This study considers the use of they and he for generic reference in post-2000 written British English. The analysis is framed by a consideration of language-internal factors, such as syntactic agreement, and language-external factors, which include traditional grammatical prescriptivism and the language reforms resulting from second-wave feminism.

This study considers the use of they and he for generic reference in post-2000 written British English. The analysis is framed by a consideration of language-internal factors, such as syntactic agreement, and language-external factors, which include traditional grammatical prescriptivism and the language reforms resulting from second-wave feminism.

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

This original volume provides the first state-of-the-art overview of research on pronouns in the 21st century. With its dedicated sections on grammar, history, and change, language learning/acquisition, cognition and comprehension, power, politics, and identity, The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns shows that contemporary interest in pronouns and gender represents just the tip of the iceberg. Led by Laura Paterson, a transdisciplinary collection of experts discuss the global history of different pronoun systems, synthesize the literature, and contextualize the salient issues and current debates shaping research on pronouns across different spheres and via different theoretical-methodological traditions. The Handbook is designed to encourage readers to engage with a range of perspectives from within and beyond their immediate areas of interest, with the ultimate aim of shaping the future trajectory of interdisciplinary, multiingual research on pronouns. Using data from multiple languages and engaging deeply with the social, cultural, political, technological, and psychological factors that can influence pronoun use, this innovative book will be an indispensable resource to scholars and advanced students of theoretical and applied linguistics, education, and the social and behavioural sciences.

This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology.

Gender inequality remains an issue of high relevance, and controversy, in society. Previous research shows that language contributes to gender inequality in various ways: Gender-related information is transmitted through formal and semantic features of language, such as the grammatical category of gender, through gender-related connotations of role names (e.g., manager, secretary), and through customs of denoting social groups with derogatory vs. neutral names. Both as a formal system and as a means of communication, language passively reflects culture-specific social conditions. In active use it can also be used to express and, potentially, perpetuate those conditions. The questions addressed in the contributions to this Frontiers Special Topic include: • how languages shape the cognitive representations of gender • how features of languages correspond with gender equality in different societies • how language contributes to social behaviour towards the sexes • how gender equality can be promoted through strategies for gender-fair language use These questions are explored both developmentally (across the life span from childhood to old age) and in adults. The contributions present work conducted across a wide range of languages, including some studies that make cross-linguistic comparisons. Among the contributors are both cognitive and social psychologists and linguists, all with an excellent research standing. The studies employ a wide range of empirical methods: from surveys to electro-physiology. The papers in the Special Topic present a wide range of complimentary studies, which will make a substantial contribution to understanding in this important area.