| Summary: | Singular 'they 'enjoys a curious notoriety in popular discussions of English grammar. Despite this, and though its use with quantificational, non-specific, and genuinely epicene antecedents dates back at least to the 1400s (Balhorn 2004), it has been little discussed in formal linguistics. This squib suggests an analysis of this longstanding use of 'they', while also describing a more recent change in 'they'’s distribution, whereby many speakers now accept it with singular, definite, and specific antecedents of known binary gender. I argue that the distribution of 'they', in both conservative and innovative varieties, has implications for our understanding of the syntactic representation of gender in English, the structure of bound variable pronouns, and the regulation of coreference.
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