Third Person Singular Pronouns Research Articles

Gender Patterns in Indonesian: A Corpus Study of Personal Pronoun References “Ia” and “Dia”

Indonesian is a language that does not have a grammatical gender feature, and this absence extends to the third-person singular pronouns. In English and many European languages, there are distinct second-person for addressing genders: male and female. The grammatical structure of Indonesian remains unchanged despite temporal shifts and the absence of gender-specific distinctions. The official Indonesian dictionary (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia or KBBI) does not designate ia and dia with explicit gender distinctions, such as masculine and feminine. This research aims to discuss the masculine and feminine contextual patterns of the pronouns ia and dia within the Indonesian Corpus (Korpus Bahasa Indonesia or KOIN). The study used a dataset comprising 121.098 tokens selected from literature, national, and social categories. Identifying gender patterns in using the second-person pronouns gets the research focus on the data of 19.697 concordances of the word ia and 10.031 concordances of dia. The findings indicate that dia has a reasonably equal association with both genders, but the word ia prefers feminine references more. It clarifies the nuances of gender expression in Indonesian and explains how linguistic decisions communicate gender information.

Outlier speakers and apparent effects: The case of variable subject placement in Spanish

Aims and objectives: The current paper utilizes corpus data to examine variation and potential language contact effects regarding pronominal subject placement among first-generation immigrants in Atlanta, with particular attention paid to the individual speaker. The research questions that guide the study are the following: What linguistic and social predictors govern subject placement in Mexican Spanish spoken in Roswell, GA? What role, if any, does English contact play in the overall preverbal rates and/or constraints that govern subject placement? Do the data show any substantial individual differences with regard to rates of subject placement? If so, how might the inclusion versus exclusion of these speakers influence the overall interpretation of the results? Design and data: This study employs a variationist sociolinguistic framework, and the speakers comprise 20 first-generation Mexican immigrants living in Georgia. Analysis: Descriptive statistics are employed for purposes of overall as well as individual usage rates of postverbal subjects. In addition, linguistic (e.g., person/number, priming) and social predictors (e.g., sex, English proficiency, preferred media language) were incorporated into logistic regression analyses using Rbrul. Findings: Pronominal subject placement is most strongly influenced by person/number. Third-person singular pronouns favor postverbals while other pronouns favor preverbal position. Regarding social predictors, both sex and preferred media language appeared to play significant roles in the initial analysis; however, upon considering outlier speaker effects, the apparent effect of sex disappeared. The media language effect shows that those with a preference for English media favor preverbal subjects, suggesting a potential language contact effect. Originality and implications: The current study is the first to analyze this phenomenon in southeastern U.S. Spanish. The findings have implications for the study of language contact and change, demonstrating the importance of considering how individual speakers could misrepresent the overall data, interpretations of results, and conclusions in sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism.

SEEING BEYOND WORDS: METAFUNCTIONS ANALYSIS OF EFL TEXTBOOKS

This study carefully applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to identify common linguistic patterns to examine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. This descriptive qualitative study addresses the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks as the research focus. The frequent use of material process, particular nominal group types such as Thing (T) and Numerative Thing (NT), the nuanced modality conveyed by "should," "would," and "will," and the use of narrative perspectives with third-person singular pronouns ("he" and "she") are noteworthy among these patterns. The identified linguistic features furnish invaluable pedagogical insights for the stakeholders of English learners, including the teachers, and provide guidance for targeted language instruction. Furthermore, these results are also invaluable for material development since the study highlights the importance of integrating SFL principles within the classroom discourse. The study also emphasizes the significance of SFL-based textbooks as learning facilitates. The study discovers that SFL-based textbook analysis provides well-informed instruction, allowing teachers to modify their teaching methods to meet students' communicative needs better. Despite limitations, the analysis remains a valuable tool in the classroom discourse as it better portrays the foreign language classroom discourse.

