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| Reference : De dynamiek van hersemantisering |
| Scientific journals : Article | |||
| Arts & humanities : Languages & linguistics | |||
| http://hdl.handle.net/2268/62122 | |||
| De dynamiek van hersemantisering | |
| Dutch | |
De Vos, Lien  [Université de Liège - ULg > Département des langues et littératures modernes > Philologie historique néerlandaise - Langue néerlandaise moderne et linguistique synchronique >] | |
| 2009 | |
| Taal en Tongval | |
| Vanacker | |
| Themanummer 22 - Perspectieven op het genus in het Nederlands | |
| 82-110 | |
| 0039-8691 | |
| Gent | |
| Belgium | |
| [en] grammatical gender ; language change ; gender change ; semantic gender | |
| [en] The southern Dutch variety has a traditional, so-called ‘grammatical’ gender
system, in which pronouns agree in gender with their antecedent noun, which can be masculine, feminine or neuter. For most nouns, there is no apparent semantic motivation underlying gender assignment. However, this kind of grammatical system may be replaced with a system that makes use of semantically-motivated gender-marked pronouns, by a process termed ‘resemantisation’. Certain elements of semantic gender systems are to be found in the language acquisition of southern children. This paper addresses the question to what extent these semantic tendencies in pronoun usage by children are indicative of an ongoing change in the southern pronominal gender system. Hence it focuses on pronominal gender usage of adults and adolescents as well as language acquiring children. The results reveal fi rst, that even adolescents do not yet reach an adult-like profi ciency in the grammatical gender system, and, second, that the infl uence of grammatical gender on pronominal reference gradually decreases from generation to generation. Though grammatical gender still stands strong, clear semantic patterns are observed, which indicate an ongoing process of resemantisation. The data for adolescents also suggest that the resemantisation process is pushed forward by language acquirers. In this paper the dynamics of this process will be discussed as well as how this fi ts in the typology of resemantisation pathways. | |
| http://hdl.handle.net/2268/62122 |
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