Dennis Storoshenko Presenting at the CLA

Lecturer Dennis Ryan Storoshenko will be presenting a paper Only Cool People Tweet Theirselves: Variation in the English Reflexive Paradigm at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association in Victoria, British Columbia this week. A contribution to the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, this work documents the use of hisself and theirselves​, finding that while these pronouns are present in both the US and the UK, they are used differently in each country. In the UK, theirselves is used much more frequently than hisself, whereas the reverse is true in the US. The paper also argues that among users in the Deep South, there are semantic conditions determining the choice of theirselves versus themselves (likewise hisself vs. himself) which are not reflected in the speech of northern and western states, or the UK.