Plurality and Binding within the English th...sel { f/ves } Paradigm - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Plurality and Binding within the English th...sel{f/ves} Paradigm

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko

University of Calgary

June 3, 2019

Variation in English th-self Forms

English th-self forms are...complicated. With three possible “case” pronouns and two possible “number” variants, there are six possible forms: Singular Plural Nom theyself theyselves Acc themself themselves Gen theirself theirselves

Disclaimer

This presentation is going to ignore -selfs, though it exists

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 2 / 28

Big Picture Claims

These are not all interchangeable Neither variable is strictly associated with any particular type of antecedent Different grammars appear to carve up the functional load borne (prescriptively) by themselves in different ways (with they forms being

• utliers)

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Outline

1

Today’s Puzzle

2

Prior Discussion

3

New Twitter Corpus

4

Results

5

Discussion

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Outline

1

Today’s Puzzle

2

Prior Discussion

3

New Twitter Corpus

4

Results

5

Discussion

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 5 / 28

Singular they

This is partly wrapped up in a discussion of what exactly the th- pronouns denote Social changes aside, singular uses of the th- pronouns abound in contexts where definiteness is uncertain

Example (Bjorkman (2017))

They had the wrong number. (To someone else in the room after quickly ending a phone call)

Example (Bodine (1975))

Somebody left their sweater.

These can both be felicitous even when the speaker has a reasonably good idea about the gender of the referent

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Variable they

Bjorkman goes on to report that for some speakers, use of a th- form is obligatory in bound variable contexts The account is that the th- pronouns are less featurally-rich than gendered pronouns, and thus emerge as defaults This dovetails into the D´ echaine and Wiltschko (2002a) account that increased featural specification makes a pronoun less likely to function as a bound variable

Question

How does this relate to reflexive forms?

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 7 / 28

D´ echaine and Wiltschko on Reflexives

In D´ echaine and Wiltschko (2002b), this is extended to the English

• self paradigm

1st and 2nd person: full DPs DP D my ΦP Φ NP self 3rd person: ΦP only ΦP Φ him NP self The possessive morphology signals an extra layer of definiteness not present in 3rd person DPs undergo assigned co-reference, ΦPs are semantically bound

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 8 / 28

Implicit Predictions

This makes a clear prediction for a form like hisself: assigned co-reference, not variable binding Compare to Cheshire et al. (1993) where there is just described as dialectal paradigm levelling herself and itself are a bit of a wash for testing this And, we would expect the same thing for themselves vs theirselves

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 9 / 28

Prior Twitter Searches

In results presented at CLA 2013 and LSA 2015, with two different Twitter data sets, the story was the same:

◮ hisself behaves exactly as predicted ◮ theirselves stubbornly allows bound variable antecedents

Nagging Question

Why????

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 10 / 28

Handwaving

One pattern that jumped out was that most of the “unexpected” data came from the Commonwealth, or from parts of the US where this variation is uncommon Maybe it is paradigm levelling for some people, or a snowclone (a template being misapplied without knowledge of the underlying grammar) This is not a simple binary choice; English in North America gives us six possible forms But, the data collection was tiresome, so I left it alone. Even though some isolated speakers had exactly the predicted pattern.

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 11 / 28

Outline

1

Today’s Puzzle

2

Prior Discussion

3

New Twitter Corpus

4

Results

5

Discussion

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 12 / 28

Once More Unto the Breach

Easier-to-use tools for scraping twitter now exist. In this case, twitteR (Gentry, 2015), which, via R (R Core Team, 2017) makes this all a lot faster As a first step, collect the most recent 5000 tokens of each form (June 2018) The search window is roughly one week, if the frequency is lower than the value selected, you just get all the possible data No regional filters used Eliminating retweets and obvious robots, a manageable corpus can be collected

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 13 / 28

Corpus Coding

Number of the antecedent (Sg/Pl) Animacy of the antecedent (Animate/Inanimate) Function of the form:

◮ Argument ◮ Adnominal Modifier ◮ Adverbial Modifier ◮ By Phrase ◮ Exempt ◮ Metalinguistic/Robot

Type of Antecedent

◮ Definite DP ◮ Indefinite DP ◮ Bound Element (Control and

Relative Clauses)

◮ Weak Quantifiers (Numerals,

most N, a lot of N, etc...)

◮ Strong Quantifiers (every N,

some N, wh...)

