(Not) acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch 183show that Audring’s (2006) description does not apply straightforwardly
for pronominal reference by East Flemish children. Rather, the pronoun het
‘it’ seems to be available not only for lowly individuated mass nouns, but
also for more strongly individuated referents, including count nouns and to
some extent also animates (8 non-grammatical instances of het ‘it’, for
masculine stier ‘bull’, olifant ‘elephant’ and aap ‘monkey’, and for femi-
nine koe ‘cow’).
Table 5. A grammatical two-gender system for count nouns?
HIJ HET
count, common: 214 85
count, neuter: 8 71
(data extracted from Table 4 ; p<.001 (Chi square))The overall conclusion is that in Standard Dutch as spoken by East Flemish
children, three gender systems are operating: the traditional three-gender
system, the innovative dyadic grammatical system, and semantic gender.
Although there are differences with respect to the consistency with which
each individual child applies grammatical or semantic gender, there are no
children consistently using one system: all children show both answers
which can only be explained as the result of grammatical gender, and an-
swers pointing towards the use of semantic gender. In addition, there seems
to be no regularity in the degree to which certain lexical items are liable to
reference according to semantic or grammatical gender. Thus, in any given
case, an East Flemish child may use semantic gender or grammatical gend-
er. This has important consequences for the modeling of the gender system
of East Flemish 7-8-year olds, which needs to be of a probabilistic nature
rather than taking the form of rules determining when grammatical or se-
mantic gender is used.
- Pronominal gender in German, English, and future Dutch
According to Mills (1986), the age at which an aspect of a language’s
gender system is acquired correlates with its relative clarity in the system.
Hence, although semantic rules also play a role, German can be characte-
rized as a language with grammatical gender: gender is primarily assigned
on formal grounds, and three-year old children are already aware of the
most important formal rule, i.e. the rule stipulating that words ending on a