[Lingtyp] Pronouns, politeness, political correctness

[Nicholas Kontovas]

I sent a version of this message earlier, but realised just now I only sent
it to Christian.

Maybe it's just me, but as a native speaker of English, when there is a
referent whose gender is unknown or a hypothetical referent of unspecified
gender, it actually sounds strange enough to border on ungrammatical to use
third person singular masculine pronouns. It makes it seem as if there is a
specific person of whom the speaker is aware but that they've forgotten to
introduce them in the preceding discourse.

I know there is no common gender non-specified third person singular
pronoun in German, so knowing that Christian is German, I wouldn't have
thought twice about the error unless he'd drawn attention to it. I would
think it was just obvious interference from German. That said, it does seem
bizarrely antagonistic to pre-empt any comments on it out of the blue.
There are plenty of reasons not to prefer that construction that have
nothing to do with "political correctness"; it just doesn't fit my native
speaker intuition.

If we'd like to make the discussion more linguistic, maybe other native
English speakers can chime in with their judgements on "he" for referents
of unspecified gender :-) Also, maybe mention your native dialect to see if
that matters. Mine is working-class NYC metro area English.

Best,

Niko

On Wed, 10 May 2023, 15:59 Christian Lehmann, <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I should, first of all, say that it was not my intention to start a
> discussion on political correctness on this forum. On the one hand, it is
> pretty clear that, among all genuinely linguistic issues, this is the one
> which engages most people emotionally, which  means that a rational and
> constructive discussion is very hard to conduct. On the other, one may ask
> why this would be an appropriate topic for LingTyp. So, to repeat, the only
> thing that I requested was that people refrain from criticizing or
> commenting on other people's usage if political correctness is at stake. It
> seems that nobody among those who have taken up the topic is really against
> this request.
>
> This being said, it seems also clear that the issue involves a number of
> problems that are of linguistic interest (although not necessarily of
> typological interest). One is the question brought up by Maïa: Do we have a
> right to determine our name? And further: Do we have a right to determine
> how our people (our ethnos), town and our country are called? (Remember
> that political correctness has often required speakers to stick to the most
> recent redenomination realized by locals.)
>
> Another is the question of politeness brought up by Jürgen: If I use an
> expression that some people find politically incorrect, at the same time
> sincerely and  credibly assuring interlocutors that I mean no harm (and if
> required, distancing myself explicitly from pejorative or otherwise
> negative connotations that some people associate with it), is it then me
> who is impolite or is it those people who insist that I speak otherwise?
>
> Again, these are issues of pragmatics rather than typology. But we
> typologists are not really that narrow-minded; so if people want to take it
> up, go ahead.
>
> Best,
> Christian
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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