Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Reader 1

Mary Paster

Reader 2

Michael Diercks

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Singular they, particularly in its use for nonbinary individuals, has become both more well-known and well discussed in recent years, and past research has picked out innovative grammars that include the innovative reflexive form themself. This paper collects and analyzes data from syntactic elicitation of an innovative grammar, using a framework of multiple different theories of binding. It shows that the innovative singular reflexive pronoun is preferred for singular antecedents, while the conservative plural reflexive is preferred for plural antecedents, and delves into more complex interactions of structure and agreement. Overall, this paper shows that this innovative grammar has fairly consistent grammaticality judgments, ones which may serve to disrupt or provide interesting challenges to existing theories of binding, particularly those based in Minimalist Agree.

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