Pronouns In Dutch Research Articles

Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns

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.

Reasoning about alternative forms is costly: The processing of null and overt pronouns in Italian using pupillary responses

ABSTRACTDifferent words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly.

Turkish-Dutch bilinguals maintain language-specific reference tracking strategies in elicited narratives

Aim:This paper examines whether second-generation Turkish heritage speakers in the Netherlands follow language-specific patterns of reference tracking in Turkish and Dutch, focusing on discourse status and pragmatic contexts as factors that may modulate the choice of referring expressions (REs), that is, the noun phrase (NP), overt pronoun and null pronoun.Methodology:Two short silent videos were used to elicit narratives from 20 heritage speakers of Turkish, both in Turkish and in Dutch. Monolingual baseline data were collected from 20 monolingually raised speakers of Turkish in Turkey and 20 monolingually raised speakers of Dutch in the Netherlands. We also collected language background data from bilinguals with an extensive survey.Data and analysis:Using generalised logistic mixed-effect regression, we analysed the influence of discourse status and pragmatic context on the choice of subject REs in Turkish and Dutch, comparing bilingual data to the monolingual baseline in each language.Findings:Heritage speakers used overt versus null pronouns in Turkish and stressed versus reduced pronouns in Dutch in pragmatically appropriate contexts. There was, however, a slight increase in the proportions of overt pronouns as opposed to NPs in Turkish and as opposed to null pronouns in Dutch. We suggest an explanation based on the degree of entrenchment of differential RE types in relation to discourse status as the possible source of the increase.Originality:This paper provides data from an understudied language pair in the domain of reference tracking in language contact situations. Unlike several studies of pronouns in language contact, we do not find differences across monolingual and bilingual speakers with regard to pragmatic constraints on overt pronouns in the minority pro-drop language.Significance:Our findings highlight the importance of taking language proficiency and use into account while studying bilingualism and combining formal approaches to language use with usage-based approaches for a more complete understanding of bilingual language production.

The Diachrony of Semantic Gender Agreement: Findings from Middle Dutch

This paper presents the results of a corpus study of pronominal gender agreement in Middle Dutch. In present-day Dutch and in several other Germanic varieties, pronouns show semantic gender agreement that is based on the degree of individuation of the referent. Dutch pronouns show variation between this type of agreement and lexical gender agreement. This study investigates how old semantic agreement based on individuation is. In particular, it aims to answer the question of whether semantic agreement has developed in response to the change from the Germanic three-gender system to a two-gender system or dates back to before this change. The results show that agreement based on individuation already existed in Middle Dutch, when the original three-gender system was still in place. This shows that this type of agreement did not develop in response to the change from three to two nominal genders. The semantic interpretation of the genders along the lines of individuation apparently existed already and could be an old Germanic, possibly Indo-European, feature. What seems to have changed over time is the proportion of semantic to lexical agreement, as semantic agreement appears to occur more frequently in present-day Dutch than in Middle Dutch. This shift in agreement preference may be due to the loss of adnominal gender marking and the resulting reduced visibility of lexical gender in the noun phrase.

Standard and Colloquial Belgian Dutch pronouns of address: A variationist-interactional study of child-directed speech in dinner table interactions

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus-based analysis of child-directed speech during Flemish family dinner table interactions. Specifically, we study parents’ style-shifts, that is, their alternation between Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch, a non-standard supraregional variant of Dutch, when interacting with their children. By integrating insights and methods from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, we pay attention not only to macro-social categories (such as the age of the children), but also to the micro-social and pragmatic context (e. g. frames) of the style-shifts. The fact that this study focuses on a single case-study is a consequence of opting for this combination of course-grained quantitative analyses and fine-grained qualitative analyses. We rely on detailed transcriptions of three hours of recordings for one Flemish household with four children (age nine months, and four, five and seven years old). Our results reveal significant variation in the style-shifts of the mother (age 35) and the father (age 39) with respect to the four children. These results were interpreted against the background of comments made by the parents during a sociolinguistic interview that followed the recordings. Generally, our analyses allow us to provide a nuanced insight into the social meaning of the two language layers (Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch) as they are distributed across the speakers and situations in this family, thus revealing a link between the attested patterns of child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms.

Choosing referring expressions in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: Effects of animacy

It has been argued that animate entities are referred to with more attenuated expressions than inanimate entities, because they are more accessible in memory. Two previously untested claims made for Dutch suggest that the situation may be more complex. Firstly, it has been stated that full pronouns can only refer to animate entities, while reduced pronouns can also refer to inanimate entities. This seems to be inconsistent with the accessibility account. Secondly, inanimate entities may be pronominalized less to avoid gender-marked expressions when grammatical gender is unclear. Using a sentence completion task, we tested these claims by investigating the effect of animacy on both the choice of pronouns versus more specific expressions and the choice of reduced versus full pronouns in Dutch. We compared speakers of Netherlandic Dutch, who have generally lost intuitions about masculine and feminine grammatical gender of nouns, with speakers of Belgian Dutch, for whom these intuitions are still relatively intact. Both groups showed an effect of animacy on pronominalization, suggesting that this effect cannot only be explained as a gender avoidance strategy. At the same time, the choice between full and reduced pronouns cannot be explained by accessibility. Implications for theories of reference production are discussed.

