Kawaiirrhea’s H!P remixing, it’s basically: Minimoni 1st generation, meet Minimoni 3rd generation (aka Athena & Robikerottsu).
Every time I hear the intro to ‘Minimoni Telephone Ring Ring Ring!’ I just always picture Tsuji teaching Ayaka the dance in Nono’s suprise dance lesson (part 1). Classic stuff. ^_^
Comment by broomhead — 2008/03/14 @ 6:50 am
If Kawaiirhea were to combine Konnichi pa over the instrumental of Hana wo Pu~n, he’d probably become the most hated and most beloved member of International Wota at the exact same time. I’ll take full responsibility if this happens.
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/14 @ 12:31 pm
broomhead, you’ve got yourself a challenge!
*looks around*
Er, I think I’ve got myself a challenge, then. Hm, this will be difficult since “Konnichi pa” doesn’t come with an instrumental track… I could do some bandpass filtering to extract the vocals…
And I guess it might be flattering to be referred to as “he”. I realize I haven’t brought up gender in my writing, probably because I don’t think I “experience” gender the way most people do (whatever that means), so it doesn’t play the same role in how I view things.
I actually prefer the singular “they” as a pronoun, partly because I’m genderqueer, though I must point out that actual gender and grammatical gender are two separate systems that are not completely correlated, the former being continuous (ranging over a spectrum of genders, each individual essentially having their own gender) and the latter being discrete (constrained to specific lexical constructs); in fact, I would like to see non-genderqueer people prefer pronouns other than the traditional “she” and “he”.
This is one of the reasons why I like the Japanese language so much. Japanese does have gendered language, but it’s a lot different from English. Gender is reflected in the use of certain words, such as the first-person pronoun “boku” for use by men and the analogous “atashi” for use by women. But the key difference here is that this gendering is primarily in the first person, so it’s up to the speaker to determine their own grammatical gender, which is nice because I’ve often been assumed to be of a gender that’s not my own, as have many other genderqueer and trans people. Furthermore, it seems to me that in Japanese, the gender connotations of these aren’t as rigid as the “he”/”she” dichotomy in English, so that the use of a gendered word in a certain context can connote a sense of femininity or masculinity that does not strictly correspond to the speaker’s gender identity. All of which is fascinating, and I’ll have to write about it further at some point, when I’ve acquired a better understanding of Japanese.
That said, neither English nor Japanese has true grammatical gender, as in the case of many Indo-European languages like French or German, which have a consistent classification of determiner phrases into distinct categories (e.g., the article in front of every noun must be of the right gender), not just two forms of a single pronoun and nothing else (on a syntactic level), as in English. And true grammatical gender isn’t always binary, either. Polish, for example, has five grammatical genders.
Anyway, back to the singular “they”. It has been argued to be incorrect English, but the truth is there is no single English language but rather a large collection of dialects. Each English speaker speaks their own flavor of English, and each flavor of English is correct.
“They” with a singular antecedent can be clunky, but it’s a part of most English speakers’ grammar, including such venerable authors as Shakespeare and Austen. In fact, I’ve already used it twice in the above paragraphs. One concern that has been brought up is that it’s mainly used to refer to an individual in the abstract (e.g., “a person must be free to say what they want”), but not to a specific, concrete person. This may be true, but I argue that the specific usage is also common; e.g. “yesterday, I showed Buono!’s new album to this friend of mine, and they said it was the best album they had ever heard”. This sounds perfectly natural to me.
So, being a non-prescriptivist and a linguist-in-training, I would leave it up to individual speakers to decide how they wish to refer to me in the third person. I just find the semantic connotations of “he” and “she” misleading, while the singular “they” is already a part of most people’s grammar. The avoidance of pronouns, which I’ve noticed has been used here on IntlWota previously, is also fine, though it could be clunky.
Not to put you at fault for anything, broomhead; I just wanted to clarify.
Comment by broomhead — 2008/03/14 @ 1:06 pm
Oh gosh. Well, even if you weren’t offended, I apologize. It’s something I should have figured out first. You are spot on about the avoidance of pronouns, at least from me. I like your argument for “they.”
I actually don’t know a lot of the genders for the bloggers here on Intlwota. Furthermore, lots of blogs have no place for gender of the author, the news blogs specifically. It is interesting to think about. The genders of the authors are sometimes explicitly stated. But without that knowledge, I’m wondering if I’d consider YODC, for example, a “male” blog. Sometimes, a lot of writing could come from anybody.
All the talk about gender in language reminds me of when I was taking Latin. I’d spend my time memorizing the vocabulary, but not the gender. I would get half-credit for remembering the word but not the gender. I always hated that…
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/14 @ 1:22 pm
Native speakers of languages with grammatical gender have to learn the gender of words just like everybody else:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl.....05411.html
Rather amusing, actually.
