Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

From:    And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
> I don't know whether all the epicene
> pronoun fuss is due simply to prescriptivism or whether there
> is genuinely a dialect difference with AmE here, such that AmE
> lacks the BrE solution. (It's hard to tell, what with AmE
> being so much more prescriptivist in the first place.)
I'm just curious:  on what grounds are you making this
assertion? Have you noticed that American students of
yours are more likely to make reference to standards of
language use than your British students?  (This is not
to say that one cannot make generalizations about cultures,
but I wonder whether you have actually looked at some
empirical data on this which I have not myself seen.)

Besides which: it seems a little dubious to speak about
"American English" and "British English" except in the broadest
terms.  I know that within America there certainly are people
for whom "one" is completely unacceptable as an everyday
epicene except in the most formal of registers, so it wouldn't
surprise me is there are people who have difficulties with
"them" as epicene, too.  Yet for me, both are quite acceptable.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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