From: gal2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Androgyny and pronouns in a genderless language
Reply-To: gal2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 00:40:01 GMT


I'd like to redirect this thread towards working out a theory instead
of just citing data and advising recasting.

In article <1992Aug30.173343.24488@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>Roger Lustig (roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU) writes:
>>
>>[I write]:
>>>
>>>* Every good chef knows their ingredients.
>>>
>>>  Everyone in the kitchen knows their ingredients.
>>
>>The former sentence is used less often, and criticized more often; but
>>it's certainly acceptable in informal usage. (See Urdang, for instance.)
>>In formal usage, many people nowadays recast it with "All chefs..."

WHY then, is recasting necessary?

>Yes, recasting to all plural is often a good idea. However, consider
				 ^^^^^ WHEN and WHY?
>an instruction: "When the operator sees the red light blink he must 
>press the blue button." We can probably make some good recasting,
>but not to "all". Neither can we use "they" instead of "he", [. . .]

This is the type of construction I was having trouble coming up with in
my original post (Thanks, Erland):

* When the operator sees the red light blink, they must press the button.

(This would sound even worse to me if the verb of 'they' had to agree
with both 'they' and 'the operator', but couldn't. With a modal we don't
have that problem.)

I think that all the examples we've come up with so far must lie on a
continuum of acceptibility. There are constructions even worse than this,
such as 'they' referring to a specific antecedent (eg. 'the operator') in 
a previous sentence (or worse in a long paragraph continually referring
back to one such antecedent), or to the proper name of some ambiguously
sexed person such as the androgynous Pat on Saturday Night Live:

**Pat went to a hair dresser, but they didn't know how to cut their hair.

(Perhaps that is a low blow, with two potentially awkward usages of 'they'
etc. So be it.)

It seems to me that the problem must lie in how we conceptualize about
people in general. If I may approach this from outside linguistics for
a moment, let's assume that when someone is talking about a person, the
listener will generate a cognitive model of that person based on
information gleaned from the speaker's utterance, and according to the
idealized cognitive model (Lafoff's terminology) that we use to
conceptualize instances of persons. That is, the listener has a default
"image" of a generic and idealized person, and roughly speaking, a copy
of this image is made and amended when appropriate in the course of
thought / discourse / whatever. Sex seems to be one of the most important
characteristics of a person, and a conceptual commitment must be made
as soon as possible as to a person's sex.

Does this theory account for the awkwardness of 'they' referring to some
unsexed third person singular antecedents? Any holes here?

I think we also need to distinguish between a COMMON gender and an
UNKNOWN gender. The use of 'they' that we have been mulling over seems
to be the latter, though this isn't obvious before making this distinction.
English clearly does not have and does not need (or at least is not
begging for) a bona fide common gender third person pronoun. Almost
no one tries to remain uncommited to the sex of a person after the
person's sex has been established. This is further evidence for my
little theory.

I'd say that 'they' can easily refer to 'every ___', 'any ___', 'no ___',
'___one', '___body', and for some people even 'a ___' because these
constructions do not (directly?) invoke new person-models, and thus
do not demand commitment to the sex of the person. But this is all so
vague. . . .

[BEFORE YOU FLAME ME: Please do not call me a prEscriptivist or a sexist
bastard without a damn good argument. I'm neither. Be constructive.]

[MORE INTERESTING DISCLAIMER: English is my only fluent language, and
my German is way rusty. I'd really like to hear from anyone with data
from other languages relating to this theory. Do other genderless
languages have similar pronominal characteristics? What of genderful
languages? The above cognitive theory applies only to English speakers.
It's feasible that a person's sex is a minor characteristic in some
hypothetical culture or other.]

Thanks for contemplating this,
Jake.
-- 
"What's so interdisciplinary about studying lower levels of thought process?"
				  <-- Jacob Galley / gal2@midway.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang