Agreement patterns in English is a collection of variationist corpus studies examining the development of the English generic third person pronoun, that is, generic he or they used with no number or gender specification. The studies focus on the increasing prevalence of the plural pronoun they used in this context, commonly referred to as “epicene they,” in competition with the singular pronoun he. A number of factors are examined in the studies, including internal linguistic factors such as the number and definiteness of the antecedent, as well as extralinguistic factors such as the formality and type of text (imaginative or informative), gender of the writer, and century (from 1500 to the present).
With regard to the antecedent, Laitinen finds the increasing distribution of epicene they closely mirroring the grammaticalization and the gender- and number-leveling process of the indefinite pronoun antecedents, which moved from independent forms that maintained their number and gender specification (such as every man) to compounds with the generic meaning, where number and gender are both unspecified (such as everyone). A significant effect of the definiteness of the antecedent, for example everyone vs. everybody, was also shown to influence singular or plural epicene choice.
The social factors examined reveal the interaction of speakers and writers with the language and their awareness of language choices. Texts categorized as “informative” (including scientific, journalistic, commercial, philosophical, and leisure texts), while overall favoring the plural pronoun, used generic he more than did the “imaginative” texts (fiction), suggesting that authors are more aware of normative pressures in more formal texts. The gender of the writer proved to be enormously influential on pronoun choice, with female writers utilizing the plural pronoun almost exclusively, indicating a preference for semantic agreement (unspecified gender) over grammatical (number) agreement. Over the centuries, continuing variation in pronoun usage is demonstrated, with the plural gaining favor despite normative pressures toward singular he beginning in 1746.
The overall conclusion presented by Laitinen through these studies is that epicene they has been a variable in the English grammar since the Early Modern period, gradually gaining in strength through a process of grammaticalization that is nearing completion in the present day. This grammaticalization process is related to the overall development of the English language by examination of the entire referent subsystem, both anaphoric and cataphoric, which displays a tendency toward semantic agreement in contrast to grammatical agreement. At the earlier end of diachrony, these internal linguistic factors were highly influential in pronoun choice, but toward the end of the change, the social factors, particularly gender, become more prominent.
