Gender Roles

Loren Pechtel said:

Emily Lake said:

Loren Pechtel said:

The problem here is that the set of AFABs includes some who do not appear sufficiently female

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I reject your linguistic assumption. Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is recorded at birth, observed very early in the pregnancy via ultrasound, developed between the sixth and twelfth week of gestation, and is determined at conception.

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The point of AFAB is to avoid any debate about what gender a trans person is.

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Well, that's not going to succeed.

Loren Pechtel said:

Bomb#20 said:

Loren Pechtel said:

So you want all trans in the men's room.

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... What I want is women's boundaries to be respected. Transmen have a right to be in the women's room -- they're women. Transwomen who actually present as female can go in the women's room because nobody will try to stop them. And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option. One-size-fits-all solutions are not good solutions.

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The problem here is that the set of AFABs includes some who do not appear sufficiently female. You need a rule.

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It seems to me the old rule -- be courteous -- worked pretty well, back in the day. The folks who insisted we switch to a new rule -- self-ID -- spoiled things for everyone. So where do we go from here? I think at this point the least bad rule that handles women like your SIL who don't appear sufficiently female is for them to show ID with an F on it if somebody challenges them. Sure it's offensive for them to have to do that, but then it's offensive for every cis-male voyeur and his brother to be given a green light to violate women's boundaries. This is kind of a "needs of the many outweigh needs of the few" situation.

Bomb#20 said:

Transwomen who can't convincingly present as female but go out in public anyway are outing themselves. For those who can present as female, making it socially acceptable for women to use the men's room makes transwomen safer. Women often have good reason to use men's rooms -- shorter lines and cleaner toilet seats.

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Depends on the location. I've seen women show up in the men's room at tech events several times. I've never seen it elsewhere, though. The people who are at tech events do not represent anything like an average of the population.

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Not yet. Normalizing it would be good for harm reduction. Easy enough to do -- all the idiots changing the signs on bathrooms from "Women" to "Gender Neutral" need to be instructed to change them back, and if they really need a "Gender Neutral" sign, to put it on the men's room.

Bomb#20 said:

Loren Pechtel said:

Bomb#20 said:

Loren Pechtel said:

So you want all trans in the men's room.

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... What I want is women's boundaries to be respected. Transmen have a right to be in the women's room -- they're women. Transwomen who actually present as female can go in the women's room because nobody will try to stop them. And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option. One-size-fits-all solutions are not good solutions.

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The problem here is that the set of AFABs includes some who do not appear sufficiently female. You need a rule.

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It seems to me the old rule -- be courteous -- worked pretty well, back in the day.

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Back in the good old days when weirdos knew their place and didn't make unreasonable demands - like, I don't know, expecting to be reasonably safe in public spaces - things sure seemed to work pretty well. If you were normal. As to how well it worked for those whose mere existence was by many seen as uncourteous, let's ask them, shall we?

Bomb#20 said:

The folks who insisted we switch to a new rule -- self-ID -- spoiled things for everyone. So where do we go from here? I think at this point the least bad rule that handles women like your SIL who don't appear sufficiently female is for them to show ID with an F on it if somebody challenges them.

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That's a pretty clear expression of wanting to throw people under the bus right there.

Secondly, and almost as importantly, how is this going to work in reality? If Vermont drops the Fs and Ms in their IDs effectively according to self assignment, New Hampshire changes it for post-op individuals, and Maine only records birth sex, do you expect people to produce local ID everytime they cross state lines?

Bomb#20 said:

Sure it's offensive for them to have to do that, but then it's offensive for every cis-male voyeur and his brother to be given a green light to violate women's boundaries. This is kind of a "needs of the many outweigh needs of the few" situation.

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Or maybe it is a "none of the above, we can do better than both of that" situation? If you think things worked a few decades ago, at don't you try to formalise the implicit rules people where following instead of jumping on the Republican train?

Jokodo said:

If you think things worked a few decades ago, at don't you try to formalise the implicit rules people where following instead of jumping on the Republican train?

