You got me drifting off into a lot of general remarks about language. If you want to keep this focused on English pronouns, do a text search for "Back on topic".
The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth ... are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. ...
... linguistics is what I have a degree in. And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English.
Not so clear...
A bit imprecise. What really seems to be going on is not that there's a homophone of plural "they" that's marked for the singular, but that "they" is underspecified for number. That's an unusual state of affairs, but English number agreement is independently known to be unusual. There's few if any other languages where the 3rd person singular is the only place in the verbal paradigm that usually shows visible concord. The exact opposite is much more common: the 3rd Sg typically has no agreement marker where the other slots in the paradigm do have one, or had the phonologically lightest marker.
What I'm saying is: there probably is no "singular they" in English, in the sense of a separate word that that is marked for singular and happens to sound and spell the same as another word that is marked for plural. There probably isn't a "plural they" either. There is only one "they" which is unspecified for number, gender and specificity. Its usage where it picks up a (grammatically and/or) semantically singular antecedent is restricted by the "Elsewhere principle", or by the convention of using the most restricted whose specifications don't produce a mismatch. A grammatical example would be English verbal inflection: it's not parsimonious to suggest there a five different, lexically distinct, verb endings in the present indicative and another six in the subjunctive that all happen to be homophonous, i.e realised as a null suffix. Its much more plausible that English main verbs really only have two endings, one that's specified for 3rd person singular indicative and one that's fully unspecified.
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.
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 - especially maybe speakers with little prior exposure to the language and poorly specified expectations of what *
should* be there, such as toddlers everywhere or Norse/French settlers or residual Brythonic speakers in medieval England; counteracted by the pressure to avoid ambiguities where they can lead to misunderstandings etc.
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. There is no timeless platonic Essence of English of which Modern and Old English are just shades under different light. Early 21st century English is what all and only what can be produced by one of the many mental grammars its speakers hypothesised to explain the output of the generation before them. In other words, English
is, in a very real sense, the aggregate of the hypotheses its speakers formed during acquisition, based on what English
did a generation ago. 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.
And I think pursuing it will take us far afield; we should be able to settle our current dispute on narrower grounds.
A loose analogue outside of grammar could be how you usually wouldn't say "I'm going to Europe" when the only planned stop is in Paris.
Here's an example from Shakespeare: "
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend."
And another from the King James Bible: "Let nothing bee done through strife, or vaine glory, but in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues."
(Examples via
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24504, there's more there)
Thanks for injecting some hard data. Let's see what it tells us...
It appears English does have a word for "a person who's sex not known or irrelevant, in the singular", and it's "they" (which just so happens to also be a word for "persons, plural" and for "inanimate objects, plural"),
That's not hard data; that's a theory. I.e., it's a testable hypothesis that's been proposed as an explanation for hard data. Testing it means answering three questions. How well does it predict actual in-the-wild examples of the usage in question? How badly does it falsely predict examples of the usage in question? And how does it compare with competing theories?
For the first question, Shakespeare? Check. Bible? Check.
Well, something we agree upon...
For the second question, all your examples are usage, so I went browsing for examples of non-usage in the wild. (...). I submit that Bibi's and Robert's maleness is irrelevant to what was being said about them. If the theory were correct then English-speakers would use "they/them/their" for singular antecedents a lot more than we do.
I refer to my extra-grammatical analogy further up: if you went to Paris for the weekend, you'd tell people "I went to Paris for the weekend", not "I went to Europe for the weekend", even if you weren't planning with following up with anything Paris specific - indeed even if you specifically bring it up to boast how you can still afford transatlantic weekend trips during this economic crisis, or to annoy someone who wants to ban "needless" air travel for ecological reasons, ie if the only relevant aspect of your trip is indeed that you went to Europe. Language expects you to be as specific as you can without being obtuse.
To add, sticking with the Paris/ Europe analogy: If you want to keep it unknown that it is Paris you went to (because its the Bush Jr years and "French fries" were just renamed and your conversation partner is a staunch Republican), or if you think mentioning it might cause confusion (because you expect them to not know where Paris is located), you're free to say that you "went to Europe". You wouldn't be lying by doing so. At best you'd be an incompletely collaborative communicator.
When talking about a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male, your audience expects you to use "he" - because all the boxes for the use of "he" are ticked, not because "they" would cause a grammatical mismatch.
And again, you wouldn't be lying by using "they", even though you might set your audience off searching for a different antecedent.
It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris.
It does when the dialogue goes like this:
A: "I'm going to Paris next week"
B: "Funny that, I just came back from Europe yesterday"
i.e. when
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.
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, they were all formed by individuals (mostly kids) making their hypotheses based on the output of other Englishes. 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. If I tell you to continue the series 1-2-4, an answer of -8-16 is just as right as one of -7-11 (1+sum([0,n]) vs 2^n), though one may feel more
natural.
