(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 175(2006) hypothesis in children, and also for detecting variation between
different varieties of Dutch, but the selection is too narrow to be able to
provide a full overview of all the semantic factors that may be at work. For
instance, the questionnaire does not contain abstract nouns and collectives
(see De Paepe and De Vogelaer 2008 and De Vos 2009, respectively, for
discussion of these noun types). One relevant non-semantic factor is fre-
quency (De Paepe and De Vogelaer 2008): infrequent items tend to trigger
semantic agreement more often. This factor is kept constant in the present
research: all items on the list are words that are frequently used by children
(i.e. they are on the ‘unanimity list’ of Schaerlakens, Kohnstamm and Le-
jaegere 1999), which indeed occur in the varieties under scrutiny.
The East Flemish data are part of a larger, still ongoing investigation, in
which more factors are included than in the present article. As a conse-
quence, more lexical items are included in the East Flemish than in the
Overijssel data. A comparison of the overall East Flemish results with the
results for the nouns for which data are available for Overijssel too, yielded
no significant differences, and thus below the overall results are given,
since these are based on a larger data sample and thus more robust. Even
within the more elaborate East Flemish survey (and in other investigations
as well, cf. De Paepe and De Vogelaer 2008 and De Vos 2009), nouns
within a certain semantic category behave rather uniformly (cf. also below).
Hence resemantisation does not appear to show important lexical effects
(apart perhaps from words for which grammatical gender shows geographi-
cal variation, but such words were kept out of the questionnaires).
Apart from noun semantics, agreement patterns in languages with se-
mantic agreement also tend to depend on contextual and discourse factors
(see, e.g., Curzan 2003:118-131 on Middle English and Siemund 2008 on
present-day, non-standard varieties of English). Thus the test sentences
with which pronouns are elicited may influence the results. In order to mi-
nimize variation resulting from differences between the test sentences,
these all had a similar form. An example is given in (2): the children were
instructed to fill in the pronoun (hij ‘he’, ze ‘she’ or het ‘it’) that they
would use to refer to the bold-faced noun in a previous sentence (in this
case: bed ‘bed’, a traditionally neuter noun triggering the use of het ‘it’ in
most children). All pronouns to be filled in were subject pronouns. The
bold-faced noun was always used as a sentence-initial subject in the first
sentence, and was always preceded by a definite determiner, viz. a definite
article or a possessive pronoun, and hence highly topical. These conditions
are known to trigger the use of personal pronouns in the following sentence