Non-gendered pronoun processing: an investigation of the gender non-specific third person singular pronoun ‘TA’ in Chinese

ABSTRACT This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, “TA,” in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender pronouns in reference to antecedents with varying stereotypical gender (e.g., occupation terms) and definitional gender (e.g., kinship terms). In our analysis, we assessed several means of operationalizing stereotypical gender information. Optimal model performance was achieved with a continuous measure that accounted for individual differences in gender perception, suggesting the involvement of a probabilistic component. Results for reading latencies and perceived appropriateness of TA support previous findings from discourse analysis that TA is not entirely gender-neutral but rather has nuanced contexts of use in modern Chinese written discourse.

Age-related differences in understanding pronominal reference in sentence comprehension: An electrophysiological investigation.

This study aimed to investigate how age affects the ability to comprehend sentence meaning, specifically how individuals resolve pronouns to their corresponding nouns. The study included 34 young participants (20-29 years old) and 34 older participants (60-81 years old). The participants were presented with sentences containing two characters and a third-person singular pronoun. Stereotypical genders associated with character names were manipulated such that the pronoun had either one, two, or no possible antecedents, rendering the pronoun referentially unambiguous, ambiguous, or mismatched, respectively. Consistent with the prior findings on preserved syntactic processing with advanced age, event-related potential data time-locked to the critical pronouns showed a P600 effect to mismatched pronouns regardless of age. These results indicate that older adults, like their younger counterparts, have a strong preference for readily available antecedents. When the pronoun was ambiguous, younger adults showed a typical Nref effect-a sustained anterior negativity associated with elaborative inferencing to search for the referent. Older adults did not exhibit this effect, suggesting a reduction in elaborative processes for establishing coherence. Nevertheless, the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns was observed in a subset of older adults, who also showed a Nref instead of P600 response to mismatched pronouns. Overall, individuals who elicited the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns were associated with a higher level of print exposure, suggesting that life-long reading experience may help to counteract age-related decline. Together, these findings help characterize the differential effects of aging on pronominal understanding and provide initial electrophysiological evidence of the protective benefit of print exposure on language processing in the aging population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Have a Writing Style? An Investigation into the Stylistic Features of ChatGPT-4

Even though Turnitin generates AI (Artificial Intelligence) writing detection reports, these AI reports shall not be used for punitive purposes as Turnitin AI reports accuracy is way below the 98% claimed by Turnitin, as revealed in this study. To assist professors, teachers, and content evaluation stakeholders in their strive to identify AI-generated material, this study examines the stylistic features of case study, business correspondence, and academic writing ChatGPT-4 generated responses by exploring sentence length, paragraph structure, word choice, mood, tense, voice, pronouns, keywords density, lexical density, lexical diversity, and reading ease. The study revealed that ChatGPT-4 case study generated responses are produced in paragraphs of 2 to 3 sentences of 16 to 18 words each. The sentences are mainly formed in imperative mood. The use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ and the second-person possessive determiner ‘your’ is prevalent. Keywords and lexical density are relatively low, lexical diversity is average, and the reading ease is relatively high. The study also found that ChatGPT-4 business correspondence responses are generated in paragraphs of 2 to 3 sentences of 16 to 20 words each. The sentences are mainly generated in declarative mood thru simple present tense in active voice using third-person singular pronouns. Technical words and abbreviations are used without outlining what they stand for. The keywords density, lexical density, and lexical diversity are high and the reading ease is low. The study also revealed that ChatGPT-4 academic writing generated responses are provided in paragraphs of 3 to 4 sentences of 16 to 19 words each. The sentences are mainly generated in declarative mood using active voice, agentless passive in times, with diverse present tenses. Keywords and lexical densities are high and the lexical diversity is low, which makes the reading ease average difficulty, except for the undefined abbreviations. Noticeably, ChatGPT-4 supports the transgender movement by intentionally using the third-person plural pronoun ‘they’ to refer to a singular.

Thought and language: association of groupmindedness with young English-speaking children’s production of pronouns

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children’s pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking children’s first-person plural, first-person singular, second-person, third-person plural, and third-person singular pronouns. As a proportion of pronouns, children used more first-person plural pronouns, only, after 3;0 compared to before. Additionally, children used more 1pp. pronouns when their mothers used more 1pp. pronouns. As a proportion of total utterances, all pronoun classes were used more often as children aged. These findings suggest that a shift in children’s social conceptualizations at age 3 is reflected in their use of 1pp. pronouns.

