Pronominal Gender in Dutch: Apparent-Time Change in Lexical versus Semantic Agreement

Abstract

This article discusses pronominal gender agreement in Dutch. Based on a sentence completion task filled out by about 10,000 speakers, we provide evidence for the claim that there is an ongoing shift from lexical to semantic agreement in Dutch, even in a formal register. Results of correspondence and cluster analyses indicate that nouns with the same degree of individuation group together. Furthermore, the analyses reveal an age effect, with three distinct speaker groups that follow a specific gender agreement pattern. Younger speakers are more semantically oriented than older speakers, who are more lexically oriented, which points to apparent-time language change.