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A study of whether "singular they" is more "difficult" to understand than gendered pronouns found that "singular they is a cognitively efficient substitute for generic he or she, particularly when the antecedent is nonreferential" (e.g. anybody, a nurse, or a truck driver) rather than referring to a specific person (e.g. a runner I knew or my ...
Singular they is a use of they as an epicene (gender-neutral) pronoun for a singular referent. [7] [8] In this usage, they follows plural agreement rules (they are, not *they is), but the semantic reference is singular. Unlike plural they, singular they is only used for people. For this reason, it could be considered to have personal gender.
Consider the singular “they, ... For example, “heer,” “hiser” and “himer” were proposed by Ella Young, the first woman superintendent of Chicago public schools, in 1912, he said ...
The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. Even when used with singular meaning, they takes a plural verb: If attacked, the victim should remain exactly where they are. Due to this supposed grammatical inconsistency, use of singular they was discouraged by some grammarians during the nineteenth and ...
In (16), singular they occurs with a singular antecedent of any gender, with no restriction on description or name. In examples (14-16), subscript i indicates coreference ; moreover, examples such as (15) and (16) are sometimes referred to as 'referential they'.
Singular they had emerged by the 14th century as a third-person pronoun, about a century after the plural they, [7] and is first attested in the 14th-century poem William and the Werewolf. [8] Neopronouns were not coined until the 18th century. [1]
Singular they/them/their pronouns are appropriate to use in reference to any person who goes by them. If a person exclusively goes by neopronouns, such as ze/hir, then singular they should also generally be used instead of neopronouns when referring to that individual, though their neopronouns should usually be mentioned in their biography (in the main prose or in a footnote).
For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and clusivity, such as mitripela ("they two and I") and yumitripela ("you two and I"). [4] Some languages do not have third-person personal pronouns, instead using demonstratives (e.g. Macedonian) [5] or full noun phrases.