I was wondering what would be the right pronoun to use in this sentence:
a person sees something that ... really likes
he, they, s/he ?
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To avoid the criticism of gender discrimination, it has been a trend nowadays to use they (known as singular they). It's an example of 'grammaticality versus acceptability'. – mahmud k pukayoor Aug 08 '17 at 14:36
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@mahmudkoya Untrue. I don't know who told you it was ungrammatical, but they were wrong. It's been used as long as English has had modern pronouns. It's part of the pattern. – tchrist Aug 08 '17 at 14:41
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@mahmud koya Did you know that 'grammaticality' is ill-defined in English? A study by Quirk and Svartvik showed that (as one might expect) a panel of grammarians couldn't agree on how grammatical various sentences were. They proposed a gradience of grammaticality, with sentence 327 say turning out to be say 75% grammatical. Of course, using a different panel would have produced different results in some cases. The point is that we throw around the terms 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' as if that settles the issue. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 08 '17 at 14:53