172 Gunther De Vogelaer
opments in Dutch gender must be attributed to the fact that there is no for-
mal ratio underlying gender assignment, which may have to do with the
loss of noun inflection, a phenomenon predating the loss of adnominal
morphology with several centuries. Indeed unlike in, e.g., German (Köpcke
and Zubin 1996) and French (Tucker, Lambert and Rigault 1977) most
gender assignments in present-day Dutch appear not to be formally moti-
vated, and the most productive rule from Middle Dutch (i.e. nouns with
final -e have feminine gender; cf. Nijen Twilhaar 1992) has become obso-
lete since Dutch has dropped the final -e in most words. There is one obser-
vation corroborating the hypothesis that recoverability of gender on the
basis of nouns’ form inhibits or at least delays changes in the gender sys-
tem: in Dutch, some categories of derivations, e.g. feminine nouns on -heid
and -nis (e.g. gezondheid ‘health’, ergernis ‘irritation’) are among the
nouns most strongly resisting innovations in the gender system (Haeseryn
et al. 2002, §3.3.3).
2.2. Acquiring gender: German, English and Dutch
A landmark study on the acquisition of gender systems is Mills’ (1986:113)
comparative study on German and English, in which the relevance of both
formal and semantic gender assignment rules is investigated. Her main
conclusion is that the speed with which children acquire a certain aspect of
the gender system “depends not on the categorization of the rules as seman-
tic or formal, but rather on the relative ‘clarity’ of the rules in question
within the gender system.” A relevant example comes from German. A
prominent gender rule in German is that words with final -e are feminine.
This rule is mastered by and large by children at the age of three years
(Mills 1986:70). Other rules that are present in adults but which have a
limited lexical scope or to which more exceptions occur (e.g., words on -/ft/
and -/cht/ are feminine, or words on -/et/ are neuter), still appear absent in
eight-year old children (Mills 1986:80).
Mills’ (1986) findings can be exploited for theorizing about the nature
of gender systems. For instance, a system like the German one, in which
some formal rules are already acquired at the age of three, can impossibly
be characterized as a predominantly semantic gender system. For Dutch,
however, evidence on early acquired formal rules is lacking. According to
De Houwer (1987:64-66) Dutch-speaking children of three years make use
of semantic rules for pronominal reference, such as the ‘natural gender