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Resumo

If it is dehumanising to refer to an adult with it, why is it applied happily to their children? The use of the neuter pronoun it to refer to children is an understudied aspect of English pronoun use. This paper explores this usage in the Aotearoa/NZ news media. It shows that the pronoun is used in more contexts than the literature suggests and there may be diverse motivations for its adoption. Irrespective of speaker intentions, this usage may contribute to deficit views of children, portraying them as lesser humans through association with the non-human entities to which it typically refers.

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