Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 177

65,85

57,89

0,00 0,00

100,00 97,44

10,81

100,00

31,71

82,05

7,89

22,50

0

20

40

60

80

100

human animate count mass

Referent type

% grammatical gende

r

masculine

feminine

neuter

Figure 1. Grammatical gender in Dutch 7-8-year old children

The best way to assess to what extent the traditional three-gender system
still applies, is a closer look into the number of attestations of the feminine
pronoun ze ‘she’, since in the innovative systems, both the grammatical
two-gender system and the semantic system described by Audring (2006),
there is no motivation to use feminine pronouns other than reference to
female referents. Apart from cases where there is indeed a semantic motiva-
tion for the use of ze ‘she’, such as in referring to female humans or, to a
lesser extent, to female animals, the traditionally feminine nouns are never
referred to with feminine ze ‘she’. From this it can be concluded that the
traditional three-gender system no longer plays a role.
Determining the extent to which the children’s answers fit into a gram-
matical two-gender system or rather are semantically motivated is a more
difficult task. On the one hand, the mere observation that the results for the
different semantic categories differ strongly, indicates that noun semantics
do play an important role. Strikingly, for most noun types for which gram-
matical gender appears to have been preserved quite well, grammatical
gender corresponds to the alleged semantic gender in the innovative system
described by Audring (2006) (see (1) above). In addition to the masculine
and feminine nouns with human referents, these include the masculine ani-
mate nouns (65,85%), the masculine count nouns (57,89%), and the neuter
mass nouns (97,44%). On the other hand, the fact that even these nouns