Variation in acceptability of neologistic English pronouns

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.

Singular they in English as a foreign language

Abstract A much-debated issue in English is the use of “epicene pronouns”, i.e. third-person singular pronouns of indeterminate gender. Previous studies have shown that singular they is the most common epicene in L1 English, but this pronoun has not received much attention in studies of L2 use. The present study extends previous research by examining variation between L2 groups in the distribution of epicene pronouns, focussing particularly on the use of singular they and how it is affected by three features of the antecedent: definiteness, notional number, and gender expectancy. The data originate in an elicitation experiment, which was completed by 338 university students of English from eight L1 backgrounds. The results show that singular they was most frequently used with notionally plural antecedents, whereas it was least common with gender-stereotyped antecedents. The study also disclosed variation between learners: In some L1 groups, they was used frequently with all types of antecedents, suggesting that these learners perceive singular they as a singular pronoun in its own right. In other groups, singular they appeared to function mostly as a modification of the plural they, as the pronoun was only frequent with notionally plural antecedents. The findings have important implications for language teaching.

Suomenoppijoiden käsityksiä kolmaspersoonaisten pronominien käytöstä ja puhuttelusta

My study is a survey that examines how Finnish as a second language speakers understand the use of Finnish pronouns and how to address people. I focus on the informants’ experiences and perspectives with the allocation of the Finnish third-person singular pronouns hän (‘he’ and ‘she’) and se (‘it’) and second-person singular sinä (familiar ‘you’) and plural te used as singular (formal ‘you’). I examine these issues particularly in light of previous studies carried out on addressing and variation. The informants in this study encompass a group of immigrants with an academic background. The survey shows that these informants can identify factors and situational variation that lead to pronoun choice as well as using the familiar or formal ‘you’. In examining hän and se, the differentiation between colloquial Finnish practices and the norms of standard Finnish is an important aspect. In particular, se is seen as confusing, as it is colloquially used for human beings and standardly for animals, while hän could also be used for household pets. The informants’ experiences with sinä and te show that they perceive their set of politeness norms used for addressing as one that often differs from that of a Finn.My materials provide preliminary indications of the fact that the approach non-native speakers take on the deviation from standard Finnish norms and on situational variation may differ from that of native Finnish speakers. What is interesting is that identifying variation does not necessarily change one’s own approach or way of speaking.

Avoidance of gender-ambiguous pronouns as a consequence of ambiguity-avoidance strategy

ABSTRACT It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers’ avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it results from the influence of non-linguistic conceptual similarity between discourse entities. To adjudicate between the two accounts, the present study investigates how Mandarin speakers choose referring expressions in written and spoken Mandarin. As written and spoken Mandarin differ in their referential ambiguity (the third-person singular pronoun is gender-ambiguous in spoken Mandarin but not in written Mandarin), it provides a good testing ground for evaluating the two accounts with the manipulation of gender similarity. We found that Mandarin speakers’ pronoun use was affected by pronoun ambiguity but not by conceptual similarity of discourse entities. In particular, in written Mandarin, where pronouns are gender-specific, Mandarin speakers produced fewer pronouns when there was more than one character that matched the gender of the pronoun. In spoken Mandarin where pronouns are gender-ambiguous, however, Mandarin speakers’ pronoun use was not influenced by gender of discourse characters. Our findings suggest that the gender effect is driven by an ambiguity-avoidance strategy rather than conceptual similarity between discourse characters.