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/14 @ 1:32 pm
Oh, and this use of the singular “they” to refer to two different people individually when both their genders are known by the speaker, in the same sentence:
“Another person wrote that they wanted their husband to get a green card so that they could join them here in the states,” Tompkins told WABC-TV.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING.....rss_latest
Not confusing at all, despite oft-cited claims to the contrary.
So don’t dis the singular “they” … :-p
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/14 @ 1:50 pm
^ That is, the gender of at least one of the two referents is known by the speaker. Not to imply any heteronormativity here…
Comment by maiZe — 2008/03/14 @ 2:18 pm
@ broomhead & Kawaiirrhea: You know, this morning I read broomhead’s comment, and the first thing that I picked out was the use of “he”. I kid you not! I have noticed the lack of gender specification in your writing, Kawaiirrhea, and I have been hesitant to assume. If you look back at my post on Genki Dschinghis no Jibun Song I typed out “Kawaiirrhea” 3 times…
@ Kawaiirrhea: It didn’t occur to me to use a singular they. I’ve always been very torn regarding the use of it. I know for a fact that I use it when speaking, but we all know that the written word and spoken word are two very different things. In chats (which is speaking through the internet), I have no qualms about using slang and improper grammar, but when I write, I get very picky. There’s a guy that I work with who’s not a native speaker (he only started learning/speaking English around 4 or 5 years ago), and he constantly asks me about the ‘proper’ way to word things when he writes e-mails to clients or is working on a presentation/report. When he asks me these questions, I realize how limited my knowledge is regarding this language that I speak every day. Then again, English was always my weakest subject in school. And getting back to the use of a singular ‘they’, I feel as though I’ve been docked marks in some papers that I’ve written for using ‘they’. So in the end I adopted using ‘he or she’ in my papers which gets very repetitive and annoying.
I fully agree with you on liking the quirks of Japanese. I find that rarely using words like ‘he, she, you, me’ etc.which are so prevalent in the English language gives me swirly eyes (picture me as an anime character ^_^) as I try to learn Japanese, but it’s just so interesting to see the difference between languages.
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/14 @ 2:52 pm
@maiZe: On the topic of “proper” English…
If you approach language from a scientific perspective, you realize that everybody speaks a different language (and a single person can speak more than one language), so it’s not very useful (and sometimes impolite) to say this is “incorrect” or that is “correct” according to some arbitrary rules. After all, this depends on what authority you cite, and there are conflicting sources of authority. What is more illuminating about the language capabilities of humans is trying to understand how the mind forms rules to produce and recognize language, and in what ways those rules can vary across languages and still be the same across all humans.
In practice, what is essential about a piece of language, spoken or written, is not whether it’s correct or not, but whether it communicates what the speaker intends for it to communicate. This obviously involves both the speaker/writer and the listener/reader. So how one phrases things becomes important as an element of communication.
And because different contexts require different modes of communication, there have arisen certain standards (often ill-defined) as to what is appropriate in which context and what isn’t; for example, writing to a client on behalf of a company. But ultimately these are arbitrary and may not actually correspond to natural, internal rules of grammar (the ones you’re born with and configure as you hear people speak), which might explain why some “correct” phrasings feel very awkward.
Ideally, we could all agree to ignore these artificialities and stop letting supposed authorities hinder our speech and writing, and instead focus on what’s actually important: what we’re trying to communicate. But as long as there’s someone we’re communicating to and they expect these artificialities, then the ideal will never be achieved, alas …
So in response to your saying “I realize how limited my knowledge is regarding this language that I speak every day”, I reply that you have actually complete knowledge of the language(s) that you speak every day; it’s just that it might come in conflict with the various (sometimes self-contradictory) rules set down by some higher authority who ultimately doesn’t speak the same language you do.
With regard to singular “they”, though, there are many modern style manuals that now recommend it instead of the clunky “he/she” or the traditional but sexist “he” (or the equally sexist “she”). So it all boils down to what authority you look to for confirmation of “correctness”. And I too have had my share of annoying prescriptivist authority figures trying to cram their flavor of grammar down my throat.
Which is one of the reasons why I’ve decided to study linguistics in grad school.
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/28 @ 11:13 am
Not to exhume a dead horse, but upon further analysis of the use of the singular-referent ‘they’ in my own dialect of English (and by extension, presumably many others), I think that the conditions for using ‘they’ are not dependent on generic vs. specific reference, as has been proposed; i.e., “Each person has their own priorities” (generic) vs. “(*) Dr. Smith has their own priorities” (specific). (The asterisk (*) denotes an ungrammatical usage.)
