Syntactic or semantic gender agreement in Dutch, German and German learner Dutch: a speeded grammaticality judgement task

Autor(en)
Gunther De Vogelaer, Johanna Fanta, Greg Poarch, Sarah Schimke, Lukas Urbanek
Abstrakt

Dutch is currently undergoing a ‘resemanticisation’ of its pronominal gender, in which syntactic agreement is replaced with a system in which pronouns are chosen in accordance with the degree of individuation of the antecedent. Current accounts of resemanticisation link the process to the extent to which the three-way nominal gender distinctions are still entrenched. Using experimental data gathered with speeded grammaticality judgements from speakers of both Netherlandic and Belgian varieties of Dutch, of German, and of German learners of Dutch, we unambiguously relate the rise of semantic agreement in Dutch to an increased uncertainty with respect to grammatical gender. In addition, reaction time measurements suggest that an agreement system with a strong propensity towards grammatical agreement allows for faster processing of agreement relations than systems in which semantic agreement plays a larger role.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Germanistik
Seiten
271-298
Anzahl der Seiten
28
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668476-010
Publikationsdatum
2020
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
602040 Psycholinguistik, 602034 Nederlandistik, 602032 Mundartforschung, 602014 Germanistik
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Allgemeine Kunst und Geisteswissenschaften, Allgemeine Sozialwissenschaften
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/02fd39d6-dd53-4aca-bf15-e2f8aa9b0acc