1. Guy, Guys, and Gender Neutrality Sean McLennan Indiana University CLS 40 April 15, 2004

2. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Introduction A server in a restaurant: Good evening! Can I get you guys something to drink?

3. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis E-mail chosen for colloquial nature static community restricted demographics known community where referents are more clearly interpretable computational tractability

4. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis 1879 e-mail messages sent to a closed list approx. 70 participants (primarily Canadian undergraduate students) nearly equal gender ratio November 1998 - October 2002

5. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis Factors examined: number: singular vs. plural grammatical position: subject, object, indirect object, vocative phrasal co-occurrence: determiners, you, hey/hi etc. gender composition of referent: male, female, mixed, unknown, genderless

6. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis: Results 73% total = 526 23%

7. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis: Results NumberGram. Pos.Phrase Co-occ. 98% you 3% you

8. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Corpus Analysis: Results Accounts for 98% of the recorded instances

9. 040415 - Sean McLennan - CLS 40 Discussion guymanhe high freq (73%)* low freq (5%)* low freq (3%) highly pred. by gram. context marginally pred. by gram. context not pred. by gram. context shift in dir. of neutrality shift in dir. of gender specificity prescriptivist imposition non-gendered imagery(?) gendered imagery balances lexical paradigms in conflict with existing paradigm used as a generic: * current study Graham (1975)