epicene they

Example Sentences

• "That's because, as amazing as it sometimes seems to austere grammarians, epicene "they" is not universally regarded as wrong. It has a long and respected history (dating back to the 14th century, I believe), and many famous writers have used and defended it."
• "Some researchers have suggested a strong link between the type of antecedent and the chosen alternative of the epicene pronoun. For example, it has been suggested that the majority of epicene theys refer to quanticational expressions such as somebody, everybody, etc."
• "[Title:] The Rise of Epicene They"
• "In short, inclusive language is supposedly scientific, its use necessitated by modern English. And so the epicene "they" becomes a neuter workaround, but "mankind" is employed, some allegedly sexist renderings are retained, and God and Satan remain masculine because this is how modern anglophones speak and think."
• "We conducted two experiments that, in contrast with prior work, employed implicit methods. We manipulated the type of pronoun in a sentence (i.e., epicene he, epicene they, and unrelated) and type of probe word (masculine or feminine) in order to determine whether he or they is a more effective epicene pronoun, comparably facilitating the processing of both masculine- and feminine-gendered words."
• "Similarly, quantifiers such as somebody, everybody, and nobody seem to influence pronoun selection as the majority of epicene theys refer to quantificational expressions."