Discussions of singular ‘they’ in Public and Educational Contexts: A thematic analysis

<p dir="ltr">This thesis examines discussions of singular ‘they’ in educational and public contexts to better understand current discourses surrounding singular ‘they’ and our perceptions of diverse genders, as well as how we communicate linguistic concepts to the public. Though the singular ‘they’ has been in use in English since the 14th century with generic referents such as ‘everyone’, adoption of a newer nonbinary use of singular ‘they’, used with specific named referents, currently constitutes a grammatical change in progress in English.</p><p dir="ltr">The data for this thesis consisted of two corpora - a media corpus and a textbook corpus. The media corpus was made up of lingcomm (linguistics communication) from non-fiction books, newspaper articles, blogposts, TikTok videos and YouTube videos containing linguistic discussions of singular ‘they’, whereas the textbook corpus was comprised of introductory undergraduate linguistics textbooks used in Australian universities. The corpus was analysed using a thematic analysis used as part of a critical discourse analysis, with themes covering different ways singular ‘they’ is discussed sorted into historical, social and linguistic thematic macro-categories.</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis finds that there is a strong focus in the corpora on appealing to historical evidence of generic singular ‘they’ to legitimise all uses of singular ‘they’ in standard English. In attempting to legitimise singular ‘they’, a majority of lingcomm and textbooks analysed perpetuate language myths by conflating the long-standing generic singular ‘they’ with the newer nonbinary singular ‘they’, which portrays a static view of language that reinforces prescriptive ideals of traditional language use and undervalues the contributions of marginalised groups to language.</p>