The Case of Dutch Pronouns



Semantic agreement competing with syntactic agreement: the case of Dutch pronouns

Jan KLOM Gunther DE VOGELAER University of Münster

Abstract The Dutch gender system is undergoing drastic changes in various respects. The pronominal, NP-external gender tends to resemanticize, with syntactical principles in gender agreement being replaced by semantic principles guided by the individuation of the referent (Audring 2009). This process affects the personal pronoun and extends partly to the relative pronoun (Audring 2009: 108). Dialectal variation plays a huge role in this process, in which, in general, the north of the Dutch-speaking area is more innovative while the south is more conservative. In this paper, we want to discuss the acquisition of pronominal gender in Dutch children in a rather late stage of language acquisition, that is, at the age of six to eight years. This study is based on previous studies (De Vogelaer 2006, and De Paepe, De Vogelaer 2008) and adds new data from Dutch and especially from German regional varieties. We gathered data via a sentence completion task in various places in the Dutch- and German speaking area. Our goal is to elaborate on the regional variation in the pronominal gender system and to tackle the question in how far semantic agreement is found also in German. Audring (2006, 2009) sees the mismatch between two adnominal genders (de- and het-words) and three pronominal genders as main trigger for the resemanticization of the Dutch pronominal system. We want to argue that rather than this mismatch, syncretism and deflection are the main causes for resemanticization (see also De Vogelaer, Klom 2013).

1. Introduction In the adnominal system of Standard Dutch and northern dialects, the masculine and feminine gender have merged to one common gender, as is shown in the following example. They are still distinguished only in one agreement target, viz. in the personal

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- 123 -  J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER pronoun (masc. hij, fem. ze1 and neutr. het). The possessive pronoun also has distinct forms for masc. and fem., albeit with a syncretism unique to the Dutch gender system of masculine and neuter (masc. zijn, fem. haar and neutr. het). In Southern Dutch dialects such as East Flemish, however, these morphological distinctions are preserved better:

(1) (a) Southern Dutch dialects (East Flemish): (b) Standard Dutch

de(n) grot-e(n) man? Hij is ziek. de grot-e man? Hij is ziek.

‘the tall man? He is sick’ ‘the tall man’

de grot-e vrouw? Zij ... de grot-e vrouw? Zij …

‘the tall woman? She …’ ‘the tall woman’

het groot kind? Het ... het grot-e kind? Het …

‘the tall child? It …’ ‘the tall child’

(adapted from De Vogelaer, De Sutter 2011: 195)

The ending -n in masculine articles and adjectives is given in brackets because its realization depends on the phonetic environment: it is realized only before /t/, /d/, /b/, /h/ or a vowel (Taeldeman 1980)2. This ending originated as a case-gender portmanteau morpheme (accusative masculine) and was reanalyzed as a gender marker (Geerts 1966). In general, East Flemish varieties are more conservative than West Flemish varieties (De Vogelaer, De Sutter 2011: 194).

Before moving to our main topic, gender agreement, we will briefly look into gender assignment. There are few formal cues that help detect the lexical gender of a noun. Among those cues are suffixes like -heid (F) or -sel (N) (Haeseryn et al. 1997, Booij 2002: 37). The formally marked feminines like vrijheid ‘freedom‘ are considered the last residue of the grammatical feminine (Haeseryn et al. 1997: 161).

The association between schwa ending and feminine gender, which was robust in Middle Dutch (Marynissen 1996), has been blurred by schwa apocope (Nijen Twilhaar 1992); this process has resulted in lower predictability of lexical gender. This suggests that phonology is not a good predictor for gender in Dutch (see also Durieux, Daeldemans & Gillis 2000). In comparison to Dutch, German has a bundle of semantic and formal regularities in gender assignment. The semantic regularities have much in common with Dutch: For example, metals (das Erz, das Silber) are  1 Only the unstressed form ze is used to refer to inanimates (Haeseryn et al. 1997: 254). 2 The phonological conditions differ slightly from dialect to dialect.

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- 124 -  Leuvense Bijdragen 101 (2017) neuter, as in Dutch (het erts, het zilver, Fontein, Pescher-ter Meer 2000), and alcoholic beverages are masculine (der Wein, der Schnaps; one exception being das Bier; see Köpcke 1982: 13). Similar semantic regularities in Dutch include languages and cities, which are neuter (Fontein, Pescher-ter Meer 2000: 53f.). Formal regularities in German include formally gender-marking suffixes like -heit (F), and gender also plays an important role in declension morphology, since declension classes and plural suffixes have strong associations with gender (for example, masculine monosyllabics with a plural ending in -er plus umlaut are masculine or neuter, e.g. Buch – Bücher (N), Köpcke, Zubin 1983: 172; Kürschner, Nübling 2011). This association between gender and declension is stable in German, but it is disrupted in Dutch, which is also caused by the general erosion of inflection morphology in Dutch.

