英语论文哪里有？笔者认为虽然本研究为中国英语学习者使用英语表位代词提供了一些证据，但也存在一些局限性。首先，本研究采用基于语料库的方法探讨了前因个体化程度的影响，并采用实验方法探讨了社会性别和概念数对中国英语学习者选择英语表位代词的影响。
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.4 Organization of the dissertation
This dissertation consists of 6 chapters, as shown in Figure 1. Chapter 1 is the introduction, composed of research background, research purposes, and significance, and puts forward three major questions, focusing on three related factors, namely gender, notional number, and degree of individualization. Chapter 2 is a literature review in three subsections. Firstly, it introduces gender categories of English antecedents and gender characteristics of English epicene pronouns, compares differences of gender characteristics between Chinese and English epicene pronouns, then reviews relevant studies abroad and at home. Secondly, it introduces categories of notional number of English antecedents, compares differences of number characteristics between Chinese and English epicene pronouns, then reviews related research abroad and at home. Thirdly, it introduces English antecedents’ degree of individualization and the relationship between notional number and degree of individualization of antecedents, compares similarities of individualized characteristics between Chinese and English, then reviews relevant research abroad and at home.
The dissertation consists of two studies to investigate three questions. Study one in Chapter 3 is an experimental study aiming to investigate the effect of social gender of antecedents on the choice of English epicene pronouns and the effect of notional number of antecedents on the choice. Firstly, a pre-test study of gender role scoring is conducted to ensure that antecedents in this study are less affected by other social and cultural factors. There are two sentence completion tasks in study one: a tag question task aiming to study the effect of social gender of antecedents and a slot filling task aiming to study the effect of notional number of antecedents. After cleaning the data, Chi-square test is used to explore whether there is a significant difference in the preference of English epicene pronouns in relation to social gender and notional number of antecedents, respectively. Finally, the relevant factors are discussed in detail.
Chapter 3 Study One
3.1 Method
We conducted the experimental study for its two merits: controlling variables and practicality. Firstly, irrelevant factors, such as referential gender and grammatical number, could be controlled in the experiment. Secondly, sentence completion tasks were proved to be a practical method to elicit English learners to give epicene pronouns (Abudalbuh, 2012; Lee, 2007).
Before conducting the experiment, we did a pre-test study to ensure that antecedents in the sentence completion tasks were male stereotypes, female stereotypes, and gender-neutral nouns based on Chinese EFL learners’ judgment. In the experiment, two sentence completion tasks are used for different purposes. The tag question task aims to study the effect of social gender on the choice of English epicene pronouns. The slot filling task aims to study the effect of notional number on the choice of English epicene pronouns.
Chapter 4 Study Two
4.1 Data collection and processing
We chose Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL2.0) for its three merits: natural output, data representativeness, and transcription quality. SECCL2.0 reflected Chinese EFL learners’ oral production under natural conditions. It showed Chinese EFL learners’ choice of epicene pronoun by their first instinct. As a sub-corpus of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL2.0), SECCL2.0 collected 7,130 minutes of recordings of oral tests of TEM-4 in years 2003 to 2006 from 713 sophomores of English majors from different universities in China. The total length of the transcribed text was 779,731 words, including 2139 files, and the transcribed quality was very high.
The tool used to collect data in this study was AntConc 3.5.8, a free multi-platform tool developed by Laurence Anthony for corpus linguistics research with a free corpus analysis toolkit for retrieval and text analysis. The data processing steps were as follows:
Firstly, we excluded nouns denoting male or female gender in the TEM-4 test, such as the noun “professor”, epicene pronoun he was used to refer back to in the test. We also excluded nouns with male or female stereotypes, such as “teacher” and “driver”, since these nouns might be related to referential gender in context. Antecedents we extracted were all gender-neutral nouns. Then, we searched four kinds of antecedents in the corpus according to antecedents’ degree of individualization, as shown in Table 5: (1) definite noun phrases (e.g. the resident), (2) indefinite noun phrase (e.g. a neighbor), (3) quantitative noun phrases (e.g. every person), (4) indefinite pronouns (e.g. everyone). Afterward, we extracted four kinds of epicene pronouns and their related forms from context words: (1) he (his, him and himself), (2) she (her and herself), (3) he or she (his or her, him or her and himself or herself), (4) they (their, them and themselves). The variants of different epicene pronouns were regarded as one type and were counted in the nominative case. For example, his, him, and himself were counted as he. The distance between the search word (antecedent) and the context word (epicene pronoun) was set to 20 words (Zhang & Yang, 2021). We separately counted the frequency of four types of epicene pronouns. Finally, we repeated manual retrieval and check-up to ensure the reliability of the data.
4.2 Results
This section mainly reports two points: the frequency of Chinese EFL learners’ choice of epicene pronouns he, she, he or she, and singular they in SECCL2.0 on the whole, and the normalized frequency and the standardized percentage of epicene pronouns according to antecedents’ degree of individualization.
4.2.1 Overall frequencies of English epicene pronouns in SECCL2.0
Figure 17 shows the overall frequency (raw frequency) of epicene pronouns he, she, he or she, and they in the corpus: he 284 times, she 37 times, he or she 17 times, and they 200 times. The results show that: (1) Chinese EFL learners used epicene pronoun he most frequently, with a percentage of 52.6%, which indicates that the learners have a certain degree of male gender bias in the selection of epicene pronouns; (2) The frequency of singular they ranked second, which indicates that learners accept the singular usage of they to a certain extent. (3) Chinese EFL learners also used epicene pronoun she to refer back to gender-neutral antecedents, such as in Example（23）; (4) The percentage of epicene pronoun he or she was only 3.1%; (5) The total percentage of gender-inclusive epicene pronouns he or she and singular they was 40.3%, which indicates that Chinese EFL learners have gender-inclusive awareness in the choice of epicene pronouns to a certain degree.
Chapter 6 Conclusion and Implications
In conclusion, the present study found that social gender, notional number and degree of individualization of antecedents affected the choice of English epicene pronouns. Chinese EFL learners preferred to use epicene pronoun he on the whole, which indicates that Chinese EFL learners are male-biased to some extent. Although there was a high percentage of singular they, but it was affected by the notional number and degree of individualization of antecedents. It is mainly because Chinese EFL learners’ choice of English epicene pronouns is affected by the lack of gender marker and number marker in the third-person pronoun “他/TA” in their mother tongue.
The appropriate usage of English epicene pronouns would be of great significance, not only for the correct transmission of gender information but also for the publicity of the grammatical singular concept of epicene pronoun singular they. As for gender equality in language use, if Chinese EFL learners improperly use English epicene pronouns, their English communication may be regarded as gender discrimination by native English speakers (Zhang & Yang, 2021). As for the publicity of singular they, it is found that, in the past two decades, six of the ten most popular English grammar books published in China stipulate he as epicene pronoun, while singular they is prescribed only in four English grammar books (Zhang & Yang, 2021). This shows that there is lack of the popularization of singular they.
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