Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns

Lien De Vos,Gunther De Vogelaer,Gert De Sutter

doi:10.1017/s1470542720000094

Lien De Vos, Gunther De Vogelaer + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1017/s1470542720000094

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Abstract

Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronounhet/’t‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.

Highlights

Previous research has shown that agreement between pronouns and their antecedent nouns in Dutch is increasingly shifting from a lexical to a semantic system of reference: In the former type of pronominal reference, the pronoun’s form is determined by the lexical gender of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
The study only deals with personal pronouns, since the personal pronoun paradigm is the only component of Standard Dutch grammar where the masculine/feminine distinction is upheld, and the component from which innovations in reference strategies are expected to spread to other agreement targets (Corbett 1991:242; see Audring 2009:159–164 for an illustration from Netherlandic Dutch)
Southern Dutch pronominal gender differs from the pronominal gender in northern Dutch: whereas the North shows generalized use of masculine or common pronouns for simple entities irrespective of their gender, neuter nouns referring to inanimates in the South always trigger neuter pronouns

Summary

Introduction

Previous research has shown that agreement between pronouns and their antecedent nouns in Dutch is increasingly shifting from a lexical to a semantic system of reference: In the former type of pronominal reference, the pronoun’s form is determined by the lexical gender of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. This article is concerned with the inanimate end of the Individuation Hierarchy, as illustrated in 1, in which a mass noun, namely, wijn ‘wine’, refers to an unspecific quantity. In these situations, Dutch shows an increasing tendency to use the neuter pronoun (in this case the reduced form of het, namely, ’t), even if the noun has common gender (or is masculine in three-gender varieties of Dutch). The common gender is indicated here and below as C and the neuter gender as N

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