Nor is it a matter of the speaker’s knowledge of the referent’s gender, as in “I was referred to a Dr. Smith, so I decided to given them a call” (unknown gender) vs. “(*) I have known Dr. John Smith for years, and they simply will not listen to any kind of foreign-language music” (known gender).
Rather, I think the distinction is between the case where a referent is familiar to both the speaker and the addressee and the case where the referent is unfamiliar to at least one of the two. This would parallel the distinction between ’so-’ and ‘a-’ prefixed words in Japanese. For example, ‘ano hito’ is used to refer to a person known to both the speaker and the addressee, but if one of the two is unfamiliar with the person in question, ’sono hito’ is used instead.
By analogy, my dialect of English permits ‘they’ in reference to a specific person of known gender when said person is not familiar to the addressee or to the speaker. This contradicts the gender-knowledge and specificity hypotheses cited above.
OK: “This woman I met told me that everything they owned was blue.” (not familiar to addressee)
OK: “Does the woman you just mentioned have an office of their own?” (not familiar to speaker)
Not OK: “I can’t believe that the woman we’ve known for years has just parked their car on my front lawn.” (familiar to both)
Singular ‘they’ seems to be analogous to ’sono hito’ in Japanese, and cannot be used where ‘ano hito’ cannot.
English, however, has the existing singular third-person pronouns ‘he’ and ’she’, so it would be useful to compare the distribution of these with respect to ‘they’.
In my dialect, these sound quasi-ill-formed in generic reference:
OK: “Everyone speaks their own language.”
OK: “Every person speaks their own language.”
OK: “An honest person will not say what they know to be false.”
Questionable: “Everyone speaks her own language.”
Questionable: “Every person speaks her own language.”
Questionable: “An honest person will not say what she knows to be false.”
Questionable: “Everyone speaks his own language.”
Questionable: “Every person speaks his own language.”
Questionable: “An honest person will not say what he knows to be false.”
Questionable: “Everyone speaks his or her own language.”
Questionable: “Every person speaks his or her own language.”
Questionable: “An honest person will not say what he or she knows to be false.”
Interestingly, they sound a bit odd even when the gender of the referent is known:
OK: “Every man speaks their own language.”
OK: “An honest man will not say what they know to be false.”
Questionable: “Every man speaks his own language.”
Questionable: “An honest man will not say what he knows to be false.”
We can construct potentially ambiguous sentences and see which meanings they can produce:
(1) “Katy asked which woman had left her book on the table.”
(2) “Katy asked which woman had left their book on the table.”
For me, the first interpretation that comes to mind for (1) is that ‘her’ refers to ‘Katy’, not ‘which woman’, while for (2), ‘their’ refers to ‘which woman’ and not ‘Katy’. This would seem to fit the familiarity hypothesis because Katy is presumably familiar in the discourse while ‘which woman’ does not refer to a familiar individual.
I can elicit the alternate interpretation of (1) with some effort, so perhaps this one is allowable in a similar grammar (“Standard English”) that does allow ‘her’ to refer to ‘which woman’, so the fact that it sounds quasi-OK and not completely bad may be an artifact of my attempting to recognize the sentence with a grammar that is not my native one but is similar enough for me to adopt it for this instance.
It is also possible that an initially unfamiliar referent can be “familiarized” in the discourse, thus producing constructions that sound quasi-OK. It would be useful to define exactly what “familiarity” is. Using names, in particular, throws in further complexities that remain to be studied.
All of this is fruitful material for a project in one of my classes, so I guess I should thank broomhead for inspiring it.
And I’d be interesting in seeing if any of you have similar judgments to mine, and if not, how your judgments differ from mine.
Comment by Otingocni — 2008/03/28 @ 8:47 pm
As the dead horse has been brought forth and laid before me, I shall honor it by placing a coin over each of its stilled eyes and thereby contribute my two cents.
When I read both sentence (1) and (2) I interpreted them both exactly the same way; that the book belonged to ‘which woman’. I never even considered the possibility that the book could be Katy’s until I read your view. I don’t know if it is of any significance but if you phrase it:
(3) “Katy asked which woman left her book on the table.”
(4) “Katy asked which woman left their book on the table.”
Looking at sentence (3) my first interpretation is that the book belongs to Katy, though I certainly couldn’t tell you why.
Well, ‘man’ is frequently used in reference to mankind, the whole of humanity regardless of gender, and as such I don’t think it is at all odd to use a genderless plural when referencing it. I certainly wouldn’t consider the sentence “Every man deserves to be free” to refer only to those who gender identify as male. However, if someone were to be addressing a group composed solely of men, or to the men exclusively in mixed gender group I think a difference becomes evident. Or, to put it another way, if you look at a more specifically gendered version of your example:
“Every woman speaks their own language.”
