The impacts of Context, Proficiency Level, Sex and Specialties Influence The Epicene Pronouns Used by L2 Writers in Asia: A Corpus Study

• Published in: Corpus pragmatics : international journal of corpus linguistics and pragmatics Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 199 - 218
• Main Authors: Tang, Yao, Ali, Nor Liza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.06.2025
• Subjects: Computational Linguistics; Computer Appl. in Arts and Humanities; Linguistics; Original Paper; Pragmatics; Semantics; Social Sciences; EFL; Generic he; Singular they; Epicene pronouns; ESL
• ISSN: 2509-9507; 2509-9515
• DOI: 10.1007/s41701-025-00186-5

This study aims to investigate the influence of four factors, learning context, L2 proficiency level, sex, majors and their interaction terms, on whether Asian L2 writers use two epicene pronouns, generic he and singular they . By establishing a binary logistic regression model, this study investigates the use of the probability of the two epicene pronouns by writers in the ICNALE. The results show that ESL writers are more likely to use generic he than EFL writers. However, specialty moderates the effect of context. In the humanities, EFL users use more generic he than ESL users. Context also moderates the effect of specialty. Among ESL users, writers in the humanities are less likely to use generic he than writers in science. Females are less likely to use singular they than males. However, language proficiency moderates the effect of sex. For high language proficiency writers, females are more likely to use singular they than males. Sex also moderates the effect of language proficiency. Among female authors, high proficiency users use more singular they than low proficiency users.