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The "implicit rule" that was being followed a few decades ago was case-by-case discretion, with the expectation of good courteous behavior from those to whom accomodations were being granted, with the understanding that those accommodations were granted on the basis of clinical diagnosis of a severe mental health condition, oversight by a psychologist which included on-going counseling, and surgical removal of the penis and testes.

If you want to formalize that, I'd probably support you. Progressives would likely label you an evil transphobe though, so choose carefully.

Jokodo said:

Bomb#20 said:

Loren Pechtel said:

Bomb#20 said:

... What I want is women's boundaries to be respected. Transmen have a right to be in the women's room -- they're women. Transwomen who actually present as female can go in the women's room because nobody will try to stop them. And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option. One-size-fits-all solutions are not good solutions.

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The problem here is that the set of AFABs includes some who do not appear sufficiently female. You need a rule.

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It seems to me the old rule -- be courteous -- worked pretty well, back in the day.

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Back in the good old days when weirdos knew their place and didn't make unreasonable demands - like, I don't know, expecting to be reasonably safe in public spaces - things sure seemed to work pretty well. If you were normal. As to how well it worked for those whose mere existence was by many seen as uncourteous, let's ask them, shall we?

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Reasonably safe from whom?!? From other men!!! Why on earth should we assume that letting "weirdos" into a place that's currently safe from men because it excludes men will be an effective way to make the "weirdos" safe from men once we've stopped allowing that place to exclude men?!? You might as well propose that unvaccinated people be let into a venue that requires proof of vaccination on account of that place being so much safer for them than the ones full of people infected with COVID.

The demand to let men into women's intimate spaces is blatantly not motivated by safety concerns. It appears to be motivated by a feeling that trans people are more oppressed than women and a conviction that justice lies not in applying principles but in prioritizing the interests of whoever is most oppressed. It's the same reason a lot of people think OWS protestors should be allowed to block streets and vandalize businesses.

Bomb#20 said:

The folks who insisted we switch to a new rule -- self-ID -- spoiled things for everyone. So where do we go from here? I think at this point the least bad rule that handles women like your SIL who don't appear sufficiently female is for them to show ID with an F on it if somebody challenges them.

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That's a pretty clear expression of wanting to throw people under the bus right there.

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"Wanting"? Good grief. I don't "want" to throw anyone under the bus. The non-ops' demand to take as their right a privilege women had generally been kindly granting to pre-ops and post-ops has created a situation where somebody is inevitably going to be thrown under the bus. They've put us all in the position of having to figure out how many, how badly, and whom.

Secondly, and almost as importantly, how is this going to work in reality? If Vermont drops the Fs and Ms in their IDs effectively according to self assignment, New Hampshire changes it for post-op individuals, and Maine only records birth sex, do you expect people to produce local ID everytime they cross state lines?

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I expect if someone's mannish-looking SIL shows an F on her out-of-state ID and a Maine cop arrests her anyway because he says Vermont ID sex is meaningless, she's going to collect a massive judgement against the state, and after that Maine is going to order its cops to accept out-of-state IDs as definitive.

Bomb#20 said:

Sure it's offensive for them to have to do that, but then it's offensive for every cis-male voyeur and his brother to be given a green light to violate women's boundaries. This is kind of a "needs of the many outweigh needs of the few" situation.

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Or maybe it is a "none of the above, we can do better than both of that" situation? If you think things worked a few decades ago, at don't you try to formalise the implicit rules people where following

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I'm pretty sure I covered that when I wrote "And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option." Formalizing the new rule shouldn't be up to me. I shouldn't get a vote. The rule should be whatever women generally want it to be.

instead of jumping on the Republican train?

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Oh for the love of god. This is really getting tiresome. Why do you keep on trying to shove other people's words into my mouth? Strawmanning doesn't seem like your style. Are you just having a tough time wrapping your mind around the idea that hard-assed Republican doctrine and hard-assed progressive doctrine do not jointly exhaust the space of possible policies?

