Epicene pronouns in UK national newspapers: A diachronic study

1 Introduction The standard English personal pronoun paradigm has been more or less stable since the end of the Early Modern English period, with its last major change being the replacement of thou with you (Busse 2001: 120). However, the current paradigm does not include a gender-neutral third person singular form, and thus every animate, human antecedent must be referred to in the third person using a gendered pronoun, whether or not the speaker/writer knows the referent's biological sex. The form traditionally prescribed to fill this pronominal gap 1 is generic he – the use of the masculine pronoun for generic reference – but it has fallen out of favour (if indeed it ever reflected usage) on the grounds that it is an example of sexist language and promotes the exclusion and invisibility of women (see Stanley 1978; Sigley and Holmes 2002: 138). Conversely, empirical evidence has shown that the other major contender for epicene status, singular they – the traditionally plural pronoun used as singular – can be easily processed as a gender-neutral form, despite arguments over its number (dis)concord with singular referents (see Foertsch and Gernsbacher 1997; Sanford and Filik 2006). In this paper, which is part of an ongoing study of epicene pronouns, I draw on two corpora of UK national newspaper articles to present a diachronic analysis of the quantitative usage patterns of these two epicene candidates. I show that in 1961 (which is the date of the LOB corpus) generic he is the favoured epicene pronoun, whilst in 2007/08 written usage has swung towards singular they. These results represent a move away from traditional grammatical convention , and the use of he to refer to both sexes, towards a singular version of the pronoun they. 2 Significantly, the dates of the two corpora are important, as the LOB corpus represents written standard English before second-wave feminism and the non-sexist language reforms which it helped to facilitate, whilst the 2007/08 corpus contains data which represents more modern, and arguably current, pronoun