Taal en Tongval - Volume 61, Issue 3, 2009

Met dit themanummer tonen we aan dat zowel het adnominale als het pronominale genus aan variatie en verandering onderhevig is in de dialecten in het Nederlandse taalgebied én het gesproken Standaardnederlands. Een deel van de veranderingen is (nog) niet gesignaleerd door de grammatica’s van het Nederlands zoals de Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (1997:149, ANS) en de Modern Grammar of Dutch (2003, MGD) waardoor zij in feite een systematiek van het Nederlands presenteren die niet (meer) accuraat is.

Gender is one of the most intriguing and problematic morpho-syntactic categories of natural languages. Generally, there is no simple correlation between the gender to which a noun belongs, and its semantic, morphological, or semantic properties. This is illustrated by the fact that dialects of Dutch may differ considerably in their classification of nouns with respect to gender. In the case of derived nouns, the suffix may impose a particular gender class, but in conversion (or zero-derivation) it is the morphological configuration as a whole that determines gender, another proof of the complexity of gender assignment. Determining the gender of a noun is only possible in an indirect way, on the basis of syntactic contexts in which that noun agrees in gender with other words. However, the syntactic context does not always provide unambiguous cues. In a number of cases this has led to gender change, for instance in Frisian and in dialects spoken in the province of Groningen. Hence, this uncertainty in gender assignment is a source of language variation and change. Uncertainty as to gender assignment is also pervasive in standard Dutch, which exhibits a mismatch between the pronoun system with three genders, and a system with two genders for nouns. This mismatch is solved by resemanticizing pronoun gender: the difference between the personal pronouns hij and het is interpreted as a difference in degree of individuation of the entity referred to. This may result in a difference between the normative gender classification of a noun, and its gender in actual use, both in written and spoken Dutch. Hence, this is another source of language variation in Dutch.

Southern dialects of Dutch have a threefold gender differentiation; thus they diverge both from the Dutch standard language (with an opposition between ‘neuter’ and ‘common’ gender) and the common source language of loan words, French (with an opposition between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’). This set of divergences inspired us to do some research into gender assignment to loan words in Flemish and Brabantish dialects of Belgium. We argue that this assignment is the result of a complex interaction between system-driven (internal) aspects of the dialects concerned, and external influences: gender in either the source language or the mediating language, which in the area under investigation was French for at least the last century and a half. The interaction between both sets of tendencies appears to be at variance in different areas of the geographical entity we look at. The presence of strong formal oppositions between masculine and feminine (as is the case in the central Flemish dialects) results in strong intuitions with native speakers. Neuter gender is not very common in these dialects. However, strong intuitions appear to prevail in Brabant dialects (except the Brussels one) also, in spite of the complete absence of any clear formal indices. In these dialects neuter plays a much more prominent role that may be compared to that in standard Dutch. In all other dialects (the extreme western dialects of Flemish, those of the area between Brabant and central Flemish dialects, and the Brussels dialect) the intuitions are extremely wagering. We present proposals to interpret those differences.

The southern Dutch variety has a traditional, so-called ‘grammatical’ gender system, in which pronouns agree in gender with their antecedent noun, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter. For most nouns, there is no apparent semantic motivation underlying gender assignment. However, this kind of grammatical system may be replaced with a system that makes use of semantically-motivated gender-marked pronouns, by a process termed ‘resemantisation’. Certain elements of semantic gender systems are to be found in the language acquisition of southern children. This paper addresses the question to what extent these semantic tendencies in pronoun usage by children are indicative of an ongoing change in the southern pronominal gender system. Hence it focuses on pronominal gender usage of adults and adolescents as well as language acquiring children. The results reveal first, that even adolescents do not yet reach an adult-like proficiency in the grammatical gender system, and, second, that the influence of grammatical gender on pronominal reference gradually decreases from generation to generation. Though grammatical gender still stands strong, clear semantic patterns are observed, which indicate an ongoing process of resemantisation. The data for adolescents also suggest that the resemantisation process is pushed forward by language acquirers. In this paper the dynamics of this process will be discussed as well as how this fits in the typology of resemantisation pathways.

This article focuses on a well-known aspect of masculine nouns in the Southern Dutch dialects that has not received much attention in the literature, however: the fact that attributive elements are optionally inflected with an -e(n)-suffix. The appearance of the -n is moreover regulated by a number of phonological conditions. By means of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch and fourteen determiners that were operationalised as linguistic variables, we investigate three questions: the validity of the set of phonological restrictions just mentioned, the problem of the demarcation of the three genders in the light of the masculinisation tendency, and the interplay between internal and external factors in the explanation of the presence of -e(n). It is revealed that, for the first question, the restrictions listed in the literature are to a large extent valid, but that they also exhibit quite a range of variation. For the second question, the difference between the three genders is shown to be statistically significant, rendering the evidence for the masculinisation process in fact problematic. This is substantiated in the analysis of the third question where the -e(n)-suffix is found to be a marker of register rather than gender, and that it is furthermore characteristic of speakers of the new elite in Flanders that emerged under the economical growth after World War Two and the accompanying rise in affluence.

The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that started out with intriguing facts from the field of Dutch child language, showing that children –at a certain stage– have recourse to a default determiner in what seemed to make part of their way towards acquiring grammatical gender. By attempting to get grip on the facts, we soon came across the notion of “neuter” –since Dutch is a language that does not make the familiar distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, but instead opposes nouns that are non neuter to nouns that are neuter. Moreover, we ran into related puzzling facts opposing adult and child Dutch. In this article, we will show that the Dutch gender system is not only driven by purely grammatical features, but that other factors have to be taken into account as well. The starting point for our discussion is recent work by Carme Picallo, who argues that neuter pronouns in languages like Spanish and Catalan do not represent a third gender class –next to masculine and feminine pronouns– but instead are elements that lack grammatical gender and number. We will investigate whether Picallo’s hypothesis is interesting for a language like Dutch as well. In the first part of this article, we will show that this question can be answered positively, and we will show which new questions are raised as a consequence. In the second part of this article, we will show that acquisition data of het by Dutch children give support in favour of the hypothesis under investigation.

This paper investigates a non-prototypical use of the Dutch suffixes which are usually attached to a noun to denote a female referent. These suffixes may also be attached to nouns whose referent cannot be described in terms of being female; rather, the nouns in question refer back to an antecedent whose referent is either a group of people or is inanimate. Based on corpus data and attestations from the web, it is concluded that this phenomenon is a non-canonical type of agreement resulting from an association between collective nouns and feminine grammatical gender. It is posited that the few cases in which reference is made to a noun with an inanimate referent may involve personification of that referent.

This article compares the acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender of Dutch deaf adults to the acquisition of hearing Turkish and Moroccan Arabic adult L2 learners. Written data was analysed, collected through a (semi-)spontaneous production task in which learners were asked to write The Frog Story (Mayer, 1969) on the computer. The results show that all learner groups massively overuse the common determiner de to neuter nouns. The reverse, the use of het with common nouns, hardly ever occurred. Previous research in various L2 populations revealed similar production patterns (cf. Blom, Polišenská, & Weerman, 2008; Hulk & Cornips 2006a,b; Unsworth, 2008). The results showed no qualitative and/or quantitative differences on group level or individual level. In addition, all learners were consistent in the attribution of grammatical gender. On the basis of these results, a theoretical model was built to try to explain the various production patterns.