Gender-Neutral Pronouns He and They

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate the Korean EFL students’ understanding of singular they in comparison with gender-neutral he. When it comes to the choice of third person singular pronouns in gender-indeterminant contexts, prescriptive grammar prefers gender-neutral he, while descriptive grammar recommends singular they, among other alternative pronoun forms. As grammar books and guideline sources gradually adopt singular they as a proper, or a better, pronoun candidate compared to gender-neutral he, an experimental study was designed to examine how Korean learners of English acquire this recent language change in EFL contexts. In a naturalness judgment task, the Korean EFL learners judged singular they in informal contexts as less natural than in formal contexts and even as unnatural when the antecedents included ‘every/any,’ though it has been reported that native speakers prefer singular they in informal contexts rather than in formal contexts.