Gendered language in flux : The use of epicene pronouns in EFL and ELF writing
Stormbom, Charlotte (2021-02-12)
Åbo Akademi - Åbo Akademi University
12.02.2021
Publikationen är skyddad av upphovsrätten. Den får läsas och skrivas ut för personligt bruk. Användning i kommersiellt syfte är förbjuden.
Publikationens permanenta adress är
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-4026-3
https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-4026-3
Abstrakt
The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate the use of epicene pronouns in written English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a lingua franca (EFL). Epicene pronouns are defined as third-person singular pronouns used in reference to gender-indefinite antecedents. The dissertation focuses on the three most common types of epicene pronouns in English: generic he, he or she variants, and singular they.
The dissertation includes four substudies, which examine how the use of epicene pronouns has changed over time, how the antecedent affects the pronoun choice, and how the pronoun choice is influenced by the language users’ L1 background. The materials consist of five corpora and an experiment. The corpus texts include: (1) argumentative essays written by university students from 13 L1 backgrounds, (2) academic papers written by L1 Swedish-speaking university students, and (3) articles published in Open Access (OA) journals.
The findings reveal diachronic changes in the use of epicene pronouns: the use of generic he is found to be considerably less common in the texts from the 2010s than in the texts from the 1970s to 2000s. At the same time, the use of singular they appears to be increasing in popularity in EFL and ELF writing.
Furthermore, the results show that the choice of epicene pronouns is affected by the antecedent type. Antecedents that are semantically plural, such as everyone, are more likely to co-occur with they than antecedents that are semantically singular, such as a person. The use of he and he or she displays the opposite kind of distribution. The gender expectancy of the antecedent also appears to have bearing on pronoun choice as generic he is more common with male-stereotyped nouns than with neutral or female-stereotyped ones.
The use of epicene pronouns is also influenced by the users’ L1 lingua-cultural background. Speakers of L1s with pervasive grammatical gender (e.g. Italian and Russian) seem more prone to using generic he than speakers of genderless languages (e.g. Finnish) and languages with a combination of natural and grammatical gender (e.g. Swedish and Danish). A possible reason for these tendencies is that the structure of the L1 leads to differences in learners’ conceptualisations of gender, in line with the framework of ‘thinking for speaking’, a weak form of linguistic relativity.
The dissertation includes four substudies, which examine how the use of epicene pronouns has changed over time, how the antecedent affects the pronoun choice, and how the pronoun choice is influenced by the language users’ L1 background. The materials consist of five corpora and an experiment. The corpus texts include: (1) argumentative essays written by university students from 13 L1 backgrounds, (2) academic papers written by L1 Swedish-speaking university students, and (3) articles published in Open Access (OA) journals.
The findings reveal diachronic changes in the use of epicene pronouns: the use of generic he is found to be considerably less common in the texts from the 2010s than in the texts from the 1970s to 2000s. At the same time, the use of singular they appears to be increasing in popularity in EFL and ELF writing.
Furthermore, the results show that the choice of epicene pronouns is affected by the antecedent type. Antecedents that are semantically plural, such as everyone, are more likely to co-occur with they than antecedents that are semantically singular, such as a person. The use of he and he or she displays the opposite kind of distribution. The gender expectancy of the antecedent also appears to have bearing on pronoun choice as generic he is more common with male-stereotyped nouns than with neutral or female-stereotyped ones.
The use of epicene pronouns is also influenced by the users’ L1 lingua-cultural background. Speakers of L1s with pervasive grammatical gender (e.g. Italian and Russian) seem more prone to using generic he than speakers of genderless languages (e.g. Finnish) and languages with a combination of natural and grammatical gender (e.g. Swedish and Danish). A possible reason for these tendencies is that the structure of the L1 leads to differences in learners’ conceptualisations of gender, in line with the framework of ‘thinking for speaking’, a weak form of linguistic relativity.