Gendered Language in Flux: the Use of Epicene Pronouns in EFL and ELF
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Charlotte Stormbom Gendered language in flux: The use of epicene pronouns in EFL and ELF writing Stormbom Charlotte This work adds to the body of research on epicene pronouns in English by examining the use of these pronouns in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The analyses focus on the pronouns Charlotte Stormbom he, he or she, and they, taking into consideration various factors that may influence pronoun use. Three interrelated factors prove to be of particular // importance: the language users’ first-language (L1) background, the semantics in EFL and ELF writing Gendered language in flux: The use of epicene pronouns Gendered language in flux: of the antecedent, and linguistic prescriptivism. Evidence is found of variation in language users’ cognitive models of epicene pronouns, notably in their The use of epicene pronouns in conceptualisations of they. The dissertation has important implications for the understanding of the EFL and ELF writing grammatical, cognitive, and social interplay of language users’ L1 background and EFL writing. It raises the issue of gendered language and linguistic gatekeeping in academic ELF publishing as well as proposes a modified paradigm of personal pronouns for EFL teaching. // 2021 9 789521 240256 ISBN 978-952-12-4025-6 Charlotte Stormbom Born 1989 Previous studies and degrees Master of Arts, Åbo Akademi University, 2014 Bachelor of Arts, Åbo Akademi University, 2011 Picture credit: Max Askelo Gendered language in flux: The use of epicene pronouns in EFL and ELF writing Charlotte Stormbom English Language and Literature Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology Åbo Akademi University Åbo, Finland, 2021 Supervisors Professor Tuija Virtanen-Ulfhielm English Language and Literature Åbo Akademi University Professor Saara Haapamäki Swedish Language Åbo Akademi University Reviewers Professor Anna Mauranen English Philology University of Helsinki Professor Anne Pauwels Department of Linguistics SOAS University of London Opponent Professor Anna Mauranen English Philology University of Helsinki ISBN 978-952-12-4025-6 (printed) ISBN 978-952-12-4026-3 (digital) Painosalama Oy, Turku, Finland 2021 Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the help of numerous people. First and foremost, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisors Professor Tuija Virtanen-Ulfhielm and Professor Saara Haapamäki for your kind support and guidance along the way. I am also very grateful to my pre-examiners Professor Anna Mauranen and Professor Anne Pauwels. I would like to thank everyone in the department of English Language and Literature: you have provided me with a positive and supportive research environment, even in the stressful time of a global pandemic. I am very grateful to everyone who helped me distribute the elicitation experiment to university students across Europe: Professor Elena Borzova, Professor Jana Chamonikolasová, Dr Heidrun Dorgeloh, Professor Roberta Facchinetti, Professor Laure Gardelle, Dr Elisabeth Gustavsson, Professor Peter Harder, Dr Pekka Lintunen, Professor Satu Manninen, Dr Alessandra Molino, Professor Arja Piirainen-Marsh, Professor Natalia Pushina, Dr Janne Skaffari, Dr Erik Smitterberg, Professor Sandrine Sorlin, Dr Heli Tissari, Professor Jukka Tyrkkö, and Dr Jim Walker. Special thanks are due to Dr Iris Lindahl-Raittila for helping me pilot this experiment twice. I want to thank Dr Tove Larsson for permission to use and collect data from the Swedish subset of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase. A sincere thank you is also owed to Dr Signe-Anita Lindgrén who encouraged me to start on this journey. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I have received while working on this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without funding from Stiftelsens vid Åbo Akademi H. W. Donners fond. The very final stage of the dissertation was completed with the help of a grant from the Åbo Akademi University Rector’s Fund. Finally, I wish to thank everyone who has enriched my life outside the academic world. Many thanks to my friends Annica, Linda, Lisa, Max, and Veijo for countless hours talking about anything and everything. Thank you to my family for believing in me: my mother Ildikó and my brothers Michael and Henry. Sadly, my father Christian did not live to see me finish this project, but I know he would have been the proudest of them all. Thank you, Andrew, for your unending support and encouragement – and for your English expertise. Åbo/Turku, 4 January 2021 Charlotte Stormbom i ii Abstract The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate the use of epicene pronouns in written English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a lingua franca (EFL). Epicene pronouns are defined as third-person singular pronouns used in reference to gender-indefinite antecedents. The dissertation focuses on the three most common types of epicene pronouns in English: generic he, he or she variants, and singular they. The dissertation includes four substudies, which examine how the use of epicene pronouns has changed over time, how the antecedent affects the pronoun choice, and how the pronoun choice is influenced by the language users’ L1 background. The materials consist of five corpora and an experiment. The corpus texts include: (1) argumentative essays written by university students from 13 L1 backgrounds, (2) academic papers written by L1 Swedish-speaking university students, and (3) articles published in Open Access (OA) journals. The findings reveal diachronic changes in the use of epicene pronouns: the use of generic he is found to be considerably less common in the texts from the 2010s than in the texts from the 1970s to 2000s. At the same time, the use of singular they appears to be increasing in popularity in EFL and ELF writing. Furthermore, the results show that the choice of epicene pronouns is affected by the antecedent type. Antecedents that are semantically plural, such as everyone, are more likely to co-occur with they than antecedents that are semantically singular, such as a person. The use of he and he or she displays the opposite kind of distribution. The gender expectancy of the antecedent also appears to have bearing on pronoun choice as generic he is more common with male-stereotyped nouns than with neutral or female-stereotyped ones. The use of epicene pronouns is also influenced by the users’ L1 lingua-cultural background. Speakers of L1s with pervasive grammatical gender (e.g. Italian and Russian) seem more prone to using generic he than speakers of genderless languages (e.g. Finnish) and languages with a combination of natural and grammatical gender (e.g. Swedish and Danish). A possible reason for these tendencies is that the structure of the L1 leads to differences in learners’ conceptualisations of gender, in line with the framework of ‘thinking for speaking’, a weak form of linguistic relativity. Keywords: epicene pronouns, singular they, corpus linguistics, linguistic relativity, gender, EFL, ELF iii List of publications This dissertation is a summary of the following four articles: 1. Stormbom, C. 2018. ‘Epicene pronouns in intermediate to advanced EFL writing’. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 4(1): 1 22. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.16016.sto. − 2. Stormbom, C. 2020. ‘Singular they in English as a foreign language’. Applied Linguistics Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2019-0115. 3. Stormbom, C. 2019. ‘Language change in L2 academic writing: The case of epicene pronouns’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 38: 95 105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.02.001. − 4. Stormbom, C. 2020. ‘Gendering in open access research articles: The role of epicene pronouns’. English for Specific Purposes 60: 193 204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2020.08.001 − Reprints of the articles were made with the kind permission of the publishers. iv Table of contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... i Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. iii List of publications ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of contents ............................................................................................................................. v List of figures ................................................................................................................................ viii List of tables .................................................................................................................................. viii Abbreviations .................................................................................................................................. ix 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Research background ....................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Aims and research questions ......................................................................................... 4 1.3 Outline ....................................................................................................................................