Matthew Hewett
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania
“Singular they and the syntax of townhouses”
(Joint work with Karlos Arregi)
Existing analyses of singular they (e.g. Bjorkman 2017, Conrod 2019, Konnelly & Cowper 2020) don’t provide an account of the fact that it obligatorily triggers plural verbal agreement, despite having singular reference (e.g. Kelly(i) thinks they(i) {deserve/*deserves} first place). These accounts claim that the plurality of singular they is just a matter of exponence, due to underspecification. The agreement facts, however, point to singular they being morphosyntactically plural. We propose that singular they belongs to a class of pronouns we term townhouse pronouns (or simply townhouses), including editorial we and nurse we, among others, which display the same type of verbal agreement mismatch. Under our analysis, what’s special about singular they and other townhouses has to do with pronouns and their structure, not with gender per se. More specifically, we provide a unified analysis of townhouses and ordinary pronouns: Like ordinary pronouns (Postal 1966, Elbourne 2001), townhouses are D heads with a null complement, but unlike them, their complement is a DP. In the specific case of singular they, the nominal has an outer plural shell DP headed by overt they, and a covert inner singular core DP headed by pron[-g], an otherwise ineffable non-masculine, non-feminine, animate pronoun. We provide evidence for all core aspects of the proposal. Finally, we account for restrictions on possible townhouses that may shed light on the inventory and representation of phi-features, based on the hypothesis that the phi-features of the core DP must be a subset of the phi-features of the shell DP. If correct, the analysis provides evidence for a mixed theory of phi-features in which some are privative (e.g. [pl] vs. [ ] for plural vs. singular) and others are binary (e.g. [+/-participant] for 1st/2nd vs. 3rd person).