Le syndrome psycholinguistique traumatique (SPLIT)

Le syndrome psycholinguistique traumatique (SPLIT)

Gendering in open access research articles: The role of epicene pronouns

Research articles in English are read and composed by individuals from many lingua-cultural backgrounds; this diversity in the users of English as an academic lingua franca is likely to increase further with the rise of open access (OA) publishing. In the light of this, a pertinent question is how gender is constructed in international research articles. This study examines OA articles (N = 1003) with respect to the use of epicene pronouns, third-person singular pronouns of indeterminate gender. The analysis of pronominal reference shows that the non-gendered singular they was the most common pronoun overall, closely followed by gendered he or she forms. The use of generic he also occurred with some frequency. Further, the study investigates what kinds of author guidelines OA journals have for the use of gender-fair language. The analysis reveals that specific guidelines were generally uncommon, and that there was no immediate correspondence between policy and practice in cases where journals provided guidelines. Taken together, the findings disclose a state of flux in the use of epicene pronouns in OA articles. A key issue in international publishing and journal editing is thus to raise awareness about gendered language through guidelines and submission checklists.

요한복음 21:24-25에 나타난 인칭 변화 연구와 οίμαι의 번역 재고

In this paper, I discuss who the author of John’s Gospel is with a study of the changes of personal pronouns in 21:24-25, and point out the problem of the translation of οἶμαι in 21:25 in the New Korean Revised Version (NKRV). These two verses, the final conclusion of the Gospel of John refer to the author who is testifying and writing about the things Jesus has done. The changes in personal pronouns, however, appear in these verses. The author as the witness and the writer of the Gospel is presented with the third-person singular pronoun “his” (αὐτοῦ), then the first-person plural pronoun “we” (the subject of οἴδαμεν), and finally the first-person singular pronoun “I” (the subject of οἶμαι). The problem here is who “we” and “I” are. The debate is generally divided into two distinctly contrasting claims. One is the view that “we” is the plural of real persons (Johannine community) and “I” is a rhetorical expression. The other is the opposite view that “we” is a rhetorical expression and “I” is a real, individual person (author). I accept the second view, and believe that the author of this Gospel is the apostle John who is one of the Twelve.<BR> The three changes in personal pronouns are made according to the author’s intention. The author wants to present himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in the third-person singular form, describing himself as an objective person in the narrative. He also tries to tell the readers that his testimony is true because he had the closest relationship with Jesus compared with others and fully understood what Jesus said. Then, the author changes a personal pronoun into the first and plural “we.” The purpose of such a change is intended to convey the sincerity of the testimony of “the disciple whom Jesus loves.” The narrator of John’s Gospel is expressed with “we” while developing the narrative from beginning to end (e.g. 1:14, 16; 21:24). Here, the use of “we” not only functions to increase the authority of the testimony, but also makes those who have faith participate in the author’s testimony. Finally, the author addresses himself as “I” with freedom and humility, praising Jesus for the greatness and vastness of his works. The author

The Production of Pronouns and Verb Inflections by Italian Children with ASD: A New Dataset in a Null Subject Language.

The language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by difficulties with pronouns. The underlying reasons for such difficulties are still unclear. This study is the first to test the abilities of children with ASD who speak Italian, a language in which overt subject pronouns are optional but verbs obligatorily feature person-referencing morphology. We found that Italian children with ASD were less accurate than typically-developing (TD) Italian children in the production of first-, second-, and third-person singular pronouns, avoiding pronouns in favor of nouns or names more often than controls. Moreover, children with ASD produced more overt pronouns than null pronouns in marked contexts, compared to TD children. These phenomena can be accounted for by difficulties with pragmatics.

“You” and “I” in a foreign land: The persuasive force of generic-you

Norms help people navigate their social lives, dictating what behaviors are typical, expected, or valued in a given context. Here we suggest that a subtle linguistic cue—the generic usage of the word “you” (i.e., “you” that refers to people in general rather than to one or more specific individuals) carries persuasive force, influencing how people discern unfamiliar norms. Across five experiments (N = 800), people endorsed unfamiliar behaviors described with generic-you (e.g., “You share them with your friends”) as more normatively correct than behaviors expressed with ‘I’ (e.g., “I share them with my family”) or third-person singular pronouns (“he” or “she”; e.g., “She shares them with her family”). These effects persisted even when participants were told that their informants were highly knowledgeable about the norms. Together, these findings indicate that generic-you functions as a linguistic nudge that carries persuasive force. Broadly, they add to a growing body of literature on how subtle linguistic shifts can meaningfully influence social cognition.

