Generic pronouns in the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English

Abstract

Everyone should bring his own copy of the report to the meeting

In example 1, the writer scrupulously follows Lindley Murray’s fifth rule of syntax which states that a pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and in number (Murray148). The well-established use of they and their for this purpose, recorded from the early sixteenth century (Mühlhäusler and Harré 231), was rejected by eighteenth century prescriptive grammarians as ungrammatical, and the coordinate construction he or she was dismissed as too clumsy. He was the most popularly prescribed solution and so Everyone should bring his own copy was declared grammatical. The fact that this usage broke the prescriptive requirement for gender concord was resolved by the declaration that in such instances he includes she, a resolution which was enshrined in an 1850 British Act of Parliament, purportedly for reasons of economy (‘to shorten the language used in Acts of Parliament’) rather than grammaticality (Bodine 131-132, Henley13). So-called generic he was thus bolstered by legislation as well as prescriptive grammarians.