An Investigation of Epicene/Generic Pronouns among Non-Native Speakers of English

Generic pronouns have been investigated in previous studies in many different contexts, but since how to use language differs among cultures, this paper examines the use of generic pronouns selected by ۷۲ Iranian English learners. To do so, two questionnaires were used; one to associate gender roles for English personal nouns and the other were sentences containing pronouns to be chosen for each personal noun. The results show that most Iranian students do not know about singular they, the pronoun he/she was the most provided choice even in the sentences with male antecedents; showing that Iranians do not have a sexist view, and for typically female antecedents she was the most commonly used option, which supports the pronominal surrogate hypothesis. Since Persian, as a gender-neutral language, does not distinguish grammatical gender and the same pronoun is used for the third person males and females, the result confirms the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

کلیدواژه ها:

Generic He ، Singular They ، Sexist Language ، Gender-Neutral Language ، Proficiency ، EFL