The Semantics of the Dutch Gender System

In this paper, it is argued that, although Dutch gender assignment is not systematically organized along semantic lines in the lexicon, the gender system has a semantic basis. This semantic basis involves a distinction between masculine/common gender associated with a high degree of individuation on the one hand, and neuter gender associated with a low degree of individuation, on the other hand. This is in line with Audring (2006, 2009), who found that Dutch pronouns often show semantic agreement along these lines. It is shown that the same semantic distinction between the genders can also be found in the nominal domain. It surfaces particularly in cases where lexically stored gender does not play a role. The semantic distinction arguably goes back to Proto-Indo-European. It is argued that, since nominal gender has become an invariable, lexically stored feature of nouns, the semantic basis of nominal gender assignment has become disrupted. This causes a con-flict between lexical and semantic gender agreement in pronouns. It is suggested that the surfacing of semantic agreement in this conflict is connected with a reduced marking of lexical gender on adnominal elements.

Salience and contrast effects in reference resolution: The interpretation of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms—in particular, “emphatic” strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns—cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single feature of the antecedent. The findings show that while the different preferences of demonstratives pronouns and nonemphatic personal pronouns correlate with the antecedent's grammatical role, the distinction between strong/emphatic personal pronouns and weak personal pronouns cannot be satisfactorily explained by grammatical role. The results suggest that the strong form is sensitive to the presence of contrastive, switched topics. These findings indicate that the form-specific multiple-constraints approach (e.g., Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008) can be extended to the strong/weak distinction and contrast sensitivity. We also discuss the implications of these results for the nature of the form-function mapping in anaphoric paradigms from a Gricean perspective.

Anaforische middelen voor topicverschuiving

Third person pronouns that require an antecedent beyond their immediate clause build discourse coherence. There are two kinds of such pronouns in Dutch, p(ersonal)-pronouns and d(emonstrative)-pronouns. They make different contributions to the discourse coherence and the present paper deals with that difference. The d-pronouns have an obviative effect. That is, they have an antecedent restriction. They require a non-topic from the preceding sentence as its antecedent in order to introduce it as the topic of the new sentence. The result is that d-pronouns function as a topic-shifting device. The p-pronouns, by contrast, do not impose such a restriction on their antecedent, nor do they have the ensuing topic-shifting function. The topic-stating function of d-pronouns finds its origin in early child language, where the d-pronoun indicates a referent that is salient in the speech situation: “see pointing gesture or gaze of me speaker”. In later child language the topic-stating function is extended to the linguistic discourse: “or listen to the preceding focus constituent”. A comparison of the topic-stating devices in German, French and Italian leads me to reject Ariel’s (1990) accessibility hierarchy for anaphoric pronouns.

Unscrambled Pronouns in Dutch

Unscrambled Pronouns in Dutch

Differences in the processing of anaphoric reference between closely related languages: neurophysiological evidence

BackgroundThe present study examines the involvement of syntactic and semantic/conceptual processes in the comprehension of pronouns in Dutch using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) replicating and extending an earlier study in German. Dutch and German are closely related and share the same logic in referring to non-diminutive and diminutive NPs (i.e. adding an affix which changes the syntactic gender into neutral). Both languages separate male (hij/er (he)) and female pronouns (zij/sie (she)), as well as a pronoun that refers to an entity of neutral gender, (het/es (it)). However, the neutral pronoun het in Dutch is not only a pronoun, it also is the article of a neutral noun. To investigate the influence of this word class ambiguity on pronoun resolution, as well as to establish the generality of the finding of the German study we manipulated syntactic and biological gender congruency between a personal pronoun and its antecedent in Dutch.ResultsIn Dutch, sentences with the word-class (pronoun/article) ambiguous pronoun het elicited an early negative shift (150–280 ms) which continued in the time frame of the N400. For sentences with a syntactically and biologically incongruent pronoun a P600 (in absence of an N400) was obtained, which was independent of the morphological form of the referent.ConclusionThe neurophysiological pattern found for Dutch stimuli was clearly different from the German study, indicating that the processing of pronouns in these two languages differs. This can be explained in terms of language specific characteristics concerning the word class ambiguous neutral pronoun het. Moreover, in contrast to the findings in the German study, there was no clear effect caused by the morphological form of the referent. Additionally, in Dutch, the pronoun resolution in sentences with a non-diminutive antecedent seems to reflect processes of revision (P600 in absence of an N400), whereas for German evidence was found for clear involvement of conceptual/semantic processes as well as structure building processes (N400/P600 complex).

How important are linguistic factors in word skipping during reading?

The probability of skipping a word is influenced by its processing ease. For instance, a word that is predictable from the preceding context is skipped more often than an unpredictable word. A meta-analysis of studies examining this predictability effect reported effect sizes ranging from 0 to 13%, with an average of 8%. One study does not fit within this picture and reported 23% more skipping of Dutch pronouns in sentences in which the pronoun had no disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Helen because she never looked so good') than in sentences where it did have a disambiguating value (e.g. 'Mary was envious of Albert because she never looked so good'). We re-examined this ambiguity in Dutch using a task that more closely resembles normal reading and observed only a 9% difference in skipping of the pronoun, bringing this linguistic effect in line with the other findings.

Language-particular or language-independent factors in acquisition? Children's comprehension of object pronouns in Dutch, French and German

Children's comprehension of direct and indirect object pronouns in Dutch, French and German was studied in order to determine the role of language-particular factors in acquisition. The pronoun systems of the three languages differ on a number of dimensions that have been assumed to influence the acquisition process: the phonological proper ties of pronouns (clitic vs. non-clitic); the position of the pronoun in the sentence and the phrasal category in which the pronoun occurs: prepositional ([ppPREP[NP[PRO]]]) vs non-prepositional ([NP[PRO]]). A picture-matching task was used. Three age groups, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children, were tested. The results indicate that language- particular properties, at least in the part of the grammar investigated here, do not play the role assumed in some theories of language development, but that more abstract, language-independent proper ties of the pronouns, such as their function as internal verbal argu ments, are relevant for acquisition. Those language-particular factors which were observed are secondary and restricted to limited domains.