Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5526Keywords:
non-binary gender, neopronouns, nounself pronouns, transgender, sociolinguistics, neologismsAbstract
This acceptability-judgment survey of English neopronouns, including xe, fae, ey, and ze, shows that while neopronouns are not fully ungrammatical for most English speakers, they are rated as less grammatical than canonical third-person singular pronouns like she, he, and they. We found that several social variables correlated with ratings of neopronouns in sentences, including age, gender, and sexual orientation. The neopronouns that bear orthographic resemblance to canonical pronouns were rated highest, and metalinguistic comments from participants identified that analogy was an important factor in whether they found neopronouns grammatical.Downloads
Published
2023-04-27
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Articles
License
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.
How to Cite
Rose, Ell, Max Winig, Jasper Nash, Kyra Roepke, and Kirby Conrod. 2023. “Variation in Acceptability of Neologistic English Pronouns”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 8 (1): 5526. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5526.