Unmarked personal reference forms in academic texts

The present study is concerned with pronominal forms of common-gender reference in the English language. Due to the lack of an epicene third person singular pronoun in English, there is no one both grammatically and stylistically accepted method of common- gender reference. The theoretical part elaborates on various commonly used contemporary strategies, pronominal or otherwise, for example substitution of the pronoun with the definite article or repetition of the head noun. In the second part, two hundred articles published after 2009, one hundred of which was published in the United States, the other hundred having been published in either Australia or New Zealand. The articles were collected manually via the ProQuest database. The working hypothesis stated that so-called singular they would occur most frequently in Australian/New Zealand-based articles, while US authors would most often opt for generic he. Methods of generic reference were catalogued based on the choice of pronoun, internal consistency within the text, the pronoun's collocates, and journal of origin