Dutch gender and the locus of morphological regularization

Abstract

The Dutch pronominal gender system is believed to be undergoing a process of resemanticization. While most research has focused on northern varieties of Dutch which are ahead in the change, this article describes the ongoing demise of the traditional three-gender system and the incipient resemanticization of pronominal gender in a southern variety of Dutch. This process can be considered an instance of morphological regularization – that is, the rise of an innovative rule system when the traditional system becomes too opaque to be successfully acquired. Resemanticization takes effect along cross-linguistically widely attested lines (the Agreement Hierarchy), using parameters that are typologically common in gender systems, such as animacy or individuation. It is argued that the locus of language change is the language acquisition process: indeed deviations from grammatical gender in adults are typically in line with the semantic system for pronominal reference that is found in young children. As children grow older and their lexicon expands, these semantic rules which categorically determine their pronominal reference at the age of three are turned into default rules, which mainly apply in cases where there is uncertainty concerning a noun's grammatical gender, for example, for infrequent nouns.

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