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The Case of Dutch Pronouns

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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 - 123 - - 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. - 124 - - 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. - 125 - - 125 - J. KLOM – G. DE VOGELAER 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 - 126 - - 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.
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