Exploring Epicene Pronouns in History

Abstract

The standard British English personal pronouns have been relatively fixed for the last 200 years. The pronouns are marked for person as there is a distinction between the first-person forms used for the speaker/ writer (referred to as I, me, my, mine, and myself) and the forms used for their addressee(s) (you, your, yours, yourself, and yourselves) which constitute the second person. Finally, the third-person pronouns (he, him, his, himself, she, her, hers, herself, they, them, their, theirs, themselves, themself, it, its, and itself) refer to participants external to interaction. Unusually for the English language, the pronouns are also marked for case — for example nominative he is different from accusative him — which indicates a pronoun’s relationship to the verb in a clause. The personal pronouns are also marked for number and have singular and plural forms. For example, when a speaker/writer refers to themselves plus another participant, the plural form we is used instead of the singular form I. There are some exceptions in the second person. For example, you does not change its form between the singular and the plural, and as a result you can refer to an individual or a group, depending on context. Also, you does not change case form depending on whether it is the subject or object of a verb. So we can have the sentences ‘You hit me’ and ‘I hit you’ where the first-person pronoun changes depending on who is doing the hitting, but the second-person form stays constant.