Discussion note Response to Chen and Wu’s paper: Less well-behaved pronouns: Singular they in English and plural ta ‘it/he/she’ in Chinese Kaja Borthen * Department of Language and Communication Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway Chen and Wu (2011) present data on plural and singular pronouns that supplement my study on pronouns reported on in Borthen (2010). The data are interesting in their own right, but unfortunately, this aspect of the paper is over-shadowed by a misconception underlying the discussion. The authors have not sufficiently distinguished between an impressionistic report I gave in an anecdote concerning plural pronouns, and the model I used to explain my data. Thus, although Chen and Wu’s examples are interesting, they cannot be related to my study the way Chen and Wu attempt to. In my view, my work is being misrepresented, and I feel urged to clarify the misunderstandings. In Borthen (2010) I present a corpus study on definite, plural pronouns in Norwegian. I conclude that these pronouns differ from their singular counterparts with respect to what cognitive status they encode (in the sense of Gundel et al., 1993), and I hypothesize that this holds for definite plural pronouns in other languages as well, e.g. English. A referent’s cognitive status has to do with whether it is represented in memory or not, and where in memory it is represented. Gundel et al. (1993) suggest that pronouns and determiners encode as part of their lexical meaning what cognitive status the referent can be expected to have in the mind of the addressee. This aspect of meaning – for instance ‘‘the referent ought to be represented in your short-term memory’’ – narrows down the set of possible referent candidates, and thus promotes correct reference assignment. Whereas Gundel et al. and other linguists assume that singular and plural pronouns encode the same cognitive status – i.e. ‘activated’ for 1st and 2nd person pronouns and ‘in focus’ for 3rd person pronouns, 1 my findings suggest that there may be an asymmetry between singular and plural pronouns in this respect. I suggest that definite plural pronouns do not signal that a representation of their referent is recently activated or in focus of attention in the hearer’s mind; rather they signal that the associated referent is at least uniquely identifiable. 2 From this it follows that the set referred to by a plural pronoun need not be already familiar to the addressee (although it may be); it is sufficient that the addressee is able to infer which set is referred to. This predicts that a person may say ‘‘They stole everything I had’’ in a situation where they is intended to refer to whoever broke into the speaker’s house, even if the referent of they has not been mentioned and is not already familiar to the addressee, or even to the speaker. My claim is that plural pronouns, such as we, you, and they, allow for reference to sets that are not familiar to the addressee, as long as the addressee can infer which set is referred to – in this case the set consisting of whoever broke into the speaker’s house. My Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 411–414 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 5 July 2010 Received in revised form 18 July 2010 Accepted 21 July 2010 * Tel.: +47 73598314; fax: +47 73596119. E-mail address: kaja.borthen@hf.ntnu.no. 1 According to Gundel et al. (1993), a referent has the cognitive status ‘activated’ if it is represented in short-term memory. A referent which has the cognitive status ‘in focus’, is not only activated but also in focus of attention. 2 My use of the term ‘uniquely identifiable’ in Borthen (2010) is a slight modification of Gundel et al.’s original definition and use of the term. On my definition, a referent is uniquely identifiable if and only if the addressee is able to retrieve or create a unique representation of it by the time the sentence has been processed. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.025