Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

77%
+5 −0
Q&A English dialects and he/she versus it

The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker. There are some basic uses of "it" whic...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

Answer
#2: Post edited by user avatar Jirka Hanika‭ · 2022-05-30T08:06:40Z (over 2 years ago)
  • The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker.
  • There are some basic uses of "it" which do refer to a person and which are available rather uniformly across dialects of English.
  • 1) Person (or animal) whose (binary) sex is unknown or disregarded. Example: *"Who was it that told you that?"*
  • 2) Person whose gender is non-binary. (The person may have opted into the pronoun.)
  • 3) Jocular or derogatory use. (The sentence will often contain additional depersonalizing lexical items, creating a tension between the subject being clearly a person, but the speaker treating them as a non-person. Such usage would be studied under pragmatics, not semantics, it doesn't constitute an independent meaning of the word "it".)
  • 4) Ante-referential use. *"John is a postman but he hates to be it."* (In such a sentence, we could perhaps argue whether "it" refers to a "postman" or to John's "postmanship", which could further be analyzed as a countable person and an uncountable abstraction, respectively.)
  • With enough context twisting, almost every word can be made to refer to almost anything, and "it" is an especially flexible referent due to its native use to refer to any abstractions - abstractions are included in non-persons.
  • Some usages of "it" may look superficially like they are referring to a person, but aren't. *"It is she who carries my baby."* Here, "it" is a part of a set phrase "it is/was ... who/that ...", the phrase is used for emphasis, and that phrase is compatible with any grammatical person and any referent, including plural referents.
  • The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker.
  • There are some basic uses of "it" which do refer to a person and which are available rather uniformly across dialects of English.
  • 1) Person, often an unborn or newborn child, (or animal) whose (binary) sex is unknown or disregarded. Example: *"Who was it that told you that?"*
  • 2) Person whose gender is non-binary. (The person may have opted into the pronoun.)
  • 3) Jocular or derogatory use. (The sentence will often contain additional depersonalizing lexical items, creating a tension between the subject being clearly a person, but the speaker treating them as a non-person. Such usage would be studied under pragmatics, not semantics, it doesn't constitute an independent meaning of the word "it".)
  • 4) Ante-referential use. *"John is a postman but he hates to be it."* (In such a sentence, we could perhaps argue whether "it" refers to a "postman" or to John's "postmanship", which could further be analyzed as a countable person and an uncountable abstraction, respectively.)
  • With enough context twisting, almost every word can be made to refer to almost anything, and "it" is an especially flexible referent due to its native use to refer to any abstractions - abstractions are included in non-persons.
  • Many usages of "it" may look superficially like they are referring to a person, but aren't. *"It is she who carries my baby."* Here, "it" is a dummy pronoun which is a part of a set phrase *"it is/was ... who/that ..."*. The phrase is used for emphasis. The fact that the "it" is used as a dummy pronoun can sometimes be confirmed once the phrase is combined with other grammatical persons or numbers than 3rd person singular: *"It was ourselves who started this."*
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Jirka Hanika‭ · 2022-05-29T14:23:28Z (over 2 years ago)
The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me.  Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker.

There are some basic uses of "it" which do refer to a person and which are available rather uniformly across dialects of English.

1) Person (or animal) whose (binary) sex is unknown or disregarded.  Example: *"Who was it that told you that?"*

2) Person whose gender is non-binary.  (The person may have opted into the pronoun.)

3) Jocular or derogatory use.  (The sentence will often contain additional depersonalizing lexical items, creating a tension between the subject being clearly a person, but the speaker treating them as a non-person.  Such usage would be studied under pragmatics, not semantics, it doesn't constitute an independent meaning of the word "it".)

4) Ante-referential use.  *"John is a postman but he hates to be it."*  (In such a sentence, we could perhaps argue whether "it" refers to a "postman" or to John's "postmanship", which could further be analyzed as a countable person and an uncountable abstraction, respectively.)

With enough context twisting, almost every word can be made to refer to almost anything, and "it" is an especially flexible referent due to its native use to refer to any abstractions - abstractions are included in non-persons.

Some usages of "it" may look superficially like they are referring to a person, but aren't. *"It is she who carries my baby."*  Here, "it" is a part of a set phrase "it is/was ... who/that ...", the phrase is used for emphasis, and that phrase is compatible with any grammatical person and any referent, including plural referents.