“Every woman speaks her own language.”
“An honest woman will not say what they know to be false.”
“An honest woman will not say what she knows to be false.”
Personally, I consider the her/she examples to sound far more natural than the genderless forms, though it is clear to me that I have a much stronger preference for gendered pronouns than you do. I wouldn’t consider using “This woman I met told me that everything they owned was blue.” in my own speech as I use gender specific pronouns whenever possible.
I’ll share a little story with you. Back when I was in elementary school I would use ‘he’ in reference to people of unknown gender as well as males. Sometimes in class when we were discussing a person of unknown gender one of my female classmates or a teacher would refer to this person as ’she’. I would stop, read what we were covering again, think for a bit and then raise my hand and ask when it became clear that the person we talking about was a girl. The teacher’s explanation was basically that while it was true that we didn’t know if the individual we were talking about was a boy or a girl for expediency’s sake we use pronouns and that ‘he’ and ’she’ were both equally valid. We would have round-table discussions where a single person would be called ‘he’ or ’she’ interchangeably, each person selecting pronouns based on their personal prejudices. Looking back, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some undercurrent of hostility between the two groups, but that could just be my current evil self wanting to see its own weaknesses everywhere. Anyway, I was basically taught it is okay to arbitrarily apply gendered pronouns where gender is unknown.
Making the elegant segue into the usage of singular they. While singular they may be correct or accepted English, I’ll have to express a different view and say that I can find usage of singular they to be awkward. Take this hypothetical conversation for example:
Employee A: “We are getting a new boss.”
Employee B: “When are they arriving?”
OR
Employee B: “When is he or she arriving?”
I can certainly accept either of those ways of referencing the new gender-unknown capitalist overseer as being valid. Shoot, I might even like ‘they’ better. Let’s continue:
Employee A: “The new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
Employee B: “I hope they aren’t a hard-ass.”
OR
Employee B: “I hope he or she isn’t a hard-ass.”
Wait… what? I’m sorry but the mixture of plural and singular forms is difficult for me to overlook. That inconsistency is my primary problem with the singular they:
“The people gathered here need ask themselves a question. Each person should find the answer within themselves.”
Should it be themself? Is “themself” a word? Okay, that might not be a good example, I’ll try again:
“My child has a tooth-ache.”
“Did they get a cavity?”
Huh? Are these two people supposed to be talking to each other, or is it two unrelated people with cell-phones sitting side by side? I can’t tell. Also, I find singular they particularly weird with verb forms that differ from other 3rd person pronouns: “he/she/it does” whereas “they (singular) do”.
Now, you may call me prescriptivist but I am of the opinion that language exists for the sake of humans and not the other way around. My feeling is that if the language is insufficient for the needs of the people it should be changed to fill those needs. I personally advocate the usage of Spivak pronouns. Their origin is simple and based in the common language as it exists now, their pronunciation and usage is straightforward and you get to use verb tenses the same as you always have with the gender specific pronouns. Now I may not be a linguist, or have any of the training or ambition necessary to become one, but that strikes me a fairly elegant solution. Well, since the language is made by the people, I suppose all I have to do is start using them regularly, but I still find it easier to refer to every one as ‘he’.
As a side note, what does “genderqueer” mean? I had never heard the term before and was wondering if it is fundamentally different from being transgendered? I am asking in all honesty from a position of profound ignorance.
(My apologies for this comment; I am more than a little bit drunk… and more than a lot bit stupid…)
Comment by Kawaiirrhea — 2008/03/29 @ 12:03 pm
As the dead horse has been brought forth and laid before me, I shall honor it by placing a coin over each of its stilled eyes and thereby contribute my two cents.
Genius. I love it.
When I read both sentence (1) and (2) I interpreted them both exactly the same way; that the book belonged to ‘which woman’.
So it appears that in your grammar, as in mine, ‘they’ (or its possessive ‘their’, in this case) can be used with a gender-specific antecedent in at least one context, namely a construction with ‘which woman’. In addition, your grammar appears to allow ‘her’ in the same situation. This piece of evidence only says something about your recognition grammar, however, and not your production grammar. It would be interesting to know which of these alternatives you would use in your own naturally-occurring speech, whether it’s mainly (1) or (2) or an even mixture of both, since you state that “in my own speech as I use gender specific pronouns whenever possible.” This does not necessarily rule out your naturally preferring ‘they’ to refer to certain gender-specific antecedents, since what “whenever possible” exactly means is the heart of the problem.
I never even considered the possibility that the book could be Katy’s until I read your view. I don’t know if it is of any significance but if you phrase it:
(3) “Katy asked which woman left her book on the table.”
(4) “Katy asked which woman left their book on the table.”
