“All roads lead to trans linguistics”: a study into the grammaticality and acceptability of multiple pronouns and neopronouns

Pronouns in English show gender-related features in third-person singular: he, she, and they (and arguably it) are considered canonical third-person singular animate pronouns (Roepke et al., 2022). “Non-canonical" neologistic pronouns (neopronouns), which are coined and less widely used, include alternate forms including but not limited to xe, fae, and ey (Gender Census, 2021). Roepke et al carried out an acceptability survey on neopronouns using 54 Likert-scale stimuli. Roepke et al assert that neopronouns have been understudied, and their findings show that neopronouns are deemed as “less acceptable” than canonical pronouns. However, the scope of their study does not cover the usage of multiple pronouns, e.g she and they (“she/they”) or xe and he (“xe/he”). Our pilot study, using the framework of the University of Edinburgh’s Map Task, will attempt to cover this gap in the literature, building off studies such as Roepke et al (2022), Baron (2020), Miltersen (2016), Hekanaho (2020). Following on from the findings of Roepke et al’s study in particular, ours attempts to explore the acceptability of multiple pronouns and neopronouns. While Roepke et al found that neopronouns were deemed as less acceptable and less grammatical via their Likert scale, our study attempts to examine the acceptability of neopronouns, THEY-ONE, and canonical pronouns via a series of matrices, and how these are used to label and gender a character that participants will guide through a map in the Map Task. In the Map Task, participants will be asked to bring one friend along to the experiment, and are arranged into various pairs throughout. While in these pairs, participants receive one map each, which differ in small ways. The participants are told this beforehand. One of the people in the pair is the Instruction Giver and their map will have a route drawn on it. The other person in the pair is the Route Follower, and their map does not have a route drawn on it. The participants will be given a character to guide along the route. This character will have ambiguous gender presentation, and will have their pronouns listed in a matrix fashion and other fashions. We hope to discover how the character is gendered during the Task according to how their pronouns are listed, and if this depends on whether one or more of the pronouns are non-canonical.