In its pronominal gender agreement, Dutch has departed in two ways from its closest neighbour German. The first tendency is called masculinization: Etymologically feminine words like koe ‘cow’ are increasingly referred to with a masculine pronoun (Geeraerts 1992), which leads to a system where hij can be used with all de-words and het with all het-words. The second tendency is resemanticization: Grammatical gender agreement is partly replaced by semantic agreement (see Audring 2009) which is governed by the ANIMACY HIERARCHY or INDIVIDUATION HIERARCHY3 (cf. Sasse 1993). This innovation is quite well established in Northern Dutch and less so in the South:

(2) (referring to the count noun boek(N) ‘book‘)

… dan moet ik ´m ook nog niet gaan inleveren

… ‘then I shouldn‘t return him yet‘

(3) (referring to the mass noun olijfolie(F) ‘olive oil’)

… hoe ´t geconserveerd wordt (Audring 2009:95)

… ‘how it is preserved’

 3 The ANIMACY HIERARCHY as used in this study has the items human – animate – count – mass. It combines two relevant factors, animacy and individuation. Therefore, the terms ANIMACY HIERARCHY and INDIVIDUATION HIERARCHY will be used synonymously in the subsequent discussion.

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While northern Dutch resemanticization operates on the basis of a split between count and mass nouns, southern Dutch shows a tendency to use neuter agreement with both mass nouns and count nouns (De Vogelaer, Klom 2013, De Vos 2013). This suggests that neuter develops into a default for inanimates or lowly individuated entities (Tsimpli, Hulk 2013, De Vos 2013), or in cases where a pronoun lacks gender and number features (Roodenburg, Hulk 2009). The dialects in Northern Dutch and the Southern Dutch dialects with their reflexes of a 3-gender system are part of a Germanic dialect continuum that includes Standard German with an intact 3-gender system and Low German dialects with more syncretisms than Standard German. In addition, a reduction of the gender system can be found in other Germanic languages such as Frisian, English and Scandinavian varieties where it has been realized to various extents (cf. Wahrig-Burfeind (1989) for a general overview, Duke (2009), Howe (1996), and Siemund (2008) for English). Correspondingly, similar processes of resemanticization are witnessed in these other Germanic languages as well. Indeed the gain of semantics in pronouns is not unexpected from a typological perspective. Taking a comparative perspective, a correlation is observed between pronominal gender agreement and adnominal (gender) morphology, with High German and English as the most ‘extreme’ varieties. German has robust gender morphology in the adnominal domain. Correspondingly, grammatical agreement is the predominant agreement strategy and “the correlation between neuter gender and inanimacy is minimal“ (Mills 1986: 86). English has reduced its morphology to the largest extent, and has no grammatical gender any more but a fully semantic pronominal gender system with the natural gender rule for humans and a default neuter for inanimates (see De Vos 2013 for similar developments in Dutch). A mass-count distinction similar to northern Dutch exists in Somerset English (Siemund 2002, 2005), and semantics plays an important role in varieties of English, as well (Siemund 2008).

Dutch occupies the middle ground between German and English in that parts of the adnominal gender system are still preserved, but nevertheless resemanticization in pronominal agreement does occur. In particular, the Dutch gender system is a case in point for two hypotheses about the relation between adnominal and pronominal gender. One of them is the EROSION HIERARCHY noun – adjective – pronoun as postulated by Priestly (1983): “formal gender-loss in pronouns presupposes gender- loss in adjectives, and the latter presupposes gender-loss in nouns” (Priestly 1983: 340). This hierarchy refers to the gradual loss of gender marking and has occurred in various Indo-European languages, e.g. in Indo-Iranic (Priestly 1983: 346). Priestly’s EROSION HIERARCHY holds true also for English which has retained a gender distinction only in pronouns. Greenberg makes the same point in his implicational universal nr. 43: “If a language has gender categories in the noun, it has gender categories in the pronoun” (Greenberg 1963: 75). As described by Corbett (1991), changes in the gender system often originate in personal pronouns which are “the

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- 126 -  Leuvense Bijdragen 101 (2017) major initiator of changes in the balance between syntactic and semantic gender” (Corbett 1991: 242). According to Fernández-Ordóñez (2009: 56), changes in gender systems can also originate in demonstrative pronouns. The starting point for a change are pronouns in Corbett (1991) and nouns in Priestly (1983). This is, however, not contradictory because Priestly’s model refers to the erosion of morphology and Corbett’s to the gain of semantics. It seems that once the erosion process has affected the controller (the noun) and all agreement targets except the pronoun (viz. the adjective in Priestly’s hierarchy), the grammatical gender system is not entrenched enough anymore and the pronominal gender distinctions, at this point obsolete, start a new life by gaining a new function. This behaviour is also not uncommon from a typological perspective (Audring 2008).

Priestly’s EROSION HIERARCHY is reminiscent of Corbett’s AGREEMENT HIERARCHY (“attributive – predicate – relative pronoun – personal pronoun”, Corbett (1979: 204)). It predicts that when a language has grammatical and semantic agreement, grammatical agreement is to be expected at the left end of the hierarchy and semantic agreement at its right end. The principle underlying this hierarchy is “increasing syntactic distance from the controller” (Corbett 1979: 216). Dutch behaves in line with this hierarchy, in that pronominal agreement is becoming increasingly semantic, whereas the use of articles and other adnominal elements is driven by grammar. Nevertheless, semantics play a role also in the adnominal domain: So-called double gender nouns in Dutch have a common-gender article when interpreted as count nouns and a neuter article when a mass interpretation is preferred (e.g. diamant(C) ‘diamond’ as an object and diamant(N) ‘diamond’ as a material (cf. Semplicini 2012)). According to Fernández-Ordóñez’ (2009: 66), “the starting point for the emergence of a new gender distinction is a new use of personal or demonstrative pronouns, according to renewed semantic criteria”. Apparently, pronouns tend to maintain formal gender distinctions and they are a good starting point for semantic innovations in gender systems. Both tendencies can be explained by the potentially large distance between personal pronouns and their source (Corbett 1979: 216) and by their autonomy compared to other agreement targets.

