Het Nederlandse pronominale genus door de bril van Duitse NVT-leerders.

Urbanek L, De Vogelaer G, Poarch GJ, Schimke S, Fanta J

Abstract

Both in Dutch and to a lesser extent in German, pronouns can agree with a noun's lexical gender or be chosen on semantic grounds. It is well-known that for non-human antecedents, Dutch seems to be shifting towards a more semantic system, via a process labelled 'hersemantisering', in which gender marking on the pronoun increasingly depends on the degree of individuation of the antecedent. This article presents a psycholinguistic investigation on how German learners of Dutch as a foreign language (NVT) handle the Dutch gender system, in which a speeded grammaticality judgement task (GJ) was used in conjunction with a sentence completion task. German learners of Dutch judge more combinations of pronouns and their antecedents to be grammatical than they actually use. However, unlike in Flanders and the Netherlands, grammatical gender still trumps semantic gender, which we explain as a L1 transfer effect.