Lex at UTM Linguistics Brown Bag

Lex Konnelly (Ph.D.) is the next guest speaker for the Linguistics Brown Bag Lunch series at the Mississauga campus. Their talk, "Linguistic innovation and advocacy in trans and gender-diverse communities: The morphosyntax of singular they", will be taking place on Monday, February 4, from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM in room 5128 of the New North Building.

As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this talk, I highlight the burgeoning relationship between transgender communities, linguistics, and social justice, drawing attention to the role language has played in wider cultural orientations to transgender issues as well as the ways in which linguistics can be at the forefront of this critical activism. By way of example, I report on joint work with Elizabeth Cowper (in prep.) on the non-binary usage of singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine (1). Despite they's widespread usage, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified (2), generic (3), or otherwise gender non-specific (4) contexts and would produce such examples natively.

(1) When Arthuri arrives, please ask themi to fill out this form. (2) If anyonei comes to the door, tell themi to go away. (3) The perfect studenti always finishes theiri homework. (4) I heard they hired a new teacheri. I wonder which grade theyi’ll be assigned to.

We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers' level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they's most recent broadening – that is, as a non-binary pronoun of reference – dovetailing with wider sociocultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgments. As I aim to show, linguists from all disciplines – both theoretical and applied – are especially well-suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.