A Study On The Choice Of English Epicene Pronouns By Chinese EFL Learners

English epicene pronouns are used to refer back to grammatically singular,sex-unknown,or sex-indeterminate antecedents.In addition to general usage,English third-person pronouns he,she,he or she and they can also be used as epicene pronouns.However,these epicene pronouns are different in expressing gender: he and she are biased in gender while he or she holds a balance between men and women,and singular they is a gender-neutral epicene pronoun but is ambiguous in number characteristics.Influenced by the non-sexist language reform,official institutes like American Dialect Society,American Psychological Association advocate the use of gender-neutral singular they and avoid the use of gender-biased epicene pronouns.It is found that the choice of English epicene pronouns is mainly affected by three factors: social gender,notional number,and degree of individualization of antecedents.Chinese EFL learners’ choice of epicene pronouns is affected by antecedents’ degree of individualization,but which epicene pronouns they prefer to choose needs to be studied further.Moreover,whether social gender and notional number of antecedents affect Chinese EFL learners’ choice of epicene pronouns remains further investigated.The present study adopted the experimental method and the corpus-based method to explore the Chinese EFL learners’ preference of epicene pronouns and effects of social gender,notional number and degree of individualization of antecedents.Firstly,the experimental method was used: the tag question task was used for antecedents with different social genders,and the slot filling task was used for antecedents with different notional numbers,aiming to induce Chinese EFL learners to fill in English epicene pronouns,then explore to what extent social gender and notional number of antecedents affect the choice of English epicene pronouns.Finally,Chi-square test reveals a significant difference in the preference of English epicene pronouns in relation to types of antecedents.Secondly,Ant Conc software was used to extract English epicene pronouns from a spoken corpus（SECCL2.0）,aiming to explore the preference of English epicene pronouns by Chinese EFL learners and to what extent antecedents’ degree of individualization affects the choice.The results show that:（1）Chinese EFL learners tended to use epicene pronoun he to refer back to male stereotypes and gender-neutral antecedents,while they tended to use epicene pronoun she to refer back to female stereotypes;（2）Chinese EFL learners tended to use epicene pronoun he to refer back to notionally singular antecedents and used both epicene pronoun he and singular they to refer back to notionally neutral and notionally plural antecedents;（3）Chinese EFL learners preferred to use epicene pronoun he to refer back to antecedents with the high degree of individualization while preferred to use singular they to refer back to antecedents with the low degree of individualization in SECCL2.0.These findings show that social gender,notional number and degree of individualization of antecedents affect Chinese EFL learners’ choice of English epicene pronouns.The results further indicate that Chinese EFL learners’ choice of English epicene pronouns is affected by the third-person pronoun “他/TA” underspecified in gender and number in their mother tongue.It provides new evidence that L2 English learners’ choice of epicene pronouns is affected by mother tongue transfer and helps to study further Chinese EFL learners’ awareness of gender equality in language use and their sensitivity to notional number.In addition,this study is significant for promoting Chinese EFL learners to use singular they and avoid using the male-biased epicene pronoun he.