Gender systems like the Dutch one pose a huge challenge with regard to their learnability because masculine-feminine distinctions have to be learned only based on the pronouns. In this situation, rather than getting rid of pronominal gender entirely, Dutch chose to resemanticize its pronouns. One important question is why this happened. Audring (2008, 2009) argues that one reason is deflection: “When deflection cuts into the nominal genders, the semantic associations with the genders may be promoted to a more central - or indeed the only - organizing principle in pronominalization.” (2009: 199) Elsewhere, she suggests that the mismatch between three pronominal genders and two adnominal genders is a driving force for

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- 127 -  J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER resemanticization: “the rise of semantic agreement is connected to the paradigmatic mismatches that have uprooted the traditional Dutch gender system” (Audring 2009: 172); „Because of a mismatching inventory of noun and pronoun genders, pronominalization in Dutch is riddled with conflicts and variation.“ (Audring 2009: 1). We want to argue that rather than this paradigmatic mismatch, deflection, and the loss of adnominal gender cues, seem to be the reason for resemanticization. One reason for this is that despite a “paradigmatic mismatch”, historical descriptions of Dutch agree that the gender of a pronoun can generally be predicted: de-words take the masculine pronoun hij, and het-words the neuter pronoun het. Exceptions apply only in humans and sometimes animates where the natural gender rule applies, and, according to prescriptive grammars of Dutch (Haeseryn et al. 1997), for a few nouns with gender-marking derivational suffixes like vrijheid ‘freedom’. Another problem for the mismatch hypothesis is that resemanticization is also observed in Flemish varieties with an adnominal three-gender system (De Vogelaer, De Sutter 2011). This, in our opinion, underscores that resemanticization indeed exploited a resource that was already present before the adnominal gender system collapsed. This scenario is also discussed by Audring 2009 (see pp. 196-198 for a discussion of the Flemish data). Kraaikamp (2012) also argues for a causal connection between the loss of gender marking and the gain of semantics. These findings suggest that languages with richer adnominal gender marking, such as German, have less semantic agreement than languages with impoverished adnominal gender marking (e.g. Dutch). To elaborate on this issue, we looked into the robust 3-gender system in German. The trigger seems to lie in the opacity of the system, and more precisely in the impoverished input that does not give the language-learning child enough cues to detect the lexical gender of a noun. This also explains why children acquiring varieties in which the three-gender system is still better entrenched display lower resemanticization ratios. Despite a general tendency towards dialect levelling and standardization, the influence of dialects could be shown to be still an important factor until today, and even in language acquisition (De Vogelaer 2011: 362). In a questionnaire study on the pronominal agreement system of Flemish children between 6 and 8 years, the frequency of feminine nouns is shown to be a significant factor for target-like gender agreement. This indicates that the gender of each noun is stored lexically (De Paepe, De Vogelaer 2008).

In a similar vein, Cornips & Hulk (2006) showed that children who were raised in a southern dialect used grammatically agreeing pronouns in their Standard Dutch more consistently than a control group that only speaks the standard. This suggests that the gain of semantics in pronouns is connected to the erosion of gender morphology (Dekeyser 1980, Nijen Twilhaar 1992).

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If resemanticization is found also in southern Dutch varieties, this may be connected to the defective input in their parents’ language where children find not enough cues to detect the lexical gender of a noun (De Vogelaer, Klom 2013: 163). The tendencies to overgeneralize the personal pronoun het (De Vogelaer, Klom 2013; De Vos 2013) and the definite article de (De Houwer 1987) have been related to frequency effects. According to Tsimpli and Hulk (2013) and Roodenburg and Hulk (2009), het has a default value as an expletive pronoun since it is frequently used when referring to lowly individuated entities such as propositions; de is by far the most frequent form of the definite article since most nouns have common gender (Van Berkum 1996) and it is the only form the definite article can take in the plural. While 7-year-old Dutch children use the correct form of the attributive adjective in less than 90% of the obligatory contexts (Blom et al. 2008: 314), German (Mills 1986) and French (Van der Velde 2004) children at that age have already acquired an adult-like gender system. According to Mills (1986), unclear rules are acquired late or are not acquired properly at all. Hence it comes as no surprise that children are strongly affected by the innovations in the Dutch gender system (De Vogelaer 2011: 357). If it can be shown that their language differs significantly from the adult language, it even becomes likely that they will keep some traits of it in adulthood and thereby help implement the change in the system. De Vos & De Vogelaer (2011) show that, given sufficient deviations of grammatical gender in 6-8-year-olds, one can indeed conclude that the gender system is undergoing resemanticization. The scenario in which language change is implemented as younger generations of speakers replace older ones, is well- known from research in variationist sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov (2007) on transmission). It is, with respect to gender, also documented for a language as different as the Bantu language Isangu which has, unlike Dutch, a very robust gender system (Comrie 1999). In the remainder of this paper, we will compare the pronominal gender system of primary school children in 2-gender Dutch, 3-gender Dutch and German. Our primary goal is to investigate the correlation between the richness of the adnominal gender system and the degree of resemanticization.

