Dutch gender and the locus of morphological regularization Lien De Vos & Gunther De Vogelaer ABSTRACT The Dutch pronominal gender system is believed to be undergoing a process of resemantization. While most research, most notably Audring (2006), has focused on northern varieties of Dutch which are ahead in the change, this article describes the ongoing demise of the traditional three gender system and the incipient resemantization of pronominal gender in a southern variety of Dutch. This process can be considered an instance of morphological regularization, i.e. the rise of an innovative rule system when the traditional system becomes too opaque to be successfully acquired. Resemantization takes effect along cross-linguistically widely attested lines (the Agreement Hierarchy), using parameters that are typologically common in gender systems, such as animacy or individuation. It is argued that the locus of language change is the language acquisition process: indeed deviations from grammatical gender in adults are typically in line with the semantic system for pronominal reference that is found in young children. As children grow older and their lexicon expands, these semantic rules which categorically determine their pronominal reference at the age of three are turned into default rules, which mainly apply in cases where there is uncertainty concerning a noun’s grammatical gender, e.g. for infrequent nouns. Thus resemantization of pronominal gender, and possibly other instances of morphological regularization as well, are found to be instances of change through transmission (Labov 2007). 1. Introduction West Germanic languages differ with respect to their pronominal gender system, i.e. in the pronouns that are used to refer back to antecedent nouns. German, on the one hand, uses a so- called ‘grammatical’ gender system, in which pronouns agree in gender (and number) with their antecedent noun, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter. Although gender assignment may be semantically motivated, pronominal reference does not mainly depend on the semantics of the antecedent noun. In English, on the other hand, the use of gender-marked pronouns such as he, she and it is regulated exclusively on semantic grounds: male persons (or higher animals) are referred to with he, female persons (or higher animals) with she, (lower) animals and inanimates trigger it. Historically, the exclusively semantic nature of pronominal reference in English must be seen as an innovation. Thus it appears that a grammatical system of pronominal gender may be replaced with a semantically-motivated usage of gender-marked pronouns, via a process that has been termed ‘resemantization’ by Wurzel (1986). According to Audring (2006), Dutch is currently undergoing resemantization too: a grammatical system of pronominal reference is giving way to a semantic one, in which the crucial parameter is ‘individuation’: highly individuated nouns, such as count nouns referring to concrete entities, trigger the use of traditionally masculine pronouns such as hij ‘he’ or hem ‘him’; lowly individuated nouns, such as abstract mass nouns, trigger the use of the traditionally neuter pronoun het ‘it’. Resemantization of pronominal gender along mass/count distinctions is well-attested in many European languages. Siemund (2002), for instance, provides examples from (regional varieties of) English, Frisian, Danish and German. Fernández-Ordóñez (2009) discusses similar tendencies in a number of varieties of Spanish. Despite the substantial body of literature on resemantization, however, the question as to what mechanism of language change is observed here, seems to have remained unaddressed. Thus, the goal of this paper is to investigate where and how changes in pronominal gender systems take place, or, put differently, to find the locus of resemantization. First, resemantization is identified as a case