The diachronic distribution of singular they, generic he, and he or she construction in English newspaper corpora.

The primary focus of this BA thesis is the choice of the third person singular pronoun in the contexts where the gender of a singular animate referent is unknown or unspecified. Specifically, the use of singular they in this context is examined, as its distribution in the press genre of written language over the past 20 years is analysed using corpus linguistics. In the theoretical part, both grammatical and sociolinguistics factors are considered in order to trace the history of prescription for gender-neutral third person singular pronouns, focusing specifically on the development of the issue in recent years. The research part documents the singular use of pronoun they on five samples from two newspaper corpora (SiBol: Corpus of English broadsheet newspapers for years 1993-2013 and The Timestamped JSI web corpus for years 2014-2020) and analyses its development from year 1993 to 2020. The data acquired from the corpora are partially analysed with the help of artificial intelligence language model. This paper's hypothesis is that singular they grows in popularity; potential sociolinguistics reasons for that change are examined.