2. Method

The case study under discussion is based on a sentence completion task that we presented to 7- to 8-year-old children. Similar sentence completion tasks have been used before by Mills (1986) and De Paepe and De Vogelaer (2008) with children, and by De Vogelaer and De Sutter (2011) with adults. In our research, wefocus onthe geography of the pronominal gender system as a parameter that correlates with the degree of adnominal marking in the regional varieties. A questionnaire with 24 items was completed by one primary school class per measure point in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. For the German data, a translated version of the questionnaire

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- 129 -  J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER with six additional items was used (these were added to find out about the distinction between higher and lower animals, see section 3d). For our discussion, the data will be sorted in three groups, based on traditional, dialectological grounds, more precisely the richness of adnominal marking in the individual varieties: German (richest gender system and most consistent 3-gender area), 3-gender Dutch and 2-gender Dutch (poorest gender system). We gathered data in the following places: In Germany: Bad Bentheim, Bad Bevensen, Bad Zwischenahn, Esens, Fürstenau, Hamburg, Lengerich, Münster, Norden, Norderney, Oldenburg, Papenburg; in the 3-gender varieties of Dutch: in Biervliet and Kloosterzande (these two places in Zeelandic Flanders are merged and not discussed separately), Kessel-lo, Klemskerke, Sleeuwijk, Urmond;and in 2-gender Dutch: Middelburg, Stiens, Uithuizen, Utrecht, and Zwolle. Since no traces of the three-gender system were found in the Dutch places Sleeuwijk and Urmond, we treat them as part of the 2-gender area. We expected to find the lowest degree of semantic agreement in German and the highest degree in 2-gender Dutch. In German, we expected semantic agreement to be most prominent in the north-west, since this area is close to the Dutch border and because there is the possibility of a Low-German substrate, and northwestern varieties of Low German are well-known to display massive gender syncretism (Wahrig-Burfeind 1989). Since the questionnaire was completed by entire school classes, we did not control sociolinguistic parameters like knowledge of a local dialect, geographical mobility or social background of our informants. However, we asked the pupils to indicate their age and sex. In our research design, we expect to find gender agreement that differs from gender agreement in spontaneous speech for various reasons: First, different registers in written and spoken language have different grammars, and a written questionnaire that is conducted in school and monitored by a teacher is expected to be closer to the standard. Second, the written questionnaire could be mistaken as a test by the children. But grammatical gender is, to our knowledge, not taught at primary school, and hence we would not expect school children to avoid semantic agreement. Third, the items in our questionnaire present ideal conditions for grammatical agreement, with an antecedent in bold in the preceding clause. In spontaneous language use (see De Houwer 1987 and Rozendaal 2008 for spontaneous child language), an antecedent is frequently more distant from the coreferent pronoun, and it can also be referred to extralinguistically. All these factors are known to influence agreement.

The following tables give the items in the questionnaire in its Dutch and German version, respectively. The ANIMACY HIERARCHY was implemented using the categories human – animate – count – mass. The animate items were divided into higher and lower animals such as aap(M) ‘monkey’ and vlinder(M) ‘butterfly’. As Köpcke & Zubin (1996) have shown, these two groups behave differently with respect to gender assignment in German, typical examples being Elephant(M) ‘elephant’ as a

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- 130 -  Leuvense Bijdragen 101 (2017) high animal with masculine default gender4 and Hummel(F) ‘bumble bee’ as a low animal with feminine default gender (see section 3b for a detailed discussion). We tried to apply this to the discussion of semantic gender agreement in Dutch, where two important differences are at hand: First, this study is about gender agreement and not about gender assignment. And second, the gender values are different: In Dutch resemanticization, the highly individuated, or animate, gender is masculine, and the lowly individuated gender is neuter (Audring 2009). Bearing in mind that resemanticization in certain varieties of Dutch involves the use of het for entities that rank as high on the individuation hierarchy as concrete count nouns, we looked whether a distinction of our animate items in the vein of Köpcke & Zubin (1996) has an effect on semantic agreement in Dutch. These considerations result in an extended ANIMACY HIERARCHY with the items human – animate (high) – animate (low) – count – mass. In general, we used two items per cell, that is, two per gender and category of the ANIMACY HIERARCHY. For space reasons, we included only one item per cell in the category “low animate” and we did not include other factors that are known to influence agreement such as abstractness. Most items are monomorphemic. Where possible, we used cognate lexemes in the Dutch and the German version. ‘Wine’ was the only item for which we included two sentences, one with a specific reading, the other one with an unspecific reading (see section 3d). 

masc. fem. neutr. human jongen mama kind tovenaar juf meisje high animate aap koe paard vis poes kuiken kip low animate vlinder spin dier5 count stoel mand bed wagen tafel boek mass wijn (2x) soep water cola melk zand kaas table 1: Dutch items

 4 Since this is presented as a default rule, it is not without exception. 5 The interpretation of dier ‘animal‘ as low animal is provided by the context8

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masc. fem. neutr. human Junge Mutter Kind Zauberer Schwester Mädchen high animate Affe Kuh Pferd Fisch Katze Küken Henne low animate Schmetterling Spinne Tier count Stuhl Jacke Bett Wagen Flasche Buch mass Wein Suppe Wasser Reis Milch Salz Käse table 2: German items

The items in the questionnaire vary according to their lexical gender as found in the Van Dale dictionary and to their animacy or individuation. All items are indicated on the Streeflijst woordenschat voor zesjarigen (Schaerlaekens, Kohnstamm & Lejaegere 1999) as frequent words that are judged to be part of the lexicon of six- year-old Dutch children.