Looking at sentence (3) my first interpretation is that the book belongs to Katy, though I certainly couldn’t tell you why.
The difference between these two pairs is that (3) and (4) have the verb ‘leave’ in the simple past tense and (1) and (2) have it in the past perfect, which is formed by concatenating the past tense of ‘have’ (‘had’) with the past participle of ‘leave’ (‘left’). In terms of syntactic structure, (1) and (2) would have an extra level of complexity in order to handle the two verbs.
Without getting too far into technicalities, I will note that binding is an interesting phenomenon that has been widely studied in modern generative grammar and its exact conditions have been debated and modified a number of times over the years. Essentially, Condition B of binding theory states that a pronoun cannot be bound by an antecedent that is too close to it. “Too close” means that the binder is in the local domain of the pronoun. The details of what counts as a local domain are complicated, so for simplicity, we can consider it to be the minimal clause that contains a pronoun and a phrase that could potentially be its antecedent. In all of the examples, the clause in question is “which woman … table”. In this case, ‘her’ is a possessive, which apparently does not need to follow Condition B, but it is phonetically equivalent to the object pronoun ‘her’, which does follow Condition B. “Katy asked which woman left her on the table”, for example, cannot have ‘her’ referring to ‘which woman’.
It is possible that your initial reading of ‘her’ in (3) assumes an object pronoun interpretation, hence rejecting its being bound by ‘which woman’ due to Condition B and accepting ‘Katy’ as the next possible binder. Upon reading ‘book’ and re-analyzing ‘her’, you keep ‘Katy’ as the binder. In (1), due to the additional verb, ‘which woman’ may appear initially more distant and may not immediately trigger a Condition B rejection, so that you are more easily able to bind ‘her’ with ‘which woman’.
To test this hypothesis, we could try seeing what your initial readings are for the analogous masculine-referent structures, which do distinguish between possessive form (‘his’) and object pronoun form (‘him’), where we use ‘boy’ instead of ‘man’ as a more clearly masculine referent:
(5) “Billy asked which boy left his book on the table.”
(6) “Billy asked which boy left their book on the table.”
I’m getting the same readings in each of the pairs (1)/(2), (3)/(4), (5)/(6), but since you observed a difference between (1)/(2) and (3)/(4), perhaps this may be the reason.
Well, ‘man’ is frequently used in reference to mankind, the whole of humanity regardless of gender, and as such I don’t think it is at all odd to use a genderless plural when referencing it. I certainly wouldn’t consider the sentence “Every man deserves to be free” to refer only to those who gender identify as male. However, if someone were to be addressing a group composed solely of men, or to the men exclusively in mixed gender group I think a difference becomes evident. Or, to put it another way, if you look at a more specifically gendered version of your example:
“Every woman speaks their own language.”
“Every woman speaks her own language.”
“An honest woman will not say what they know to be false.”
“An honest woman will not say what she knows to be false.”
Personally, I consider the her/she examples to sound far more natural than the genderless forms, though it is clear to me that I have a much stronger preference for gendered pronouns than you do. I wouldn’t consider using “This woman I met told me that everything they owned was blue.” in my own speech as I use gender specific pronouns whenever possible.
Upon re-analyzing these alternatives, I’m finding myself getting confused by my own readings. This is a common problem when judging the grammaticality of questionable constructions that are not clearly correct or clearly incorrect. I should say that the ones I’ve marked “OK” aren’t in all cases certainly correct. I have no change to make to the ones I’ve marked “OK” and “Questionable” for non-gender-specific referents, but for the gender-specific ones, the line between OK and not OK is more unclear. So I’ll attempt to describe my judgments for those examples, with your substitutions for (10)-(13) and with a modification to (8) to avoid any influence from the “their own” construction:
(7) “This woman I met told me that everything they owned was blue.” (not familiar to addressee)
(8) “Did the woman you just mentioned leave this book in their office?” (not familiar to speaker)
(9) “I can’t believe that the woman we’ve known for years has just parked their car on my front lawn.” (familiar to both)
(10) “Every woman speaks their own language.”
(11) “Every woman speaks her own language.”
(12) “An honest woman will not say what they know to be false.”
(13) “An honest woman will not say what she knows to be false.”
(7) and (8) sound somewhat odd, but my initial interpretation (in a context where nothing else in the discourse can possibly be labeled ‘they’) is that ‘they’ refers unambiguously to ‘woman’ and not to some other object. (9) on the other hand sounds definitely bad, and my initial interpretation leaves me asking whose car was being parked.
(10) and (12) sound somewhat odd as well, but their interpretations are unambiguous. For me, (11) and (13) also sound odd, and having smashed my brain at these sentences too often, I’m not sure which is worse. But all of (10) through (13) sound a bit off to me.
