(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 179line with natural gender on the one hand, and with a count/mass-distinction
on the other. Thus, the vast majority of references to nouns denoting hu-
mans is with masculine hij ‘he’ or feminine ze ‘she’, even when the noun is
grammatically neuter (e.g., kind ‘child’ or meisje ‘girl’). The presence of
meisje ‘girl’ in the questionnaire explains that the use of ze ‘she’ for neuter
nouns denoting human referents exceeds 60%.
The high score of both hij ‘he’ and ze ‘she’ in the second row of Table 2
shows that natural gender also to a large extent drives reference to nouns
denoting animates. Neither of these results is very surprising, as even Stan-
dard High German, a West Germanic variety in which the tryadic grammat-
ical system has been maximally preserved, allows for these semantically
motivated deviations from grammatical gender, albeit to a lesser extent
(Mills 1986:51-53,93). Somewhat less expected is the non-marginal score
of het ‘it’ for traditionally masculine (7/41 or 17,07%) and neuter animates
(9/40 or 22,50%). The fourth row in the table shows the most straightfor-
ward results, in that virtually all references to mass nouns employ het ‘it’.
The scores range from 89,19% for traditionally masculine nouns to 97,44%
for neuter nouns; the masculine pronouns are quite evenly distributed over
the mass nouns in the questionnaire, viz. masculine wijn ‘wine’ (2 times
hij) and cola ‘coca-cola’ (2), feminine soep ‘soup’ (1) and melk ‘milk’ (1),
and neuter zand ‘sand’ (1). The data in the third row of the table are more
chaotic: neither a dyadic grammatical system nor Audring’s semantic sys-
tem describes the situation very well.
Table 3. A grammatical two-gender system for count nouns?
HIJ HET
count, common: 41 35
count, neuter: 7 32
(data extracted from Table 2 ; p<.001 (Chi square))Table 3 orders the data from the third row assuming that the traditional
three-gender system has been replaced by a two-gender grammatical sys-
tem, in which common nouns (i.e. former masculine and feminine nouns)
are referred to with hij ‘he’, and neuter nouns with het ‘it’. Then a statisti-
cally significant correlation is found between grammatical gender and pro-
nominal usage: common gender correlates with hij ‘he’, neuter gender with
het ‘it’. But it is immediately clear from Table 3 that the two-way grammat-
ical gender distinction between common and neuter by no means categori-
cally determines pronominal reference in the test data: deviations abound,