Jarhyn said:

So on other words, "newspeak" when said by a conservative (rather than someone who actually read the book and understands the concept) is a dog whistle used to complain that English is a living language, and usage of words change...

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As usual, the explanation you come up with for an opponent disagreeing with you is make-believe -- a pure invention ungrounded in any observation. You are not competent to model other people's minds; you know this about yourself; you ought to take this into account when you feel the urge to impute disreputable thoughts to people.

Of course English is a living language. Of course usage of words changes. You have seen exactly zero examples of anyone complaining about that here. But English is a consensus of the usages of all its speakers. The language changes when the consensus changes. Demanding that people change their usage is not sufficient to change the language and is not evidence that the language has changed. Adoption of a new usage by a narrow subculture is not sufficient to change the language and is not evidence that the language has changed. Pointing out that you personally are not the Academie Anglaise, and that you personally have neither the power nor the authority to change English by mere force of your wishful thinking, and that you personally have not supplied any evidence that the consensus of English speakers has in fact changed to whatever you wish it were, do not constitute complaining "that English is a living language, and usage of words change." Your entire line of argument is asinine.

How dare we understand the foundations of common words at an academic level!

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You misspelled "make up a just-so-story to rationalize creating new technical jargon, and then pretend new jargon makes the old usage wrong."

Plenty of argument has been made to demonstrate than "man" and "woman" are social concepts only loosely linked to physical realities,

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Certainly. And then you promptly discard that conclusion that was plentifully demonstrated, and indulge yourself in the fairy tale that "social concept" has nothing to do with society and instead means "it's whatever my ideology proclaims -- society's concept be damned".

A person's gender is not the category he puts himself in; it's the category society's consensus puts him in. That's what it is to be a "social concept". A person is of course free to categorize himself any way he pleases, but he cannot force others to categorize him as he pleases. Categorization is the fundamental linguistic operation, prior to all considerations of naming and syntax, and all speakers of a language are free to do it any way they like. It's called "freethought" -- deal with it. And if it turns out most of us freely choose to do it the way we observe others doing it, so that we can more easily communicate with them, well, that's where consensuses come from. That's the reason it's possible for languages to work in the first place. This is not rocket science.

The ability to think and express this concept -- the concept that a person's "gender" is socially rather than individually chosen -- is what you have been attempting to suppress by promoting your Humpty Dumpty language: your idiolect in which you use "gender" to mean "gender identity" and in which you retain no word still meaning "gender".

There's a difference in childhood in brain structure:


Small, but detectable.

Loren Pechtel said:

There's a difference in childhood in brain structure:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn4202

Small, but detectable.

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Reading the study, a number of points occur to me...

I.e., the brain differences correlated with being trans are not the same differences as the brain differences correlated with being of the other sex. I.e., transwomen don't have "female brains"; what they have tends to be different from cismen's brains along some orthogonal axis.

I.e., they're conflating gender, gender identity, and gender roles.

I.e., the parents have had 9 or 10 years to observe sex-atypical behavior in their children and react to it. If some "network correlate of gender" is caused by the child's brain being affected by the way the parents have treated the child, or is causing the sex-atypical behavior, the study would not distinguish those scenarios. I.e., it's a confounding factor they haven't controlled for. To tease apart those possibilities they'd need to do the brain scans in infancy and then wait 9 or 10 years and see if they still predict behavior.

I.e., their results on gender identity aren't statistically significant.

I.e., small, but detectable, as you said. Very small. The gendered-behavior signal is barely above the noise.

I.e., they can't reliably tell whether someone is trans by examining the brain, but they can tell whether someone is male or female. Yes, there appears to be such a thing as a female brain, but transwomen generally don't appear to have them.

I.e., the data on parents' evaluations of their children's gender-linked behavior was biased by arbitrary cultural notions of appropriate gender roles.

