180 Gunther De Vogelaerand they go in either direction, i.e. both the use of het ‘it’ for common
nouns is found and the use of hij ‘he’ for neuter nouns.
But Table 3 also suggests that there is some asymmetry in these devia-
tions: the attestations of het ‘it’ for common nouns by far outnumber the
attestations of hij ‘he’ for neuter nouns. This use of het ‘it’ for masculine
(14/38 or 36,84%) or feminine count nouns (21/40 or 52,50%) is especially
remarkable since it is not captured in Audring’s (2006) description of
northern colloquial Dutch. Thus, while the first, second and fourth row
might provide evidence in favor of a characterization of northern Dutch
children’s pronominal usage as being semantically motivated along the
lines set out in Audring (2006), the results of the third row affect the over-
all applicability of her description. More specifically, there seem to be other
factors than uncountability stimulating reference with het ‘it’. These addi-
tional factors, however, cannot be easily defined. One possible factor may
be abstractness: De Paepe and De Vogelaer (2008) find a tendency in Bel-
gian children to refer with het ‘it’ to count nouns referring to abstract con-
cepts, which may very well be present in Dutch children too. However, the
questionnaire used for the present study did not contain any abstract items,
but only count nouns with tangible referents, all of which trigger the use of
het ‘it’ at least a couple of times: mand ‘basket’ (12 times het), tafel ‘table’
(9 times het), stoel ‘chair’ (9 times het), and auto ‘car’ (5 times het). Hence
it seems as if in the language of the 7-8 year old Dutch children in the
present study, het ‘it’ can in principle be used to refer to virtually every
countable noun. The small proportions of het ‘it’ in the second row of Ta-
ble 2 indicates that het ‘it’ can even be used for animates.
- Acquiring pronominal gender in Belgium
4.1. The persistence of the Belgian feminine
The Belgian data show quite a different picture. As for the preservation of
grammatical gender, there are no noun classes where grammatical gender
has been lost. For traditionally feminine count and mass nouns, where the
innovative grammatical two-gender system uses hij ‘he’ and where there is
no semantic motivation for the use of ze ‘she’ as well, slightly less than
40% attestations of ze ‘she’ are observed (36,84% and 37,21%, respective-