3. Results



figure 1: percentage het/es for common mass nouns

This figure gives the scores of neuter agreement with common mass nouns. Since this agreement pattern is the only one attested in all areas in which resemanticization is observed, the proportion of neuter pronouns provides a good measure for the general strength with which resemanticization is taking effect. All places and their grouping (D for 3-gender German, NL3 for 3-gender Dutch, and NL2 for 2-gender Dutch) are

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- 132 -  Leuvense Bijdragen 101 (2017) indicated. As expected, semantic agreement is most common in 2-gender Dutch and least common in German. All three groups are indicated by adjacent measure points in the above graph, and the results provide post-hoc validation for our division in three areas: indeed, German locations display consistently lower ratios of het/es than locations from the Dutch 3-gender area, which all score lower than locations in the 2- gender area. That said, the cut-off points between the three groups are not very clear (6.34% between Klemskerke (NL3) and Sleeuwijk (NL2); 4.68% between Hamburg (D) and Biervliet & Kloosterzande (NL3)). The Dutch data correlate quite well with geography: the three northernmost Dutch places Zwolle, Uithuizen and Stiens have the highest percentages of resemanticization, which come close to 100%. For the German data, however, the fact that the lowest scores come from two places in the north, Esens in northern Lower Saxony and the East Frisian island Norderney, does not confirm our expectation. In German, the scores range between 15.71% (Norderney) and 46.46% (Hamburg), which suggests varying degrees of resemanticization. We will not discuss these differences within the areas further here, but focus on the degree of semantic agreement within and between these groups. The discussion will be organized along the ANIMACY HIERARCHY, that is, for human, animate, count and mass nouns, respectively. We will focus on cases where grammatical gender and semantic gender differ from each other and discuss how these conflicts are solved in Dutch and German: In 3a), we discuss the conflict between grammatical neuter gender and semantic masculine/feminine gender in humans; in 3b), the same gender conflict in animates will be discussed. Since masculinization comes into play in feminine animates, we will also look at gender agreement in this category. The role that ‘degree of animacy’ plays will be discussed on the basis of masculine animates. In 3c), we will move to neuter count nouns that, based on Audring (2009), are expected to show semantic masculine agreement. In 3d), our data on feminine mass nouns and a discussion of the masculine mass noun ‘wine’ are presented. 

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a) items of the ANIMACY HIERARCHY: humans 



figure 2: neuter human items

The items in our questionnaire that refer to humans and are lexically neuter (shorthand: neuter humans) are kind ‘child’ and meisje ‘girl’. Grammatical agreement would result in the neuter personal pronoun het/es. Since these two items show, as expected, a very different agreement pattern, we will discuss them separately. Virtually all masculine answers (92.8%) were given for kind ‘child’, and 82.5% of the feminine answers were given for meisje ‘girl’. The neuter pronoun scores only 11.5% (kind) and 3.0% (meisje) in 2-gender Dutch and 19.3% (kind)/0.0% (meisje) in 3- gender Dutch, whereas it plays a significant role in German (66.2% (kind)/28.7% (meisje)). In all three groups, the participants were more hesitant to use grammatical agreement with meisje than with kind. The numbers in both Dutch groups are quite similar. Meis-je is, like its German equivalent Mäd-chen, a morphologically complex noun with a lexical element cognate to English maid plus the diminutive suffix -je/- chen that assigns neuter gender to nouns.6 However, both meisje and Mädchen are lexicalized units (*meis/*Mad). The fact that a noun meaning ‘girl’ is neuter has made it a frequently cited example for conflicts between grammatical and semantic gender

 6 De Houwer (1987: 62) reports that in the speech of a Flemish 3-year old girl, diminutives are always treated like common nouns also adnominally (de aapje ‘the little monkey‘). This is in line with a tendency in the acquisition of Dutch to overuse the common definite determiner de at the expense of het (Hulk, Cornips 2010).

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(see Corbett 1991: 227f.). The neuter gender of meisje/Mädchen is in agreement with the semantic tendency for pejorative words for women (cf. German das Weib, Dutch het wijf) or nouns denoting young or immature women to be assigned neuter gender, which has been observed for German (Köpcke 1982, Köpcke, Zubin 2005). Still, we find substantial amounts of feminine pronouns in German as well. Immaturity is also likely to account for the neuter lexical gender of kind/Kind, similar to its North Germanic equivalent barn in Norwegian, Swedish or Icelandic. In natural discourse, we would expect the personal pronoun to agree semantically with the sex of the given referent. In our questionnaire, however, the context gave no clues about the referent of kind being a boy or a girl.

While the neuter pronoun develops into a default for inanimates in adult language (De Vos 2013), it is dispreferred for animates and especially for humans. The very similar results for 2-gender Dutch and 3-gender Dutch are somewhat surprising given the fact that 2-gender Dutch is believed to have implemented the resemanticization change to a further extent. For these items, both Dutch groups have semantic agreement as the dominating pattern, whereas in German, grammatical and semantic agreement are both around 50%.

b) items of the ANIMACY HIERARCHY: animates 



figure 3: neuter animals 

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The neuter animate items in the questionnaire are paard/Pferd ‘horse’, kuiken/Küken ‘chick’ and dier/Tier ‘animal’. For the discussion of animate items, we chose to discuss the conflict between grammatical, neuter gender and semantic masculine/feminine gender. When comparing this graph to the above graph for neuter humans, it stands out that grammatical agreement is far more frequent with neuter animals than with neuter humans: The overall percentage for all three areas is 29.31% for neuter humans and 66.84% for neuter animals. Although we would expect more grammatical agreement in the 3-gender area than in the 2-gender area, this hypothesis is not borne out in this category. In German, grammatical agreement is the dominating pattern (Mills 1986). For animals, the agreement depends on the speaker’s conceptualization of the animal: For pets, a default gender may apply but pronouns will often agree with the referent’s sex.

