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 pronoun het/’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.

Nominal and pronominal gender: Putting Greenberg’s Universal 43 to the test

The aim of this study is to scrutinize Greenberg’s Universal 43, which predicts pronominal gender in the presence of nominal gender. On the basis of a sample of 500 gendered and ungendered languages, gender marking is examined in nouns, personal pronouns, possessors and possessums. Ungendered languages outnumber gendered languages. Eight out of 12 logically possible gender constellations are attested in the database. In keeping with Greenberg, languages with nominal gender show a strong bias towards gendered pronouns. There is a strong correlation between gendered personal pronouns and gendered possessors. Gendered possessums are cross-linguistically uncommon. The empirical patterns are brought about by a small set of theoretical principles. Gender is independently specified for each category. Gender marking is an effort. The strength of the correlation depends on the “distance” between two given gender sites. Coding gender twice in the same time frame creates a processing difficulty. Natural and grammatical gender conspire to generate the gender sensitivity of individual categories.

Regional Varieties of English

This chapter discusses non-standard grammatical features of regional varieties of English in relation to their Standard English functional equivalents. It pursues a cross-linguistic typological approach in the classification and interpretation of these features. This approach helps to reveal the often highly systematic relationship between standard and non-standard variants as well as the universal basis of the underlying cognitive principles. Illustration is drawn from reflexive marking, pronominal gender and case, tense and aspect, negation and negative concord, subject–verb agreement, and clause structure, which here includes ditransitive constructions, embedded inversion, and the formation of relative clauses.

Gender at the Edge

This article develops an analysis of Gender whereby D-gender enters grammar as a feature variable (edge linker), without a fixed value, either probing n or scanning the context for a value. Only the latter strategy is available in pronominal gender languages such as English, as they lack n-gender, whereas both strategies are applicable in n-gender languages, variably so for variable DPs, depending on their nP content and on context. The article adopts the idea that context linking does not merely involve pragmatic context scanning but also has a syntactic side to it, edge computation, whereby context-scanned and recycled features are computed at the phase edge in relation to CP-internal elements, via edge linkers. The context-linking approach has been previously launched for Tense and Person. This article extends it to Gender, thereby generalizing over context-sensitive grammatical categories and developing a novel view of the overall architecture of grammar.

Stability and Change in Grammatical Gender: Pronouns in Heritage Scandinavian

Previous studies on gender in Scandinavian heritage languages in America have looked at noun-phrase internal agreement. It has been shown that some heritage speakers have non-target gender agreement, but this has been interpreted in different ways by different researchers. This paper presents a study of pronominal gender in Heritage Norwegian and Swedish, using existing recordings and a small experiment that elicits pronouns. It is shown that the use of pronominal forms is largely target-like, and that the heritage speakers make gender distinctions. There is, however, some evidence of two competing systems in the data, and there is a shift towards a two-gender system, arguably due to koinéization.

Anders, of toch niet?

Samenvatting Both in Dutch and to a lesser extent in German, pronouns can agree with a noun’s lexical gender or be chosen on semantic grounds. It is well-known that for non-human antecedents, Dutch seems to be shifting towards a more semantic system, via a process labelled ‘hersemantisering’, in which gender marking on the pronoun increasingly depends on the degree of individuation of the antecedent. This article presents a psycholinguistic investigation on how German learners of Dutch as a foreign language (NVT), who distinguish between three nominal genders in their native language, handle the Dutch gender system, which has largely lost its three-way nominal gender, and in which resemanticisation has progressed significantly. More specifically, a speeded grammaticality judgement task (GJ) was used in conjunction with a sentence completion task to examine the German NVT-learners’ perception as well as the production of pronominal gender in the L2 (in this case Dutch). It was found that German learners of Dutch judge more combinations of pronouns and their antecedents to be grammatical than they actually use. However, unlike in Flanders and the Netherlands, grammatical gender still trumps semantic gender, which we explain as a L1 transfer effect. In addition, the role of participants’ proficiency in Dutch is discussed.

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.

Is cook 'der Koch' or 'die Köchin'? Problems of (social) gender in translation

By means of the category of gender, especially the concept of social gender, this article intends to illustrate the different parameters that are involved when referring to translation as a “crosscultural transfer”. Specific factors that have an influence on the translation, such as connotations of gender, pragmatic situations, different linguistic structure (i.e. languages that show grammatical vs. languages that show pronominal gender), are discussed. The article emphasizes the importance of the translator’s role to interpret the source text and to determine the function of the target text.

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

In the context of cultural evolution, we propose a multi-agent model that allows, through pair-wise interactions between homogeneous individuals of a population, to simulate the shift from a syntactic towards a semantic pronominal agreement system. We explore various gender mapping and learning mechanisms that can allow the agents to form a new agreement system using their semantic knowledge about the world. We investigate whether our strategies can yield cohesive clusterings over the semantic space. We notice that the system reaches full convergence in terms of gender preference at population level and that there are multiple successful ways of dividing the semantic space, including one that reflects the so-called individuation hierarchy, a case attested by a study of a spoken language data.