I suspect that this effect may be the result of interaction between the syntax and semantics modules of the language faculty, which is a hot topic of current linguistics research. A possibility is that in (10) and (12), my syntax module accepts ‘they’, but the semantics module says that ‘they’ is bad for gender specification reasons, and that in (11) and (13), the semantics module accepts ‘her’ as being semantically appropriate, but the syntax module rejects ‘her’ as being ungrammatical.
I’ll share a little story with you. Back when I was in elementary school I would use ‘he’ in reference to people of unknown gender as well as males. Sometimes in class when we were discussing a person of unknown gender one of my female classmates or a teacher would refer to this person as ’she’. I would stop, read what we were covering again, think for a bit and then raise my hand and ask when it became clear that the person we talking about was a girl. The teacher’s explanation was basically that while it was true that we didn’t know if the individual we were talking about was a boy or a girl for expediency’s sake we use pronouns and that ‘he’ and ’she’ were both equally valid. We would have round-table discussions where a single person would be called ‘he’ or ’she’ interchangeably, each person selecting pronouns based on their personal prejudices. Looking back, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some undercurrent of hostility between the two groups, but that could just be my current evil self wanting to see its own weaknesses everywhere. Anyway, I was basically taught it is okay to arbitrarily apply gendered pronouns where gender is unknown.
Interesting. I have a couple of vague recollections of similar occurrences, but don’t remember anything clearly enough to share. From a linguistic perspective, I’m curious whether your being “taught it is okay to arbitrarily apply gendered pronouns where gender is unknown” is actually encoded into your internal grammar through repeated use, or whether it is always a conscious choice that must mediate between your internal grammar and the forms you actually produce in speech. I would imagine that the existence of two competing forms for a specific use with respect to a person of unknown gender would present a conflict to the grammar so that one or the other becomes dominant, or alternatively the two forms become associated with distinct contextual features not clearly related to gender that would determine which form is more applicable.
Making the elegant segue into the usage of singular they. While singular they may be correct or accepted English, I’ll have to express a different view and say that I can find usage of singular they to be awkward. Take this hypothetical conversation for example:
Employee A: “We are getting a new boss.”
Employee B: “When are they arriving?”
OR
Employee B: “When is he or she arriving?”
I can certainly accept either of those ways of referencing the new gender-unknown capitalist overseer as being valid. Shoot, I might even like ‘they’ better. Let’s continue:
Employee A: “The new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
Employee B: “I hope they aren’t a hard-ass.”
OR
Employee B: “I hope he or she isn’t a hard-ass.”
Wait… what? I’m sorry but the mixture of plural and singular forms is difficult for me to overlook. That inconsistency is my primary problem with the singular they:
The question of whether singular ‘they’ is “correct or accepted English” is up to whose English you’re talking about. From a descriptivist perspective, if the pronoun comes naturally in your internal grammar (which is the case with many, but not all, people who speak a dialect of the collection of dialects commonly called “English”), then it is correct and accepted in your grammar. From a prescriptivist perspective, if one defines a standard English grammar and specifically excludes singular ‘they’, then according to this grammar, it is not correct. If one defines it to include singular ‘they’, then it is correct.
I agree that singular ‘they’ is awkward, even in my own dialect, and the current problem is to figure out what contexts make it awkward, because there are instances where it sounds perfectly normal, and other instances where it sounds perfectly ill-formed.
Your examples are particularly enlightening, I must say. In the first exchange, you find that ‘they’ is appropriate, while in the second exchange, you find that ‘they’ is not appropriate. Throwing aside the possibility of intermediate quasi-acceptable judgments and assuming for this specific case that these are clear-cut, let us try to identify what makes the first OK, and the second not OK.
I’ve hypothesized previously that the main factor is “familiarity” with the referent, without defining that term. If we look at the two exchanges, I think there is a clear difference in familiarity in this case, which is highlighted by comparing the statements by Employee A:
(14) Employee A: “We are getting a new boss.”
(15) Employee A: “The new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
In (14), “a new boss” specifically introduces an unfamiliar individual since it uses the indefinite article ‘a’. If the previous sentence, for example, introduced the individual in question, Employee A cannot say “a new boss” to refer to the same person. (16) is bad:
(16) Employee Z: “I heard that we are getting a new boss, someone who used to work at Company X. Is this true?”
Employee A: (*) “We are getting a new boss.”
Some alternate constructions can be made for which Employee A’s response is OK, such as not having the “someone who used to work at Company X” identifier, but the key element here is that Employee Z identifies “a new boss” (someone who used to work at Company X), so that the person referred to by “a new boss” is established in the discourse. Once established, that individual cannot be referred to subsequently with an indefinite article.
