 previous article in this issue | next article in this issue  |
|
Document Details : Title: Semantic Agreement Competing with Syntactic Agreement Subtitle: The Case of Dutch Pronouns Author(s): KLOM, Jan , DE VOGELAER, Gunther Journal: Leuvense Bijdragen - Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology Volume: 101 Date: 2017 Pages: 123-149 DOI: 10.2143/LB.101.0.3194379 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). |
|