Jokodo said:

Bomb#20 said:

That's a fascinating hypothesis but I doubt if its parsimony can be evaluated by examining Modern English without taking into account the history of how the rest of Old English's case endings were lost.

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Niko Tinbergen and his four questions again. Of course nobody ever consciously decided that only marking 3/sg/indicative and leaving the other slots unmarked is good enough. That's the result of general forces, or if you will selective pressures - people being lazy enunciators; hearers failing to every time correctly identify what the speaker *meant* to say when they slur their posttonal syllables...

None of that is however part of the input based on which speakers of English in the 21st century (or for that matter in the 16th) formed their hypotheses about how English works. Everyone who saw it happen in real time is long dead. ... The kind of linguistic hypotheses toddlers form and the ones professional linguists do possibly, probably, are very different, but we know this about toddlers': they ignore all and any data from Old English. If language learners don't base their hypotheses about the English inflectional system on data from Old English, doing so would only reduce the likeliness of finding a halfway realistic model.

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Excellent point.

Bomb#20 said:

The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

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Sure that's true for all Englishes? There's a high 9-digit number of English native speakers and a low 10-digit number of second-language speakers with varying degrees of proficiency. Many of them code-switch between different registers and use different grammars for each. The number of Englishes currently spoken is thus well into the 10 digits. None of those Englishes were formed by suckling at the tits of Mother England,

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Heh. I take your point; but the billion+ Englishes are mostly mutually intelligible only because there's a high degree of consensus about so many aspects that it's feasible to identify an overall consensus-English from which most of the billion+ idiolects diverge only slightly. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to use the word "English" as a name for consensus-English rather than for the entire cloud of points in possible-language-space that kids exposed to English input hypothesized, at least as long as one isn't focusing on aspects where, say, consensus-American-English is different from consensus-British-English.

they were all formed by individuals (mostly kids) making their hypotheses based on the output of other Englishes.

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As you might put it, sure that's true for all Englishes? It appears to me that the Englishes in which "they" is used on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male were not formed by individuals making their hypotheses based on the output of other Englishes. Those ones were formed by taking explicit instruction. They're a conlang.

Where that output is ambiguous and the edge cases that would help distinguish between different interpretations rare in any corpus, there's going to be different grammars producing similar output. ... when you have some linguistic phenomenon which is, based on the most common cases, open to two competing explanations and you think you found some informative edge cases that can rule out one or the other, it sometimes happen that the speakers you consult to determine which it is fall into two camps, one confirming each of the hypotheses. Apparently it's not just grown linguists who found the corpus ambiguous...

... there was one example from German I liked to bring up where different authoritative style guides and dictionaries declare each other's recommendation an unfortunately common error, and my classroom full of future high school German teachers would be roughly split in half in their preferences, but all feeling strongly about it - and the split wasn't even along any discernible geographic lines!
(Of course, someone immediately asked "which one really is correct?"; I guess it's an honor they'd take my word over Duden's, but the point of bringing it up was exactly that this isn't always a well-formed question.)

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Sounds like a great "teaching moment". If you couldn't count on someone to ask what's really correct you'd need to plant a shill.

Back on the topic though: the 3rd person pronoun system most 20th century English speakers seem to have employed, was/is kind of an awkward one. On the one hand, the "they" of that dialect really dislikes referential contexts. On the other hand "he" and "she" both carry a gender feature. So arguably there really was no way of referring to a referential singular antecedent whose sex or gender you don't know or don't care to introduce into the discourse without violating some pronouns specification. According to Lagunoff (and you, apparently), saying "see that person over there in the shade? I find them spooky" is bad because "they" used for a referential antecedent, but if the shade is deep enough that you don't discern much at all about them, "he" or "she" also seems problematic, if only in the sense that it potentially leaves the hearer with the impression that you know more about that shady person than you really do.

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You could always say "I find him or her spooky.", but there's no denying it's awkward.

