Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns

Abstract

Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.