Lingthusiasm Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod  

Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for both going back to the 14th century. More recently, people have also been using singular they to refer to a specific person, as in “Alex left their umbrella”. 

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Kirby Conrod, a linguist who wrote their dissertation about the syntax and sociolinguistics of singular they. We talk about Kirby’s research comparing how people use third person pronouns (like they, she, and he) in a way that conveys social attitudes, like how some languages use formal and informal “you”, specific versus generic singular they, and how people go about changing their mental grammars for social reasons. 

Read the transcript here

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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• We’re giving away grants for linguistics communications projects!
• Kirby Conrod (website)
• Kirby Conrod on twitter
• Pronouns Raising and Emerging: Kirby’s dissertation on the syntax and sociolinguistics of singular they and pronouns as honorifics
  
• Kirby Conrod’s ko-fi micro-fellowship page
• Singular they on Wikipedia
• RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 9 Episode 2
  
• Raymond 2016 on the T/V distinction
  
• Syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference by Lauren Ackerman
  
• Ackerman 2018: Our words matter: acceptability, grammaticality, and ethics of research on singular'they’-type pronouns 
• Bjorkman 2017: Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English
• Leah Velleman on distal they
• Konnelly 2019: The future is “they”: The morphosyntax of an English epicene pronoun
• THEY 2019 conference 
  

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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).