So quite plausibly, whether using "he" for an antecedent of unknown or irrelevant (in the sense of "I do not want to introduce it into the discourse", not in the sense of "it doesn't matter to what I'm going to say") sex constitutes a grammatical violation varies between speakers. Where it does, using "they" may well seem like the lesser grammatical evil for reasons of English grammar, not for reasons of political correctness.

I could go on more about the "generic masculine". It's much more of a topic in discussions about German than for English, for obvious reasons: In German, ... I'm telling you, it's mess. You have no idea how lucky you got for only having to deal with singular "they".

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I'm well aware, thank you -- I lived in Germany for a while, decades ago.

At any rate, it seems entirely plausible that, for entirely unpolitical reasons, grammars that pick between "he" and "they" based on that "he" can only be picked when the context gives a green light for a clear [+male] coexist with grammars that only allow "they" for non-referents, and the edge cases that distinguish between them in most common situations among cis-gendered people are rare enough that we never realise we're speaking different languages, so we get the impression that one of them is something the trans-lobby is pushing on us when it is indeed an ongoing intrinsic development of the English language.

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Well, yes and no. You're probably right that grammars that pick between "he" and "they" based on that "he" can only be picked when the context gives a green light for a clear [+male] becoming more normalized is a spontaneous intrinsic development. But on the other hand, that's an evolution that's going to happen piecemeal, with the usage becoming available and natural-seeming in some contexts and not others. Exactly what features "they" is becoming marked for will be worked out gradually as the consensus changes. An antecedent of unknown sex is likely to be perceived to be grammatically appropriate long before an antecedent of known but irrelevant in the sense of "I do not want to introduce it into the discourse" sex is -- let alone an antecedent of known and relevant but "some third party does not want me to introduce it into the discourse" sex. The latter appears to be an affectation very much driven by political correctness rather than ongoing intrinsic development.

Has any language ever naturally evolved a noun class system that requires speakers to keep track of which class each individual wants applied? However car-obsessed Germans were, I can't recall one ever making a stink about whether you called his car das Auto or der Wagen. It would be a burden on memory to need to remember this guy's car is an Auto and that guy's is a Wagen for fear of "misgendering" it, and natural language evolution tends to optimize for reducing memory burden, not for increasing it. Or in Japanese (which has counting words for dozens of arbitrary categories of objects such as "hon" for long thin objects), people can be counted with "nin" or "mei", and which you use depends on context. But it doesn't depend on some people asking to be counted with "nin" and others asking to be counted with "mei". Do you know of any languages that evolved referent-option noun classes?

Bomb#20 said:

(Of course "Alice and Bob think they love each other." is perfect English, and "Alice and Bob" is referential, so one might well dispute that "they" is marked [-Referential]. And you'd no doubt argue that two "they" homonyms, one [-Referential] and one [+Plural], is an unparsimonious hypothesis. Fine. Lagunoff's theory amounts to saying "they" is marked [-(Singular & Referential)]. "Bibi" is marked [+(Singular & Referential)]. That's the grammatical mismatch. Any objection to compound markings with "&" in them would be a map/territory fallacy.)

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The argument can be made that plurals are never referential, always quantificational: That "Bob and Alice" isn't a fused referent referring to mental fusion of two human individuals, but more a shorthand for "everyone in the set I herewith describe by enlisting its members". If so, [-referential] could indeed be sufficient, and the availability for plural "referents" a side-effect of plural semantics. Similarly, "the <plural_noun>" is often analysed as quantificational: "the kids" doesn't refer to a multi-part entity with individual humans as parts, but quantifies over all contextually relevant kids.

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Intriguing hypothesis.

Although this may break down for examples like "the Beatles" or "the United States", which unhesitatingly take plural agreement and "they" as an anaphor. Probably someone has a theory that reconciles "I love the Beatles and every one of their albums" with "they is only marked [-referential]", but I can't say I have an answer off the top of my head.

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Huh. My language intuition agrees with yours about the Beatles but disagrees about the United States, so I "Advanced Searched" for in-the-wild usage, and found this:


I'm wondering if "the United States" is grammatically different from "die Vereinigten Staaten".