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Outline

1

Today’s Puzzle

2

Prior Discussion

3

New Twitter Corpus

4

Results

5

Discussion

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 15 / 28

Functional Distribution

Argument Adverbial Adnominal By Phrase theyself 90.70% 1.69% 0.28% 5.29% themself 80.82% 6.85% 8.81% 1.96% theirself 88.51% 4.04% 1.86% 4.97% theyselves 91.04% 0% 1.49% 7.46% themselves 89.18% 4.58% 4.02% 1.80% theirselves 91.82% 3.48% 1.31% 2.18% them forms are the most versatile overall... ...but appear least frequently in a by-phrase. Same basic trends in -self vs selves

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Number

Singular theyself 23.10% themself 57.73% theirself 36.34% theyselves 2.99% themselves 13.04% theirselves 12.10% Definitely not the case that th- denotes plurality The plural suffix is only relatively plural, not absolute In both cases, the they forms are markedly different themselves and theirselves are fairly close though

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Bound Variable Usage

StrongQ theyself 10.42% themself 12.92% theirself 8.39% theyselves 1.49% themselves 5.55% theirselves 4.96% Speakers needing a singular bound variable are adopting th-self forms

Example

Everybody expose theyself in due time. Everyone ... is putting themself in the right side of the playing-field. I just seen somebody hawkin loogies on theirself.

theyselves is the outlier

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Relating Singularity and Binding

% of Singular that is StrongQ theyself 37.80% themself 21.69% theirself 18.80% theyselves 50.00% themselves 37.23% theirselves 37.41% Recall that bound variable contexts facilitate singular they

Example

...he’s just just someone calling themself a vegan to get a rise out of us.

For the they forms, singular use seems more dependent on bound variable contexts Not much difference here between them and their

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 19 / 28

Outline

1

Today’s Puzzle

2

Prior Discussion

3

New Twitter Corpus

4

Results

5

Discussion

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 20 / 28

Taking Stock

Bjorkman’s discussion of simple pronouns is reflected here with reflexive forms: there’s a relationship between variable binding and singularity The difference is that this is now reflected in two ways:

1

The proportion of singular interpretations arising from binding

2

The proportion of -self forms emerging as singular compared to -selves

That Nagging Question

What about the DP/ΦP stuff?

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 21 / 28

The Twist Ending

theirselves is not doing what was predicted, but theyselves is There is one other dimension on which these two are alike, and distinct from themselves % Animate theyselves 97.01% themselves 94.31% theirselves 98.87% There is a significant animacy contrast between themselves and theirselves If a rejection of inanimates is a reflection of possession, this makes some sense for the genitive form

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 22 / 28

They is Possessive

My proposal is that the they forms are historically their Of all three pronoun forms, the they cases are most clearly sociolinguistically coherent; they belong to AAE This happens to be a community that should also have theirselves (Green, 2002) This variety is known to have a post-vocalic de-rhoticization process (Pollock and Berni, 1996) This variety has hisself but not heself These speakers are preserving a DP structure for theyselves

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 23 / 28

Intersecting Forms and Grammars

theirselves is widely spread around the world This could indeed be paradigm levelling when considering a global dataset Both theyself and theirself seem to be retaining more of a sense of plurality...are users considering them to be alternatives to themselves? themself appears to be majority singular usage, and is the only one with a sense of conscious use as a non-binary form A more regionally controlled dataset (collected but not yet analyzed) should shed more light on this I still have no idea what to do with the functional differences Thanks!

Dennis Ryan Storoshenko (UofC) Th-sel{f/ves} June 3, 2019 24 / 28

References

Thanks

Thanks to the audience at the LSA in 2019 who saw a partial presentation

• f this data, colleagues for presentation feedback, and all the people whose

tweets are caught up in my dataset. Some were worth a follow.

Bjorkman, Bronwyn M. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa 2:80. Bodine, Ann. 1975. Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: Singular ‘they’, sex indefinite ‘he’ and ‘he or she’. Language in Society 4:129–146. Cheshire, Jenny, Viv Edwards, and Pamela Whittle. 1993. Non-standard English and dialect levelling. In Real English: The grammar of English dialects in the British Isles, 53–96. London: Longman. D´ echaine, Rose-Marie, and Martina Wiltschko. 2002a. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33:409–442. D´ echaine, Rose-Marie, and Martina Wiltschko. 2002b. Deriving reflexives. In Proceedings of the 21st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 71–84. Gentry, Jeff. 2015. twitteR: R-based Twitter client. http://lists.hexdump.org/listinfo.cgi/twitter-users-hexdump.org. Green, Lisa. 2002. African American English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pollock, K, and M Berni. 1996. Vocalic and postvocalic /r/ in African American Memphians. In New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV): Las Vegas, NV . R Core Team. 2017. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

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Frequency Asymmetry

This is unique tokens in a pool of 5000 (suitable measure of salt) For the -self forms: themself > theyself > theirself For the -selves forms: theirselves > themselves > theyselves theyselves so infrequent that stats get problematic theirselves is most frequently discussed metalinguistically themself has the highest frequency of robot usage

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