Epicenes in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The aim of this first corpus-based chapter is to compare and contrast singular they and generic he in written British English, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis. The general age of the studies considered in Chapter 1 highlighted the fact that there is very little data available on epicene use in written British English in the twenty-first century. In order to get a clearer picture of current epicene usage, and ascertain whether generic he or singular they is favoured in written British English, an existing online reference corpus was used to codify and compare the relative use of each pronoun. The BE06 corpus is a million-word reference corpus ¹ based at Lancaster University, which is accessible, with permission, using the CQP Web interface (see Hardie, forthcoming). For details on how the corpus was constructed, see Baker (2009: 312–20). The method used in the analysis was to query two subcorpora of BE06 (specially selected subsections of the whole corpus, detailed below) to find all tokens of they and he. Each concordance line (a term which refers to examples of the target word given in a limited context) generated by the queries was then manually analysed by matching the pronoun to its antecedent. Although the epicene forms are referred to here as singular they and generic he, all case forms of each pronoun were tested. The raw quantitative data for they and he suggests that, numerically at least, singular they is more popular in written British English than generic he.