I don't really want to make new thread for this so I'll drop it here:


Conversion therapy or the threat of it triples the suicide risk.

Jarhyn said:

I don't think there is a failure to understand. I think there is a failure to want to be wrong. There are many consequences to being wrong when it's such a politically motivated position.

I'm just disappointed that he sees attacks against a politically held position as political. For me it's not politics, it's just my life.

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Jarhyn, you made it political when you had my post censored. I have not been interfering in your life. You have been interfering in my life.

Jarhyn said:

I'll note that the dictionary, or wiki, or even linguistics as a field do not really act as constraints on the use of language.

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Bingo! What actually constrains the use of language is censorship. And yet when I point out the implications of the dictionary, or wiki, or even linguistics as a field, for the topic under discussion, you incessantly accuse me of constraining the use of language. You are projecting your own mentality and your own wrongdoing onto others.

Generally, the desire to be understood is the greatest and only constraint on real language excepting when someone seeks to make language political.
...
I argue that it is "newspeak" to apply controls and restrictions to the evolution of language so that people can't have that discourse cleanly or efficiently, to demand that it be burdensome. It is distinctly political.

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Which is precisely what you have been doing. You try to coerce people to speak in a way that puts an extra burden on their discourse because you want to control the evolution of the language.

It is distinctly political (as opposed to scientific) to attempt to constrain such vague terms so as to deny the very existence of people.

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That's a libel on top of a libel. Nobody is attempting to constrain you from using terms as vaguely as you please, and their attempts to continue personally using those terms in their traditional senses do not "deny the very existence of people". You made that up out of whole cloth. To deny that a person has some make-believe property in no way denies that he exists. When I deny that Jewish people are God's Chosen People I am not thereby denying the very existence of Jews.

In some ways I'm guilty of using these crutches too... "Transwomen are women" is such an example, where woman in both "transwomen" and "women" are stand-ins for "people whose bodily process led to a brain configuration and/or an outcome of behavioral patterns or emotional interests more shared by those who cluster around the male mode than the female mode of the bimodal distribution within a species are more cleanly handled by proxying them as 'women' in the majority of situations, because the majority of concerns handled in discussions of 'men' and 'women' come down to behavioral patterns and emotional interests".

That's a lot of words, and many people would be unable to digest such a concept, and the core meaning still comes across regardless.

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Indeed it does. Setting aside your painfully obvious self-contradiction (I presume you meant to write "the female mode than the male mode"), the core meaning is evidently that you believe the behavioral patterns of transwomen are the same as the behavioral patterns of women, and you believe emotional interests are more important than biological sex, and you believe shouting these opinions of yours at others should be accepted as an adequate substitute for supplying evidence for them.

Jarhyn said:

Not to mention that "they" is almost always proceeded with a contextualizer. It seems like a massive kvetch over literally nothing.

Nobody just says "they went to Germany" without saying it in response to a context token of some kind, even if that context token is a solidly pointed finger as opposed to a gestured finger across or around a set.

The audience to the use of a pronoun will be set up on a context.

Further, it seems like a lot of drama to throw at a situation wherein "Jarhyn and their friends walk into a bar" where "Jarhyn" is available and acceptable as a proper noun for communication, as well as using "they all" or "the group". It strikes me as a kvetch about the desire to maintain linguistic laziness,

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Bingo! You just straight up admitted that you are the one being "burdensome". You are the one applying controls and restrictions to the evolution of language so that people can no longer have their discourse efficiently. You satisfy your own definition of "newspeak". You're damn right we're kvetching about the desire to maintain linguistic laziness. Linguistic laziness is a human right. You try to take our rights away, that's political and we're going to kvetch over it. You call taking others' freedom away "literally nothing", we're going to quote Chomsky at you. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

which is itself used as an excuse to maintain the power to conflate and equivocate with the different dimensions of a cluster concept rather than isolating only the pertinent individual dimensions to any given concern, and actually focusing on those dimensions to the exclusion of the others.