figure 4: feminine animals

figure 4: feminine animals

The feminine animate items in our questionnaire are koe/Kuh ‘cow’, poes/Katze ‘cat’ and kip/Henne ‘(female) chicken’. Unlike the previous category, neuter animals, the category under discussion is subject to masculinization: Both etymologically masculine and etymologically feminine nouns are pronominalized by masculine pronouns (see Geeraerts 1992). Masculinization is more frequently found in 2-gender Dutch (61.95%), but it is also frequent in 3-gender Dutch (45.33%). The high het- ratio in German (13.88%) is unexpected. It does not agree with the findings of Mills (1986: 92) who found almost 100% grammatical agreement in 5-6-year-olds and 100% in 7-10-year-olds in this category. Since these different results cannot be accounted for by regional differences, it might be connected with a difference between the oral test design in Mills (1986) and our written test. Masculinization originates in the north of the Dutch-speaking area, but it also plays a role in Flanders, as Geeraerts

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(1992) shows by presenting data from questionnaires that were filled in by first year students in West Flanders and Brabant. In Geeraerts’ data (1992: 78), the degree of masculinization seems to be related to the semantic class or to the degree of individuation: It scores around 30% for abstract nouns and inanimates, but is negligible for feminine animals (0.8%). It is impossible on the basis of these data to determine whether the high masculinization ratio for feminine animals is typical for child informants or indicates language change in progress.

Moving further in our discussion of animate items, we come to the question in how far the difference between higher and lower animals has an effect on pronominal gender agreement (cf. Köpcke, Zubin 1996). These considerations lead to the ANIMACY HIERARCHY human – animate (high) – animate (low) – count – mass, and our prediction in terms of resemanticization as described by Audring (2009) is that masculine gender agreement is more prominent in the animate (high) group, whereas neuter agreement is more prominent in the animate (low) group:

















figure 5: masculine animals (higher – lower_

As an example, we chose to discuss the masculine animals in our questionnaire. Aap/Affe ‘monkey’ and vis/Fisch ‘fish’ are in the group of higher animals7, and vlinder/Schmetterling ‘butterfly’ is the only item in the low category. In all three  7 In Köpcke & Zubin‘s (1996: 484) study of gender assignment in German, ‘monkey‘ is considered more “animate“ (i.e. more human-like, and more prone to masculine gender) than ‘fish‘. As a consequence, all three items might as well be discussed separately: The scores of grammatical, masculine agreement for the items ‘monkey’, ‘fish’ and ‘butterfly’ respectively are: 92.3%, 62.3% and 60.3% in the 2-gender area; 86.0%, 50.0% and 36.8% in the 3-gender area; and 89.6%, 73.0% and 77.7% in Germany. That is, in both Dutch groups, but not in Germany, ‘fish’ takes an intermediate position between the other two items.

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- 137 -  J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER regions, the factor under discussion has a clear effect: 93.3% masculine, grammatical agreement for high animals compared to 60.8% for lowly developed animals in the 2- gender area, and 86.0% compared to 40.0% in the 3-gender area. In German (89.6% vs. 75.4%), the effect is less sharp. Our hypothesis that neuter agreement is to be expected more frequently in the low than in the high category is also borne out (3.3% vs. 12.1% in NL2; 3.5% vs. 13.3% in NL3, and 6.6% vs. 14.3% in German). As expected, it is a small effect, since both categories are closely related.8 The high degree of feminine agreement might also be due to personification. – As one reviewer pointed out, butterfly costumes are popular for little girls; this could be one reason for the feminine agreement scores.

To conclude the paragraph on animals, we found more grammatical agreement in neuter animals than in neuter humans. This, in addition to the difference between higher and lower animals, shows a clear association between low animacy and neuter gender in all three areas, also in German. The fact that the percentage of neuter agreement is lower in 3-gender Dutch than in 2-gender Dutch is unexpected. In 3- gender Dutch, the distribution of the three genders shows no clear priority for any gender, with, for instance, more or less equal proportions of masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns for neuter animals. More generally speaking, the ‘third gender’, which is neither grammatical nor semantic and for which no apparent explanation is at hand, scores best in the Dutch three-gender area – an observation that will be made also in the subsequent discussion. In German, grammatical agreement is the dominating strategy in this category, with scores around 80%, but with non-negligible proportions of neuter pronouns as well.

 8 The high amount of feminine agreement (27.1%, 46.7% and 10.3%, respectively) in the low category is surprising: Feminine gender agreement (de vlinder ... ze; der Schmetterling ... sie) is unexpected both in Dutch and German. At first sight, this seems to confirm Köpcke’s and Zubin’s (1996) observation that feminine gender is more frequent in lowly developed animals; however, they looked at gender assignment and not at agreement. With regard to our neuter animate items, though, which are not discussed here in detail, this tendency cannot be observed and the increase of feminine gender might be an accidental result. 