In (15), on the other hand, we have instead “the new boss”, which uses the definite article ‘the’. As such, it specifically refers to an individual who is already in the discourse, and can be assumed to be familiar in this case (though in general the notion of familiarity may be distinct from definiteness, as can be seen with some of my examples using ‘the’). The indefinite article ‘a’ would not be appropriate. (17) is OK, while (18) is not:
(17) Employee Z: “I heard that we are getting a new boss.”
Employee A: “The new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
(18) Employee Z: “I heard that we are getting a new boss.”
Employee A: (*) “A new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
I suspect that the source of your confusion is in your own choice of antecedent. Under my hypothesis, I would predict that this exchange sounds better with ‘they’:
Employee A: “A new boss is due to arrive next Wednesday.”
Employee B: “I hope they aren’t a hard-ass.”
OR
Employee B: “I hope he or she isn’t a hard-ass.”
and that this exchange sounds worse with ‘they’:
Employee A: “It turns out that the new boss won’t be joining the other group. We’re getting the new boss.”
Employee B: “When are they arriving?”
OR
Employee B: “When is he or she arriving?”
In each case, I’ve simply changed the article (and I added a context in the second exchange so that “the new boss” refers to a pre-specified individual).
Our grammars are probably more alike with respect to the singular ‘they’ than you might have imagined.
“The people gathered here need ask themselves a question. Each person should find the answer within themselves.”
Should it be themself? Is “themself” a word?
I believe that both ‘themself’ and ‘themselves’ appear in this context (with a singular referent) in many people’s dialects. So whether it’s a legal word depends on the dialect. I’m not sure how my own dialect handles these; I seem to produce both naturally. It’s probably worth investigating further.
Okay, that might not be a good example, I’ll try again:
“My child has a tooth-ache.”
“Did they get a cavity?”
Huh? Are these two people supposed to be talking to each other, or is it two unrelated people with cell-phones sitting side by side? I can’t tell. Also, I find singular they particularly weird with verb forms that differ from other 3rd person pronouns: “he/she/it does” whereas “they (singular) do”.
Yes, singular ‘they’ is weird. But it’s a natural occurrence in many dialects of English. The confusion probably arises because it behaves grammatically as a plural pronoun but refers to a singular antecedent. However, this mismatch is not unique to the singular ‘they’. The pronoun ‘everyone’ refers to a plural group but behaves as though it’s singular. And we can certainly look at the contrast between singular ‘you’ and the archaic ‘thou’. ‘you’ exhibits the same agreement characteristics regardless of whether it’s singular or plural (other than the ‘yourself’ reflexive). ‘thou’, on the other hand, has its own unique verb endings: “thou hast” and not “thou have”, even though the only difference between ‘thou’ and singular ‘you’ (even when it was common to use ‘thou’) was a matter of formality, not of plurality.
It’s useful to distinguish between agreement on a purely syntactic level, and semantic agreement. Purely syntactic agreement is simply an operation that checks a particular feature of a word to see if it is compatible with the corresponding feature of a phrase that enters a position where agreement must take place. In English, the subject position of a verb is an agreement position, and the agreement operation checks the [plural] feature of a verb against the [plural] feature of the phrase that occupies the subject position. So the verb ‘do’ in its finite (non-infinitive) form has a [+ plural] feature, which means that the subject has to have a [+ plural] feature as well. ‘they’ has a [+ plural] feature, whether or not it refers to a set with more than one element. Likewise, the verb ‘does’ has a [- plural] feature, so the subject has to have a [- plural] feature. This feature is a characteristic of the pronouns ‘he’, ’she’, and ‘it’, but not of ‘they’.
So there are consistent syntactic reasons why ‘they’ behaves as a grammatical plural when it refers to a singular individual.
Now, you may call me prescriptivist but I am of the opinion that language exists for the sake of humans and not the other way around. My feeling is that if the language is insufficient for the needs of the people it should be changed to fill those needs. I personally advocate the usage of Spivak pronouns. Their origin is simple and based in the common language as it exists now, their pronunciation and usage is straightforward and you get to use verb tenses the same as you always have with the gender specific pronouns. Now I may not be a linguist, or have any of the training or ambition necessary to become one, but that strikes me a fairly elegant solution. Well, since the language is made by the people, I suppose all I have to do is start using them regularly, but I still find it easier to refer to every one as ‘he’.
Prescriptivism and descriptivism serve different purposes, and neither is better than the other in general. It’s only when someone takes one and pushes it beyond what it’s for that conflicts arise. Descriptivism serves the purpose of understanding how language arises naturally. It is fundamental to the scientific process, an area where prescriptivism has no place: it’s not science to dictate what the rules are without seeing if those rules do in fact hold.
