43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for both going back to the 14th century. More recently, people have also been using singular they to refer to a specific person, as in “Alex left their umbrella”. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Kirby Conrod, a linguist who wrote their dissertation about the syntax and sociolinguistics of singular they. We talk about Kirby’s research comparing how people use third person pronouns (like they, she, and he) in a way that conveys social attitudes, like how some languages use formal and informal “you”, specific versus generic singular they, and how people go about changing their mental grammars for social reasons. --- This month’s bonus episode is about synesthesia, and research on various kinds of synesthesia, including the much-studied grapheme-colour, sound-colour, and time-space synesthesia, as well as rarer varieties such as Gretchen's attitude-texture synesthesia which she's never heard of anyone else having. Also, our producer Claire realized she was actually a synesthete while editing this episode! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the teaching linguistics episode and 37 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com Have a great idea for a linguistics communication project, but need a bit of money to get it off the ground? Looking to support emerging lingcomm projects? The LingComm Grant is four $500 grants for communicating linguistics to broader audiences in 2020. Applications close 1st of June 2020. Find out more and apply at lingcomm.org For links to everything mentioned in this episode, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/615600862742609920/lingthusiasm-episode-43-the-grammar-of-singular

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Linguism, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.2	I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and I'm here with Dr. Kirby Conrad, who's a linguist at the University of Washington.
0:26.3	But first, some announcements.
0:28.2	The Lingcom grant is still open until June 1st, and you should apply for that if you have a linguistic communication project that you think would be helped by a bit of money and a bit of support.
0:38.7	So there's more details for that on their website at lingcom.org. That's com with two M's as in communication.
0:45.1	And we'll link to that in the description as well.
1:00.1	Hello, Kirby. Hello Kirby, welcome to the podcast. Good morning. Thank you for having me.
1:02.1	Thank you so much for coming. I want to start with kind of the first question that we
1:06.3	ask all of our guests, which is how did you get interested in linguistics?
1:10.0	So, I have to preface this by saying that I didn't know I was going to major in linguistics
1:15.5	when I went to my undergrad for, you know, my four-year college. I got into UC Santa Cruz.
1:23.1	It was sort of lower on the list, but I ended up having an amazing time. But when I was applying to
1:29.5	colleges from high school, I thought I wanted to be an English major. And so I got to UC Santa
1:35.9	Cruz and I realized, oh my gosh, you guys don't have an English major. It's just not like a program
1:40.6	that they have. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to make my own English major out of spare parts.
1:45.0	And what I did was I decided, okay, I'm going to double major in literature and linguistics.
1:52.3	And that will make an English major.
1:54.2	And what ended up happening was I essentially made somehow the opposite of an English major.
1:59.5	But I really ended up being the
2:02.7	absolute perfect thing for me. And what really cemented like, oh, linguistics is where I was
2:08.5	going to stay for sure, was my first syntax class in my first year of undergrad. And the first day
2:16.8	of class, my professor, Jim McCloskey, walks into
	...

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