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c) items of the ANIMACY HIERARCHY: count nouns 

figure 6: neuter count nouns

Count nouns are individuated items which, according to Audring’s (2009) findings, show a tendency towards masculine agreement in pronouns. The feminine gender is unexpected both as semantic and as grammatical agreement in this graph. It scores with 2.0% in NL2, 7.9% in NL3 and 3.5% in German. The third, unexpected gender has the highest scores in the 3-gender area. In our data, grammatical agreement is the dominating pattern in all three groups. Also in 2-gender Dutch, the pronoun het is used by far more frequently for count nouns than would be expected based on Audring (2009) (see also De Vogelaer, Klom 2013 for discussion). Masculine agreement for count nouns, as reported by Audring (2009), is not very frequent; it is most frequent in the Dutch 3-gender area (21.9%). In our data, Audring’s finding of resemanticized, masculine agreement with count nouns cannot be confirmed. However, this can also be due to the different modality of the data, i.e. a written test in children here vis-à- vis spontaneous adult data in Audring (2009). Nevertheless, a closer inspection of Audring’s data leads us to believe that the mass-count distinction projected on her data presents a less clear cut-off point than suggested by her description: Audring (2009: 168f.) works with a full data set (including all conflicts and all matches between lexical and semantic gender) and a restricted data set (containing only

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conflicts between lexical and semantic gender). When substracting the full from the restricted data set (see the third column), we thus find all instances of matches9: 

Full data set Restricted data set Lex. gender equals (conflicts and matches) (conflicts only) sem. gender (matches only) Switch 582 (100%) 241 (41%) 341 (59%) Match 543 (100%) 222 (41%) 321 (59%) (JA) table 3: Objects / count nouns (adapted from Audring 2009: 168f.) 

In this table, only the „objects“ class (count nouns) from Audring (2009) is replicated. The data in the third column were calculated by us. It becomes apparent that also in Audring’s data from the Randstad, there are quite a few exceptions to her theory: 341 out of 662 count nouns (in the third column) have lexically common gender; yet they switch to neuter gender10. This suggests that masculine agreement with count nouns is far from being exceptionless also in Audring’s data. 

 9 Note that our use of „match“ differs from Audring (2009): in our terminology, a match (as opposed to a conflict) is a case where lexical and semantic gender coincide (e.g., neuter mass nouns and masculine count nouns), while in Audring’s terminology, a match (as opposed to a switch) is a pronoun that agrees syntactically with its antecedent. In table 3, the latter usage is abbreviated as „match (JA)“. 10 Audring works with a binary gender system with common and neuter gender. That means: if a common pronoun switches, it automatically switches to neuter gender, and vice versa.

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d) items of the ANIMACY HIERARCHY: mass nouns 



figure 7: feminine mass nouns

This table gives the results for the feminine mass nouns melk/Milch ‘milk’ and soep/Suppe ‘soup’ in our questionnaire where grammatical and semantic gender stand in conflict: The semantic gender is neuter while the grammatical gender is feminine. In both parts of the Dutch-speaking area, semantic gender wins over grammatical gender. The amount of masculine gender, which is attributed to masculinization, is significantly higher in the 3-gender area (31.3%) than in the 2-gender area (18.3%) or in German (2.8%). In the model of Audring (2009: 102), masculine agreement might be attributed to a specific reading of the mass noun (cf. the following discussion of the item ‘wine’). In German, too, we found a score of 17.0% for neuter agreement. In contrast to Mills’ finding that “[i]n German, the correlation between neuter gender and inanimacy is minimal“ (Mills 1986: 86), this score suggests that there is indeed a non-negligible correlation.

In a next step, we come to the category masculine mass nouns (wijn ‘wine’, cola ‘coke’, kaas ‘cheese’ in the Dutch questionnaire, and Wein ‘wine’, Reis ‘rice’ and Käse ‘cheese’ in the German translation). The proportion of semantic neuter agreement is 83.0% in 2-gender Dutch, 60.7% in 3-gender Dutch and, quite surprisingly high, 36.6% in German. The item in this category that we want to discuss in detail is ‘wine’. Beside the semantic classes as given by the INDIVIDUATION HIERARCHY, there are more individuation-related parameters that play a role in

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- 141 -  J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER determining semantic gender, such as boundedness or specificity (Audring 2009: 69). In order to study these parameters, the context that is given by questionnaire items or in discourse provides important information. For this topic, specific mass nouns are important since they range “between the countables and the uncountables” (Audring 2009: 70). For this reason, our questionnaire contains two items with the noun wijn ‘wine’ that differ in specificity. In (4a), wijn is specified by the determiner deze and has a specific interpretation whereas it is unspecific in (4b):

(4)

a. Deze wijn vindt iedereen het lekkerst. ___ smaakt gewoon veel beter dan andere wijn. ‘Everyone finds this wine very tasty. ___ tastes much better than other wines.’

b. Wijn heeft een mooie kleur. ___ is niet gezond. ‘Wijn has a nice colour. ___ isn’t healthy.’

In the INDIVIDUATION HIERARCHY as presented by Audring (2009: 124), specific mass nouns as in (4b) are located between “bounded object/abstract” and “unspecific mass/abstract”. The criterion of specificity seems to be crucial in this model. Since we added the second item in a later version of the questionnaire, the data are not available for all places. The places where they are available are Stiens and Uithuizen in the 2-gender area and all German places.

figure 8: wijn specific and unspecific in Stiens and Uithuizen

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figure 9: Wein specific and unspecific in German

In terms of individuation, the item in (4a) ranks higher on the hierarchy and we would expect more masculine and less neuter responses than in (4b). As shown in figures 9 and 10, the hypothesis is confirmed by the Dutch data, and also German is sensitive to this distinction. The difference between specific and unspecific contexts is small, however, which is somewhat unexpected given Audring’s (2009: 70) account of adult Dutch. In the German data, there is an unexpected amount of feminine gender agreement. Interestingly, the bigger ratio of feminine gender agreement in the unspecific item goes at the expense of masculine agreement. This results in less masculine agreement in the unspecific item than in the specific item which results in a pattern in German that is akin to resemanticization in Dutch.

