A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them (Addendum)

 The following exchange is based on (with minor revisions) an exchange which took place on Facebook on November 6, 2024.

https://www.facebook.com/christhadcollins/posts/pfbid02m9SzEhAzGiWkXuhE3ModZdytKhf2h5Rbv8oTnyxFMfwWh6cZMVf5J2gUeETJxzqrl

Facebook Reader: 

Karlos Arregi & Matt Hewett noted this for singular 'they' and it-clefts in their recent NELS presentation at Yale. The handout is on the NELS website.

Response:

Thank you for your comment, which is very relevant. Based on your comment, I have now reviewed Arregi and Hewett. Here are a few observations. First, I had heard about Arregi and Hewett before I wrote my blog post. I even got their handout from Gary Thoms, but I had not read it, or even glanced at it. My recent blog post is based on completely original empirical observations by me, which stemmed intellectually 100% from reading John David Storment's thesis chapters, where he has lots of puzzles concerning agreement in inversion constructions with pronouns. I basically applied the kinds of tests that he is looking at to singular-they, and that led to my blog post. Second, they (Arregi and Hewett) only discussed it-clefts, which I did not discuss. I discussed there-constructions and inversion. So the empirical discoveries complement each other. I admit the patterns seem to be similar (in that, singular-they triggers singular verb agreement in all three constructions). But their explanation (based on the antecedent of a relative pronoun) will definitely not carry over to my data. In my data, there are no relative pronouns. Third, I am quite interested in their analysis of singular-they, based on imposters. It seems very promising (and very different from the usual DM analyses based on impoverishment, underspecification and late insertion). It seems to me to be real progress in understanding singular-they. Fourth, what is deeply ironic about their handout, is that with Paco Ordonez I proposed an imposter account of 'ustedes' (2PL) in Spanish to respond to claims about impoverishment in Latin American Spanish made by Arregi and Nevins. So in effect, we have come full circle in the development of these ideas: Arregi/Nevins --> Collins/Ordonez --> Arregi/Hewett --> Collins (blog post). What an interesting world we live in!

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them

 Abstract: 

This squib shows that singular-them in expletive and inversion contexts only gives rise to singular verb agreement.

Keywords: singular-they/them, agreement, expletives, inversion

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them

Biographical Notes (Technology Review, Class Notes, March/April 2025)

I wrote this for the Technology Review, Class Notes. It should appear in the March/April 2025 issue. There are also some pictures to accompany the text. They are pictures of me in the field. But I do not post them here.

Cartography and the Passive

 This paper is chapter for the following volume:

Wolfe, Sam. Forthcoming. Mapping Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Link to paper:

Cartography and the Passive

Acceptability Judgments in ChatGPT (Study 2)

In this study, I am looking at structure dependence, which is an important concept for generative syntax. Based on a standard poverty of stimulus argument, structure dependence is taken to be part of UG (or derived from third factor considerations).

200,000 Visits for Ordinary Working Grammarian

As of 4:05 October 19, 2024, my blog Ordinary Working Grammarian has reached a total of 200,000 visits. The first blog post ever was March 14, 2017. So we have been going strong for over seven years.

The readership of the blog has dramatically increased since its inception. I only reached the 100,000 mark less than two years ago  on December 20, 2022.

In celebration of this fantastic milestone, I am posting a list of my most popular blog posts over the last year (in order of popularity). I have a broad readership throughout the world, so if you want to post as a guest, please let me know!

Acceptability Judgments in ChatGPT

On a dreary Saturday afternoon, I decided to ask ChatGPT a bunch of standard acceptability judgments. My prompt was this:

For each sentence, tell me if it is acceptable in spoken English or not. Do not give any explanations.

After that, I just typed in the sentences one after the other. And it spit out either 'Acceptable' or 'Not Acceptable.'