They is looking for ...
Back in April, the Youth and Popular Culture desk at Language Log
Plaza, managed at the time by Eric Bakovic,
reported
on "singular
they" in
Facebook. Facebook users can
leave their sex unspecified in their profiles. If they do, other
items in their profiles will be produced with the pronouns
they,
them,
their rather than the
sex-appropriate pronouns. So (to quote Eric) we get things like
Kim Doe added "burger" to their favorite foods.
I'm not really comfortable with this (though I have no problem with
singular
they with indefinite
antecedents), but I understand how it happens, and Language Loggers have
reported on similar cases over the years.
Facebook's handling of pronouns turns out to lead to much worse
problems, though, because there's no mechanism for subject-verb agreement.
This we discover from a message to ADS-L by James Harbeck yesterday,
who noted that the Facebook messages about a friend of his (who had not
specified sex) included
[Name] updated their profile. They is
now looking for friendship, a relationship and networking.
Way over the line for me, though you can see how it came about: there's
a program that pulls the sex item (called "sex", and not "gender", by
the way) from the user's profile and then plugs in
she/her/her,
he/him/his, or
they/them/their according to what
it finds there. So if someone with no sex specified checks one or
more boxes in the "Looking for" item -- Friendship, Dating, A
Relationship, and Networking are the choices offered -- that will be
reported as
[Pronoun] is looking for ...
with the program supplying the "appropriate" pronoun, in this case
they. Result:
They is looking for ...
This is akin to those annoying reports like
You have 1 messages.
which result from a lack of number-marking rules within NPs; a number
is simply inserted in a template.
[Full disclosure: I am a Facebook user, which is why I can tell you
about profile items. Among my Facebook friends are Steven Bird,
Dan Jurafsky, and Ben Zimmer here at LLP, plus Michael Erard, Jesse
Sheidlower, and Chris Waigl (whose names have come up on Language Log
several times), a number of friends from the newsgroup soc.motss, and
various current or recent students.]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 5, 2007 10:33 AM