Less well-behaved pronouns: Singular they in English and plural ta ‘it/he/she’ in Chinese

Abstract

Borthen (2010) presents a corpus study of plural personal pronouns in Norwegian, demonstrating that plural pronouns may appear linguistically less ‘well-behaved’ than their singular correspondents, in the sense that the cognitive status encoded by plural pronouns is less restrictive than that encoded by singular pronouns, and hence they tend to have a vague reference. Her study also reveals that the lexically encoded person and/or number features of plural pronouns appear to be incompatible with the interpretation they achieve in context. Based on her study, Borthen claims that there is an asymmetry between plural and singular pronouns. In this paper, we first discuss the special use of the third person plural pronoun they in English, the so-called singular they, and then the special use of the third person singular pronoun ta ‘he/she/it’ in Chinese, providing supportive evidence for Borthen's findings that pronouns are referentially less well-behaved, but counter-evidence against her claim about the asymmetry between plural and singular pronouns.