14 Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman
time drift of written genitive choice systems, depending on their exact ge-
nre and on whether they are British or American, is differentially impacted
by cultural phenomena such as colloquialization, Americanization and eco-
nomization.
The next paper discusses the evolution of gender systems in the two na-
tional varieties of Dutch, Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch. In “(Not)
acquiring grammatical gender in two varieties of Dutch”, Gunther De Vo-
gelaer uses a questionnaire to elicit instances of pronominal gender in 7-8
year-old children from a Netherlandic and a Belgian province. The results
show that grammatical gender plays a much more important role in the
Flemish children than in the Netherlandic data: While East Flemish child-
ren show attestations of feminine gender for non-animate count nouns and
mass nouns, the children from the Dutch province only use feminine pro-
nouns to refer to female humans or animates. On the basis of the qualitative
data obtained, De Vogelaer deduces that three gender systems are operating
in East Flemish children (the traditional three-gender system, the innova-
tive dyadic grammatical system, and semantic gender) but that both the
northern and southern systems are acquired as predominantly semantic
systems. The author draws the tentative conclusion that northern and south-
ern Dutch pronominal gender will ultimately converge in a system of se-
mantic agreement.
The last chapter in this section likewise examines structural differences
in national varieties of Dutch, but from different methodological and ana-
lytical perspectives. In “Lectal variation in constructional semantics: “Be-
nefactive” ditransitives in Dutch”, Timothy Colleman addresses the issue
of lectal variation in constructional semantics through an exploration of
semantic constraints on the benefactive ditransitive construction. Construc-
tions form prototype categories exhibiting a cline from good to bad exam-
ples (Could you pour me a cup of coffee vs. Could you taste me this wine).
Furthermore, constructions vary from language to language, either in nature
or in the degree of productivity. As Colleman points out, in present-day
standard Netherlandic Dutch, the benefactive ditransitive is a marked con-
struction which is only possible with a handful of rather infrequent verbs
related to food provision or preparation. However, the construction is pro-
ductive in southern and eastern local dialect varieties with verbs from the
semantic classes of creation and obtainment. In this chapter, the author
investigates whether the wider semantic possibilities of the benefactive
ditransitive in southern dialects manifest themselves in the standard lan-
guage of Belgian speakers of Dutch as well. In order to test the distribution