This paper focuses on the use of English epicene pronouns in discourse which most individuals are exposed to on an everyday basis. Gender-based linguistic reforms have been implemented since the beginning of the 1970s, to achieve a more non-sexist language. In the present study Corpus linguistics has been applied to investigate the use of personal pronoun he and the personal pronoun singular they in relationship with these linguistic reforms. The present study uses data from both written and spoken English between the 1930s and 2019. The data is collected from corpora COHA and COCA to diachronically study patterns of the use of generic he and singular they when used as anaphoric reference to an antecedent of unknown gender. To narrow the searches in corpora, indefinite compound pronouns are used in collocation with the epicene pronouns as linguistic features. Systematic sampling and mapping of the data lay the ground for the analysis that determines if patterns in the language can be related to the gender-based linguistic reforms. The evidence from the data collected for the present study shows that there are changes in use of male biased pronouns before and after the gender-based linguistic reforms. From the data conducted for the present study the evidence shows trends in the figures that the neutralization strategy can be related to the changes, to some extent. The diachronic development is discussed in connection with reforms, guidelines and previous conducted studies in more detail and suggestion on further studies are presented.

Användningen av en istället för man som nominativform för det svenska generiska pronomenet har varit en av den feministiska språkpolitikens stora frågor under det senaste decenniet. Den här studien har undersökt hur användningen faktiskt ser ut på nätet, både genom en diakron delstudie på bloggar under perioden 1998-2017 och genom en synkron jämförelse mellan olika texttyper. Därtill har studien undersökt ifall andelen nominativt en ökar i relation till dess motsvarighet man. Resultatet av dessa undersökningar är att användningen ökar, både över tid och i andelar, men att det går långsamt och att användningen av man fortfarande uppgår till omkring 99% av alla förekomster av det generiska pronomenet i subjektsposition. Olika argument har föreslagits av olika forksare angående hur nominativt en faktiskt kan användas, med begränsningar till vissa kontexter eller till vissa referenter. Resultaten från den sista delstudien i den här uppsatsen visar att en kan användas i samma kontexter och med samma referenter som man. Sedan diskuteras resultaten i relation till tidigare studier vad det gäller hur en och man kan användas.

The subject of this thesis is the analysis and comparison of explicit and implicit means of reference to the general human agent in English and in Czech. In these languages we may find both explicit and implicit means which are used to refer to the general human agent and which are identical to a certain degree. However, especially among the implicit means we may observe rather different structures in both languages. This thesis analyses two sets of data - the excerpts from two English novels with their Czech translations and two Czech novels with their English translations. The total number of examples excerpted is 200, each example being considered with its translation to the other language. The source language of this study is English for which a set of particular explicit and implicit means which we focus on in this analysis was defined. For this reason, also in the case of the Czech originals the examples were excerpted from the English translations and their Czech original versions were found. The samples obtained from both the sets of data were further compared and the analysed means were divided into three groups - instances where the means in English and in Czech were identical, instances where the means were nonidentical and instances where the reference to the general human agent was...