36th Annual Student Research Conference
Neopronouns in Practice
Lukas C. Pierce
Dr. Emily Olsen, Faculty Mentor
With the increasing acceptance of Neopronouns in English, it seems appropriate that we should examine the way that Neopronouns are being used grammatically. Past research seems to have primarily focused on examining things such as frequency and attitudes. This study attempts to go a step further by recording the ways in which Subject-Verb Agreement adapts to Neopronouns, and then analyzing that data for demographic trends. For this study, I collected data from 246 participants, and then had them answer questions about their demographic background, followed by a series of fill-in-blank questions that asked them to complete a sentence that began with one of six pronoun subjects. After analyzing the data, I was able to find strong trends towards grammatically-singular verb agreement that increased with the level of familiarity. Additionally, weaker trends were found along the sexuality, age, and education level demographic lines.
Keywords: Neopronouns, Gender, Grammar, Language
Topic(s):Linguistics
Women's and Gender Studies
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Session: 206-5
Location: SUB 3202
Time: 11:15