영어의 젠더중립 단수대명사 ‘They’의 Phi-자질과 분포

On the Phi-Features of English Ungendered Singular Pronoun THEY

This paper aims to discuss the demise and shift of phi-features in English pronouns, in particular, THEY used as a 3rd person, singular, non-binary, and gender-neutral pronoun. It has been argued that pronouns have been considered as a hybrid category between functional and lexical (Zimman 2016, Gelderen 2017). As recent as Dec., 2019, a singular-they has attracted much attention from linguists, journalists, and grammarians in the world, for the obvious reasons that the English language officially selected the epicene-they (Balhorn 2004) as Word of the Year (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The surge of the word THEY as a non-binary (ungendered) singular pronoun is extremely engaging in one hand, while the morphosyntactic consequences of its novel form seem quite murky and nebulous, especially from a heuristic perspective such as an EFL/ESL context. It is argued in this paper that pronouns, belonging to “a weaker category”, are more susceptible to their morphosyntactic changes whose recent appearance as a singular-THEY is the consequence of such weakness and instability in their feature matrix. The changes of the phi-features, particularly gender and number features in singular-THEY, are due to the language usage of the speakers’ level of participation in this grammatical change, as well as to the diversity of sociolinguistic environment.