Prescriptivism, on the other hand, serves a different purpose: That of specifying standards to facilitate interactions between groups that may have their own standards. A non-linguistic example is that of specifying the characteristics of computer ports. It wouldn’t be very useful to leave it up to individual manufacturers to determine the shape of a USB connector; nothing would fit together. Descriptivism by itself is insufficient here: the goal of facilitating interaction is not served by only describing the characteristics of each separate component.
So in the case where a language is missing a component that would communicate a specific meaning that no existing component has, it would be appropriate and useful to prescribe (or recommend, suggest, require, etc., depending on how strongly you want to prescribe) a common component to facilitate communication between speakers. This places no demands on any individual’s own grammars (though it can certainly make demands on other processes, such as consciously interpreting an unacceptable element or consciously producing an element that one’s internal grammar rejects).
I do agree that there is a hole in most people’s dialects of English that leaves the semantic concept of a specific, “familiar” individual without a third-person grammatical representation. So to facilitate the communication of this concept, prescribing a common standard is appropriate. The problem then becomes which of the many alternate proposals is best.
Practicality then becomes a factor to consider. The best prescription (toward the goal of having people actually use it) will be one that people can handle without expending an unnecessary amount of resources to use it.
It is here that a descriptivist study of people’s different grammars is useful, since it tells us how accommodating a grammar will be to a component that is not already a part of it. It is for this reason that I have been favoring prescribing the singular ‘they’, as it is already used in many people’s dialects. Since I noticed difficulty with it in certain contexts, I wanted to identify what factors were involved, and I now have a hypothesis, not completely well formed, that could explain this.
Spivak pronouns are very elegant, I agree, and aesthetically, they offer a nice parallel to the existing ‘he’ and ’she’, unlike singular ‘they’. From a practical standpoint, however, fitting them into one’s own speech is difficult, as you yourself admit. I argue that practicality outweighs aesthetics when the goal is to minimize additional effort on the part of the people involved. Aesthetically, it would be ideal to also remove the useless ‘-s’ suffix from third-person singular verbs so that all subject pronouns can take the same forms of verbs: “I do”, “you do”, “it do”, “they do”, etc. But prescribing this will pose a large amount of unnecessary effort on the part of people whose grammars require the ‘-s’.
Therefore, I continue to advocate the use of ‘they’, unaesthetic as it is, as a replacement for the non-gender-specific third-person singular pronoun gap, with the understanding that it is rejected by many people’s grammars, including my own, in certain contexts (which I hypothesize to be determined by a factor of “familiarity”). However, given that in other contexts, ‘they’ is perfectly acceptable while ‘e’/'ey’ is rejected, it would make the most practical sense to reduce the amount of conflict by prescribing a pronoun that is bad only in some contexts rather than one that is bad in all contexts.
So, in short, as perfect as we would want language to be, it’s a system that evolves in part on its own and as a result accumulates a lot of ugly but functional detritus that is usually easier to just deal with than to get rid of altogether.
As a side note, what does “genderqueer” mean? I had never heard the term before and was wondering if it is fundamentally different from being transgendered? I am asking in all honesty from a position of profound ignorance.
I refer you to the Wikipedia entry for ‘genderqueer’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderqueer
In my own usage, I treat the term not as a label with which I identify, but rather as a statement that I reject the traditional binary labels for gender. I see gender as a spectrum encompassing a vast number of identities, influenced by biological, psychological, and social factors, and don’t see the importance of putting down an arbitrary two-category system for dividing that spectrum up.
As for its relation to ‘transgender’, there are people who identify as one but not the other, and there are people who identify as both. ‘Transgender’ has come to mean a number of different things, which don’t correspond to each other exactly. The broad meaning is an umbrella term that refers to people of minority gender identities, but it also has a specific meaning of someone who is assigned to one of the two gender categories but feels that they belong in the other one (i.e., this conflicts with the spectrum view of gender).
I used to identify as “transgender” but have always found the term problematic, so I don’t any identify with it any longer. I also don’t identify as “not transgender”; it’s just that the term has lost its relevance to me. I guess part of the problem was that some people had their own preconceptions of the term ‘transgender’ that didn’t fall in line with how I saw myself, so I’d rather have people asking me what ‘genderqueer’ means because that term is less familiar in general. Also, I think ‘genderqueer’ more often implies a rejection of labels while ‘transgender’ has often been used to denote a specific identity. In general, I think it would be harder to attach characteristics to a term that rejects formalized identities than one that establishes a specific identity.
(My apologies for this comment; I am more than a little bit drunk… and more than a lot bit stupid…)
No apologies needed. This was quite an inspiring comment, and you’ve brought up a useful bit of evidence that supports my hypothesis (so I’m not going crazy, mwahahaha!).