178 Gunther De Vogelaer
show variation (cf. the lack of 100% scores in the graph) evidences that the
children’s pronominal system cannot be captured in terms of a small num-
ber of categorical semantic rules. In addition, the high score for the neuter
count nouns (82,05%) is clearly unexpected in light of Audring’s thesis on
(adult) northern Dutch, since this hypothesis predicts a higher number of
attestations of hij ‘he’ than of het ‘it’ in this category. There are two ways
to account for this result: either it reflects a semantically driven tendency to
use het ‘it’ to refer to some count nouns not captured in Audring (2006), or
it is the result of interference with grammatical gender, more precisely with
the innovative, dyadic grammatical system (cf. infra).
3.2. Northern Dutch gender: a hybrid system
Table 2 not only shows the answers in which grammatical gender is pre-
served, it also provides an overview of all the other answers. Again the data
are sorted according to the semantics of the noun that is referred to (human,
animate, count nouns, mass nouns), and according to their traditional gend-
er (masculine, feminine, neuter).
Table 2. Pronominal gender in 19 children from Overijssel (the Netherlands)
MASCULINE FEMININE NEUTER
HIJ ze het hij ZE het hij ze HEThuman: 100,00%^38 0,00%^0 0,00%^0 0,00%^0 100,00%^38 0,00%^0 31,58%^12 60,53%^23 7,89%^3animate: 65,85%^27 17,07%^7 17,07%^7 60,98%^25 31,71%^13 7,32%^3 52,50%^21 25,00%^10 22,50%^9count: 57,89%^22 5,26%^2 36,84%^14 47,50%^19 0,00%^0 52,50%^21 12,82%^5 5,13%^2 82,05%^32mass: 10,81%^4 0,00%^0 89,19%^33 5,13%^2 0,00%^0 94,87%^37 2,56%^1 0,00%^0 97,44%^38To a large extent these data confirm the picture emerging from the previous
section: for three semantic categories (humans, animates and mass nouns),
the use of gendered pronouns appears to be motivated semantically, i.e. in