176 Gunther De Vogelaer
(Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski 1993; see also Comrie 1997 on Dutch). In
addition, the second sentence was constructed in such a way that only the
bold-faced noun could logically be referred to, and reference to the entire
first sentence was equally unlikely. While Dutch, in general, shows quite a
prolific use of demonstratives in subject position, this procedure proved
successful, since indeed no demonstratives are found in the informants’
answers.
(2) Example sentence from the questionnaire
Mijn bed staat in mijn kamer. houdt me warm ‘s nachts.
My bed is in my room. keeps me warm at night.
In some cases, the determiner preceding the noun revealed gender informa-
tion. According to De Paepe and De Vogelaer (2008:8), the presence of a
gender-marking determiner does not affect the results: their questionnaire
contained nouns for which both a test sentence was included with and
without gender marking elements, and the results are identical. At the end
of the task, the children were asked whether the test was easy or difficult,
and they almost unanimously considered it an easy test.
- Acquiring pronominal gender in the Netherlands
3.1. Abandoning the grammatical three-gender system
Figure 1 displays the results for the 19 informants from the Netherlands.
Proportions are shown of the answers in line with the (traditional) gram-
matical gender of the questionnaire items per semantic type of noun, and
per traditional gender. Clearly, the extent to which grammatical gender is
used depends on the category of the noun that is referred to. Thus all mas-
culine and feminine nouns with a human referent trigger the use of hij ‘he’
and ze ‘she’, respectively, while there is not a single ze-answer for the tradi-
tionally feminine count nouns and mass nouns.