It's not something linguists like to talk about, but this is a thing that actually happens: 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...
It's not just linguistically naive speakers lacking eloquence either. When I was teaching linguistics to undergrads, 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.)
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. Now people have been claiming, under the general header of "generic masculine" that "he" really doesn't have a gender feature, that it's simply [+animate],[+singular], and it's common interpretation as referring to male persons is produced by the Elsewhere principle much as I explained the common [+plural] interpretation of "they". That is or was certainly true for some individual's grammars, but I doubt it is universally true in the grammars of English speakers of the second half of the 20th century. 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, you can barely state a person's profession without potentially implying something about their gender, as we have different words for "baker"[+m] and "baker"[+f], plus articles and adjectival inflection that depend on gender. So "an experienced baker" can be "ein erfahrener Bäcker" or "eine erfahrene Bäckerin" and it gets really awkward when you want to include them in one phrase ("ein(e) erfahrene(r) Bäcker(in)", and that still doesn't tell you which paranthesised suffix goes with which). Of course, it would be useful if "ein erfahrener Bäcker" was fully gender-agnostic just like its English equivalent. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case: at least for me "der beste Bäcker der Stadt" is ambiguous between referring to "the best baker in town, who happens to be male" and "the best male baker in town" -
just like "die beste Bäckerin der Stadt", for which also my primary interpretation, in the absence of context suggesting otherwise, would be "the best baker in town, who happens to be female" rather than "the best female baker in town". So by that interpretation, "Bäcker" and "Bäckerin" are parallel in that they both have a gender feature which can be interpreted outside the scope of the superlative. I'm telling you, it's
mess. You have no idea how lucky you got for only having to deal with singular "they".
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.
For the third question, I don't know what competing theories linguists have considered, but the one that occurs to me is that "they" isn't being treated as an honorary singular pronoun after all; rather, the grammatically singular antecedents in these cases are treated as honorary groups.
(...) In some dialects of English, mostly British varieties, plural agreement with grammatically singular nouns is readily available. Constructions like "Parliament are discussing topic X tonight" or "the committed continue to be divided" (...)
You probably guessed this was supposed to read "the committee continue to be divided", but adding it just in case.
(...)
Why I'm saying they're probably not semantically plural is this: they allow distributive readings with singular predicates. Most speakers of English accept "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" as a well formed sentence of the language (whether it's true is a different discussion). The analogue is not possible for unambiguously plural subjects: "all professors had a rebellious phase when they were a student" or "the professors..." seems to imply that they were collectively one student before splitting up into multiple professors. So the availability of "they" in "every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" does not predict plural-like behaviour in what predicates are available.
The converse is also true: you don't get collective readings with "each/every". "All (the) striking labourers assembled at the factory doors" is not like "every striking labourer assembled at the factory doors", in that only one of them is English
I don't think that's a counterexample, any more than your earlier "every one I speak to vanish as soon as they hear my voice" interpretation was. My hypothesis never involved any retrocausality, any notional pluralizing of a grammatically singular noun phrase before using "they" brings it on. You do get collective readings with "every" after an appearance of "they" has done its work. "Every striking laborer picked up a sign when they assembled at the factory doors." is English.
But never mind that. "Every professor had a rebellious phase when they were a student" is a problem for my hypothesis, and Lagunoff included other examples it doesn't account for. The theory that "they" pluralizes its antecedent doesn't predict the antecedent flipping back to singular; it predicts "Every professor had a rebellious phase when they were students." The tragedy of science: a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact.
That said, though, my contention doesn't hang on any specific theory for accounting for "they" usage. It hangs on the demanded construct not being English -- on the nonoccurrence of "* Sodomize Bibi. They will kill as many people as they can get away with." The exact reason it isn't English hardly matters. Lagunoff's apparently correct explanation for why it isn't English makes my case for me every bit as much as my own explanation would have had it been correct.
When talking about a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male, your audience expects you to use "he" - because all the boxes for the use of "he" are ticked, not because "they" would cause a grammatical mismatch.
[+Plural] vs. [-Plural] isn't the only possible grammatical mismatch. The mismatch Lagunoff points out is [+Referential] vs. [-Referential]. Of course, as she says, the term “referentiality” has been used with many different definitions in many different contexts, making it problematic; I'm not sure what you mean by "referential". But in her usage, it is precisely the fact that "Bibi" is singular and referential that makes "they" unavailable for it. The boxes for "he" are ticked, yes; but the critical point is that the boxes for "they" aren't. All those examples of singular "they", from your corpus and hers, are nonreferential in Lagunoff's terminology.
(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.)
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. 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.