BIAS GENDER DALAM BUKU TEKS PELAJARAN BAHASA INDONESIA SEKOLAH MENENGAH ATAS

Abstract: Gender Bias in Indonesian Language Textbook in Senior High School.This research to described gender bias based on the subject-object viewpoint and author-reader viewpoint of Sara Mills theory on textbook. The data of this research are vocabulary, clause, sentence, or paragraph that contain gender perspective and the source of the data of this research is reading text on the Indonesian language textbook for senior high school grade X by Kemendikbud, revised edition of 2017. Technique of data collection are reading and writing. The whole data collected were analyzed in depth and identified based on gender perspective. The results of this research are (1) forms of gender bias of the subject-object viewpoint are subordination and stereotyped to women, (2) forms of gender bias of the author-reader viewpoint, there are two aspects of the findings, namely indirect sweeping carried out by means of mediation and cultural code. Direct sweeping which uses first-person singular pronoun, third-person singular pronoun, and third-person plural pronoun.

Neural correlates of the implicit processing of grammatical and stereotypical gender violations: A masked and unmasked priming study

The aim of this study was to explore the neural correlates of the automatic activation of gender stereotypes by using the masked and unmasked priming technique. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants were presented with an Italian third-person singular pronoun (lui or lei) that were preceded by either a grammatically-marked (e.g., passeggeraFEM, pensionatoMASC) or stereotypically-associated (e.g., insegnanteFEM, conducenteMASC) role noun. Participants were required to judge the grammatical gender of the personal pronoun ignoring the preceding word. This word was presented in a masked or unmasked way. The results revealed slower reaction times and larger N400, in both the masked and unmasked conditions, when the pronouns were preceded by gender-incongruent than gender-congruent grammatical and stereotypical primes. A P300 effect also emerged in both masked and unmasked conditions for the grammatical gender mismatch between the antecedent and the pronoun. These results provide evidence that gender stereotypes can strongly influence our behavior even under unconscious conditions.

Language change in L2 academic writing: The case of epicene pronouns

With the increasing demand for gender-fair language, an important issue to take into consideration in academic writing is the use of so-called epicene pronouns, i.e. singular personal pronouns unspecified for gender. Yet, little research has focused on how L2 English academic writers use these pronouns. The present study examines the use of epicene pronouns since the 1970s in L2 academic writing and analyses their current use, starting from 2010. The data originate from two corpora with academic papers written by Swedish-speaking university students of English: (1) the Finland-Swedish BATMAT corpus, which is used to extract diachronic data, and (2) the Swedish subset of the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase, VESPA-SE, which adds to the data of current use. The results show that although the use of generic he has decreased noticeably since the 1970s, there is considerable variation in and between the texts from the 2010s. Such variation is indicative of a language change that is still very much in progress. The findings also suggest that singular they is establishing itself as a third-person singular pronoun in L2 academic writing since this pronoun is used frequently with all types of epicene antecedents in the data of current use.

Effects of repeated practice in pre-task planning on the acquisition of English personal pronouns by Chinese EFL learners

While the literature concentrates on the effects of one-time planning on immediate task performance, this article aims to uncover how repeated practice in planning helps promote L2 learners' acquisition of English third-person singular pronouns, conceptualized as pronominal use and selection of referential strategies in their oral monologue. In this study, 63 intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners were enrolled in a longitudinal experiment, in which they narrated picture-prompted stories 12 times under one of three conditions, namely, unguided planning, guided planning, or no planning. Comparison of posttest data among the groups showed that (a) long-term practice in planning facilitated the learners' control over accurate use of “he” but not the use of “she”; (b) repeated planning practice did not alter L2 learners' strategy for reference selection when doing a new task, but task repetition seemed to improve referential use; and (c) planning guidance did not promote their acquisition of the target form. Such results also suggested that effects of pretask planning might be moderated by the cognitive load required for producing the linguistic forms.