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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.
Normally, a singular antecedent requires a singular pronoun. But because he is no longer universally accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of unspecified gender, people commonly (in speech and in informal writing) substitute the third-person-plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves (or the nonstandard singular themself ...
second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed (as the English you); in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being addressed together with third parties. third-person pronouns normally refer to third parties other than the speaker or the person being addressed (as the English he, she, it, they).
they are (third-person plural, and third-person singular) Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular, excluding singular 'they'. In many languages, such as French , the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
Most pronouns are deictic: [2]: 68 they have no inherent denotation, and their meaning is always contextual. For example, the meaning of me depends entirely on who says it, just as the meaning of you depends on who is being addressed. Pronouns are not the only deictic words though. For example now is deictic, but it's not a pronoun. [6]
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They asked if they could still participate if they were not a girl, and we asked how they saw themself. They told us as a “they/them.” We asked if they wanted us to use these pronouns moving ...
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...