Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 181

ly). For a number of other noun classes, too, grammatical gender scores
more than 10% higher for the Belgian informants than in Figure 1, viz. for
neuter nouns referring to humans (37,21%), for all nouns referring to ani-
mates (80,59%, 52,78%, and 41,28%), and for traditionally masculine
count nouns (80,56%).
Overall, however, the results for the Belgian children show more simi-
larities with the data from the Netherlands than one would expect on the
basis of the differences observed in adults’ language, where pronominal
gender in the south is believed to be overwhelmingly in line with the tradi-
tional grammatical three-gender system. In Figure 2 it is indeed observed
that different semantic categories clearly yield different results, testifying to
the importance of noun semantics for pronominal gender. The categories
for which grammatical gender is preserved well by and large correspond to
Figure 1, and include classes in which grammatical gender does not conflict
with natural gender, such as masculine and feminine nouns referring to
humans and, to a lesser extent, animates. In addition, mass nouns seem to
be strongly associated with the pronoun het ‘it’. And here too, as in section
3.1, both masculine and neuter count nouns regularly trigger the use of the
pronoun with according grammatical gender (with scores of 80,56% and
82,56%, respectively).

Figure 2. Grammatical gender in Belgian 7-8-year old children

98,83

80,59 80,56

36,84 37,21

82,56

91,8

4,84

52,78

94,78

37,21 41,28

0

20

40

60

80

100

human animate count mass

Referent type

% grammatical gende

r

masculine

feminine

neuter