UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Burglars, Babysitters, And Persons: A Sociolinguistic Study Of Generic Pronoun Usage In Philadelphia And Minneapolis

Identification

Clé publique

openalex:w1528840181

Auteurs

Lou Ann Matossian

Année déclarée

1997

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.823883+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:04:47.823883+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

To the feminists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in their quest for legal personhood, belongs the credit for identifying language as both instrument and mirror of women's social status. Following a review of language as an issue in the U.S. woman suffrage movement, the present study documents contemporary generic pronouns in colloquial Euro-American usage. More than 1200 tokens were collected in four urban neighborhoods (Elmwood/Southwest and West Mount Airy in Philadelphia and Beltrami and Fuller in Minneapolis) by means of oral-history interviews and written questionnaires on topics of local interest. The settlement history and social networks of these four communities are presented. Statistical analysis shows that he was seldom used for epicene referents and appeared only about half the time even for masculine-generic referents. Indeed, the predominance of singular they and the near-absence of she, even for feminine-generic referents, appeared to be faits accomplis in colloquial usage. In contrast to the overtly gendered pronouns, the referential nonsolidity of singular they was conducive to pronoun switching and also explained why they was preferred for generic use even when the referent was female. Female language-users tended to avoid epicene he, and their use of singular they was also less masculine-biased than that of males. Evidence of continuing prescriptive pressure included the cross-age phenomenon of pronoun avoidance in writing when the referent was inclusive or feminine. However, correlations of age with education and occupation further suggested that a steady middle-class shift away from prescriptive "generic he" has been underway in colloquial English since at least the end of World War scII. Suggested research directions include historical study of feminist linguistic thought and sociolinguistic field observations of contemporary generic pronoun usage.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W1528840181

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

article

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1

• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W1528840181

Statut documentaire

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Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.