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I.e., your underlying objection is not that we're lazy people who won't bear the burden you demand we bear, but that consequently we think thoughts that aren't the ones you pick out for us to think.

Jarhyn said:

Bomb#20 said:

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

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"Waah, I'm being called out for my equivocation games,

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Yep, that is what you are being called out for. You literally claimed Oldspeak is Newspeak; and to rationalize that Orwellian absurdity you equivocated on its definition. "To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language ... As a constructed language, Newspeak is a language of planned phonology, limited grammar, and finite vocabulary". Oldspeak (i.e. common-usage English) is uncontrolled, unconstructed, unplanned, unlimited, and potentially infinite. So of course you're being called out. Waah about it to your heart's content.

and for treating Cluster Concepts as if they had explanatory power."

Grow up. Cluster concepts do not have explanatory power.

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Feel free to quote me treating a cluster concept as having explanatory power.

Bomb#20 said:

Bomb#20 said:

(Of course "Alice and Bob think they love each other." is perfect English, and "Alice and Bob" is referential, so one might well dispute that "they" is marked [-Referential]. And you'd no doubt argue that two "they" homonyms, one [-Referential] and one [+Plural], is an unparsimonious hypothesis. Fine. Lagunoff's theory amounts to saying "they" is marked [-(Singular & Referential)]. "Bibi" is marked [+(Singular & Referential)]. That's the grammatical mismatch. Any objection to compound markings with "&" in them would be a map/territory fallacy.)

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The argument can be made that plurals are never referential, always quantificational: That "Bob and Alice" isn't a fused referent referring to mental fusion of two human individuals, but more a shorthand for "everyone in the set I herewith describe by enlisting its members". If so, [-referential] could indeed be sufficient, and the availability for plural "referents" a side-effect of plural semantics. Similarly, "the <plural_noun>" is often analysed as quantificational: "the kids" doesn't refer to a multi-part entity with individual humans as parts, but quantifies over all contextually relevant kids.

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Intriguing hypothesis.

Although this may break down for examples like "the Beatles" or "the United States", which unhesitatingly take plural agreement and "they" as an anaphor. Probably someone has a theory that reconciles "I love the Beatles and every one of their albums" with "they is only marked [-referential]", but I can't say I have an answer off the top of my head.

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Huh. My language intuition agrees with yours about the Beatles but disagrees about the United States, so I "Advanced Searched" for in-the-wild usage, and found this:

The United States of America hereby gives notice that it appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from the order of the District Court entered on July 15, 2024, Docket Entry 672.​

I'm wondering if "the United States" is grammatically different from "die Vereinigten Staaten".

Click to expand...

Interesting, had I found your example, I'd probably have explained it as the product of filing a template text, I.e "<plaintiff> hereby gives notice ...", but that doesn't really explain "it".

At any rate, I don't think "die Vereinigten Staaten" is much different from "the United States". More likely, "sie" (3rd person plural pronoun, not homophone 3rd Sg f or the polite 2nd person one) is grammatically different from "they". German doesn't have anything remotely similar to singular "they". We have "he", or "she", or "he or she", and the next best thing is "diese Person" or "dieser Mensch". The plural pronoun only shows up with plurals no matter the unspecific or unreferential nature of a singular candidate antecedent. It just doesn't seem to be specified on the referentiality dimension, and neither are apparently German singular 3rd person pronouns. So unlike English "they", there's no reason it's closest German equivalent shouldn't happily cohabit a sentence with "the United States" or "The Beatles".

As a tangent, "they" isn't even etymologically related to its German or for that matter Anglo-Saxon equivalent in terms of referring to groups (of people). It's part of English's Norse heritage. It's a rare occasion that a language borrows something as basic as a pronoun, but, assuming we continue to treat English as a West Germanic language and unless we want to analyse it as a creole of sorts, that's exactly what happened between Old and Middle English.

(I may come back to say something about the rest of your post... sometime... before winter)