4. Conclusion

In this study, we discussed pronominal gender in the language of 6-8 year old children in Dutch and German by means of a written questionnaire. This questionnaire was filled in by school classes at 23 places in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. We summarized these places in three groups: 2-gender varieties of Dutch, 3-gender varieties of Dutch, and German. We were especially interested in the correlation between the regional adnominal gender systems, i.e. the degree of syncretism in gender morphology, and the amount of semantic vs. grammatical pronominal gender agreement.

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Our data show that semantic agreement plays a role in all three varieties under discussion, also in German. As expected, grammatical agreement is the predominant strategy in German, but in some places, around 20% of the answers are not grammatically “correct”. It is unclear whether these results can be generalized for the entire German-speaking area: even though we did not study dialect speakers, there is a possibility that the language of our North German participants is influenced by a Low German substrate.

From the non-trivial proportion of semantic agreement in German (up to 36.6% in masculine mass nouns), it follows that semantic agreement plays a role also in varieties of Germanic with no mismatch between adnominal and pronominal genders. Hence, a mismatch between adnominal and pronominal gender seems not to be, pace Audring (2009: 33, et passim), a requirement for resemanticization. This finding has important diachronic ramifications, since it suggests that the conditions under which resemanticization take place, are also found in older varieties of Dutch. These varieties are still assumed to have grammatical gender agreement, but systematic empirical studies are rare (but there is work-in-progress, cf. Kraaikamp 2014), and occasional examples of non-grammatical agreement seem to suggest that even semantic agreement is not a phenomenon that has evolved in the Dutch language in the last decades. For instance, Van der Horst (2008: 804) documents an ‘unspecific reference’ (“weinig specifieke referentie”) with the neuter pronoun het to the feminine noun stadt ‘town’ from the 16th century.

In the category ‘female animals’, we found masculinization to be prominent in 3- gender Dutch, even though in Geeraerts’ 1992 study on pronominal gender agreement in the language of first year students, it was virtually non-existent for items of this category. This suggests either a very late and possibly incomplete acquisition or an instance of rapid language change within one generation. Our expectation that higher animals like ‘monkey’ pattern as more individuated than lower animals like ‘butterfly’ was also confirmed by our data. As for inanimates, our data only partly corroborate the resemanticization pathway as described by Audring: We found a general tendency of neuter agreement not only with mass nouns, but also with count nouns, that is, in all inanimates. However, we did not find a general tendency of masculine agreement with count nouns (cf. De Vogelaer, Klom 2013). For the item ‘wine’, we compared a specific with an unspecific reading. The hypothesis that this has an effect on semantic agreement was borne out; however, the effect was small and does not suggest a very different conceptualization of both items in the sense that specific mass nouns range “[i]n between the countables and the uncountables” (Audring 2009: 70).

One finding is that in some conflicts between semantic and grammatical gender the ‘third gender’, that is neither semantic nor grammatical, and for which no explanation

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- 144 -  Leuvense Bijdragen 101 (2017) is at hand, scored unexpectedly high. This phenomenon is most pertinent in the three- gender area. In some graphs, this looks almost like an arbitrary agreement pattern. It seems to be the case that in the three-gender area, grammatical gender is not yet ousted and semantic gender is not yet established. The use of the third, unexpected gender (typically the feminine) could be an attempt to use grammatical agreement. It shows a system that is not yet acquired target-like at the age of six to eight: children do use feminine pronouns to refer to inanimates, but fail to distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns, ending up with similar proportions of both masculine and feminine pronouns for both. Whether correct usage of the feminine is acquired later, or not acquired properly at all, is unclear. In any case, the southern Dutch gender system is currently “vulnerable” (De Vos 2013), which might eventually result in language change.

In general, our hypothesis that adnominal gender marking correlates with the degree of resemanticization was confirmed: The degree of resemanticization corresponds with the dialect areas – one exception being gender agreement in neuter animates, where we found more grammatical agreement in the 2-gender area than in the 3- gender area. For the German speaking places, their geographical distribution from south no north did not turn out to be a good predictor for the degree of resemanticization.

Most findings of this paper match with similar studies carried out in adults, even though it is expected that proportions of semantic agreement will decrease as our informants get older. Our study, therefore, confirms the link between acquisition and change of the gender system established by, among others, De Vos & De Vogelaer (2011): when a child cannot find enough cues to detect the lexical gender of a noun, semantic factors will come into play in gender agreement. Dutch children seem to cope with that by overgeneralizing common gender in the adnominal domain, and by resemanticizing pronominal gender. 

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Prof. Dr. Gunther De Vogelaer Institut für Niederländische Philologie Universität Münster Alter Steinweg 6/7 48143 Münster (Deutschland) [email protected]

Jan Klom, M.A. Institut für Niederländische Philologie Universität Münster Alter Steinweg 6/7 48143 Münster (Deutschland) [email protected]

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