---
title: "Singular <i>they</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in"
description: "This squib asks why English speakers treat singular they so unevenly. 24 references, cited by 5 papers here."
authors: ["Bronwyn M. Bjorkman"]
year: 2017
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/4942/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.374"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bjorkman-2017-singular-i-they-i-syntactic/"
---
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# Singular \<i>they\</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English

**Authors:** Bronwyn M. Bjorkman · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2017/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/4942/galley/12433/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.374](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2753230086)

**Citations:** 83 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [5](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bjorkman-2017-singular-i-they-i-syntactic/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
This squib asks why English speakers treat singular *they* so unevenly. With quantified, indefinite, or gender-unknown antecedents, *they* has been usual since at least the 1400s (Balhorn 2004). Bjorkman also documents a newer pattern that earlier work missed. Some speakers now use *they* for a definite, specific person of known binary gender ("my cousin"), yet still reject it after a given name or a gendered noun ("Janet", "my sister"). The evidence is judgement contrasts, read against historical and sociolinguistic studies (Bodine, Newman, Matossian). The analysis has three parts:
- **Bound variables:** these may carry fewer features than referential pronouns. This fits the pronoun typology of Déchaine & Wiltschko and is incompatible with Heim's Feature Transmission.
- **Innovative speakers:** for them, gender on pronouns is no longer contrastive but an optional semantic feature. Names and gender-specific nouns still carry it lexically.
- **Discourse condition:** a coreferring pronoun must carry at least the features already attached to its referent.

The result explains why adopting *they* for nonbinary people runs into a grammatical obstacle, not only a cultural one.

## Key points
- Singular *they* with epicene or quantified antecedents is attested since the 1400s, while prescriptive bans date only from the 1700s (Bodine 1975).
- Newman (1992) studied speech from nine TV shows and Matossian (1997) studied interviews in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. Both found that *they* favours "nonsolid" antecedents, meaning ones low in referentiality, specificity, and definiteness.
- Haegeman (1981) is cited as the only earlier generative treatment. Its ban on sex-specific antecedents is refuted by bound-variable examples from Shakespeare and Austen.
- Feature Transmission (Heim 2008) cannot derive the attested pattern. The Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002) split between pronoun types can.
- Lexical gender is placed low, on the n head or the root (Kramer 2015; Steriopolo & Wiltschko 2010), while pronoun gender sits higher as discourse gender.

## Interesting ideas
- A referential pronoun may enrich what discourse has recorded about a referent but may never be less specific than that record, which is a monotone, dynamic agreement check.
- Bound-variable pronouns and referential pronouns obey different feature rules, so they should be handled by separate mechanisms rather than one agreement routine.
- Gender can come from two distinct sources: lexically fixed on certain nouns and names, or optional and tied to the discourse referent.
- Antecedent "solidity" bundles referentiality, specificity, and definiteness into one graded property that predicts pronoun choice.
- The core evidence is minimal pairs that differ only in antecedent type ("my cousin" vs "Janet"), which isolates a single factor.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): coreference could keep a feature set per entity and reject pronoun links whose features are a strict subset, with the rejection logged as the explanation.
- **I2** (frames): pronouns under quantifiers like "everyone" or "each" could be routed to variable binding with relaxed number and gender checks, separate from discourse coreference.
- **I3** (world): entity records could tag each gender value with where it came from (a name, a noun like "actress", or a later pronoun), so contradictions and overrides stay traceable.
- **I4** (world): entities could carry specific/generic/quantified flags, letting the world model tell "the ideal candidate" apart from a concrete person.
- **I5** (learn): such pairs make good negative controls for the coreference resolver, checking that it does not link *they* across the board.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Queen's University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/queen-s-university/) — University, Kingston, Canada · 8 works · 1,610 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works · [🤝 Social Sciences](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/social-sciences/) · 744 works · [🤝 Gender Studies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/social-sciences/gender-studies/) · 30 works

🧭 Topics (2): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works · [🔗 Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) · 550 works

## Cite

Cite as: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. 2017. Singular \<i>they\</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{bjorkman2017singular,
  title = {{Singular <i>they</i> and the syntactic representation of gender in English}},
  author = {Bronwyn M. Bjorkman},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.374},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374}
}
```

- [← previous Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: The dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/szmrecsanyi-2017-spoken-syntax-comparative-perspective-dative/)
- [next → A Simple and Accurate Syntax-Agnostic Neural Model for Dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marcheggiani-2017-simple-accurate-syntax-agnostic-neural/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2017/page/3/)

## References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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22. How to cite this article: Bjorkman, Bronwyn M. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 80. 1–13, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.374)
23. Published: 06 September 2017 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Published%3A+06+September+2017)
24. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

*Updated 24 October 2026*