1887
  1. Home
  2. e-Journals
  3. Linguistics in the Netherlands
  4. Volume 35, Issue 1
  5. Article
Volume 35, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-7332
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9919
PDF

Abstract

Abstract

Gender-(mis)matching pronouns have been studied extensively in experiments. However, a phenomenon common to various languages has thus far been overlooked: the systemic use of non-feminine pronouns when referring to female individuals. The present study is the first to provide experimental insights into the interpretation of such a pronoun: Limburgian ‘his/its’ and Dutch ‘his/its’ are grammatically ambiguous between masculine and neuter, but while Limburgian can refer to women, the Dutch equivalent cannot. Employing an acceptability judgment task, we presented speakers of Limburgian ( = 51) with recordings of sentences in Limburgian featuring , and speakers of Dutch ( = 52) with Dutch translations of these sentences featuring . All sentences featured a potential male or female antecedent embedded in a stereotypically male or female context. We found that ratings were higher for sentences in which the pronoun could refer back to the antecedent. For Limburgians, this extended to sentences mentioning female individuals. Context further modulated sentence appreciation. Possible mechanisms regarding the interpretation of as coreferential with a female individual will be discussed.

© Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap
Available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
2018-12-03
2025-04-24

  • From This Site

    /content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
    dcterms_title,dcterms_subject,pub_keyword
    -contentType:Journal -contentType:Contributor -contentType:Concept -contentType:Institution
    10
    5
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/deliver/fulltext/avt.00007.pie.html?itemId=/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie&mimeType=html&fmt=ahah

References

  1. Audacity Team
    Audacity Team 2017 Audacity(R): Free Audio Editor and Recorder [Computer program]. Version 2.2.1, retrieved fromaudacityteam.org/.
  2. Audring, Jenny
    2006 “Pronominal Gender in Spoken Dutch.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics18 (2): 85–116. 10.1017/S1470542706000043
     https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542706000043 [Google Scholar]
  3. Barbiers, Sjef C. J. , Hans J. Bennis , Gunther De Vogelaer , Magda Devos & Margreet H. van der Ham
    2006 Dynamische Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten (DynaSAND). Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut. www.meertens.knaw.nl/sand/.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Bakker, Frens
    1992 “Wie me euver vrouwluuj sprik. Zeej of het, die of det .” Veldeke67 (1): 10–15.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Barr, Dale J. , Roger Levy , Christoph Scheepers & Harry J. Tily
    2013 “Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal.” Journal of Memory and Language, 68 (3): 255–278. 10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001 [Google Scholar]
  6. Bates, Douglas , Martin Mächler , Ben Bolker & Steve Walker
    2015 “Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4.” Journal of Statistical Software67 (1): 1–48. 10.18637/jss.v067.i01
     https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01 [Google Scholar]
  7. Boersma, Paul & David Weenink
    2017 Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.36, retrieved11 November 2017fromwww.praat.org/.
  8. Braun, Friederike & Geoffrey Haig
    2010 “When are German ‘girls’ feminine? How the semantics of age influences the grammar of gender agreement.” Language in its socio-cultural context: New explorations in global, medial and gendered uses, ed. by M. Bieswanger , H. Motschenbacher and S. Mühleisen , 69–85. Tübingen: Narr.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Carreiras, Manuel , Alan Garnham , Jane Oakhill & Kate Cain
    1996 “The use of stereotypical gender information in constructing a mental model: Evidence from English and Spanish.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology49A (3): 639–663. 10.1080/713755647
     https://doi.org/10.1080/713755647 [Google Scholar]
  10. Cornips, Leonie
    2013 “Recent developments in the Limburg dialect region.” Language and space: Dutch. An international handbook of linguistic variation, ed. by F. Hinskens and J. Taeldeman , 378–399. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Corbett, Greville
    1991 Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9781139166119
     https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166119 [Google Scholar]
  12. Grondelaers, Stefan , Roeland van Hout & Mieke Steegs
    2010 “Evaluating Regional Accent Variation in Standard Dutch.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology29(1), 101–116. 10.1177/0261927X09351681
     https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351681 [Google Scholar]
  13. Kennison, Shelia M. & Jessie L. Trofe
    2003 “Comprehending pronouns: A role for word-specific gender stereotype information.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research32(3): 355–378. 10.1023/A:1023599719948
     https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023599719948 [Google Scholar]
  14. Nederlandse Voornamenbank
    Nederlandse Voornamenbank n.d. Retrieved fromhttps://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/
  15. Nieuwland, Mante S.
    2014 “‘Who’s he?’ Event-related brain potentials and unbound pronouns.” Journal of Memory and Language76: 1–28. 10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.002
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.002 [Google Scholar]
  16. Nieuwland, Mante S. & Jos J. A. van Berkum
    2006 “Individual differences and contextual bias in pronoun resolution: Evidence from ERPs.” Brain Research1118 (1): 155–167. 10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.022
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.022 [Google Scholar]
  17. Nübling, Damaris
    2015 “Between feminine and neuter, between semantic and pragmatic gender: Hybrid names in German dialects and in Luxembourgish.” Agreement from a diachronic perspective, ed. by J. Fleischer , E. Rieken and P. Widmer , 235–266. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9783110399967‑012
     https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110399967-012 [Google Scholar]
  18. van Oostendorp, Marc
    2012, February18th. “Marie z’n fiets is kapot” [Blog post]. Retrieved fromwww.neerlandistiek.nl/2012/02/marie-zn-fiets-is-kapot/onJanuary19th 2018.
  19. Osterhout, Lee & Linda A. Mobley
    1995 “Event-related brain potentials elicited by failure to agree.” Journal of Memory and Language34 (6): 739–773. 10.1006/jmla.1995.1033
     https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1995.1033 [Google Scholar]
  20. Qualtrics
    Qualtrics 2018 Qualtrics [Software]. Provo, Utah, USA.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Quené, Hugo & Huub van den Bergh
    2004 “On multi-level modeling of data from repeated measures designs: A tutorial.” Speech Communication43 (1–2): 103–121. 10.1016/j.specom.2004.02.004
     https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2004.02.004 [Google Scholar]
  22. R Core Team
    R Core Team 2018 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Schmitt, Bernadette M. , Monique Lamers & Thomas F. Münte
    2002 “Electrophysiological estimates of biological and syntactic gender violation during pronoun processing.” Cognitive Brain Research14: 333–346. 10.1016/S0926‑6410(02)00136‑2
     https://doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(02)00136-2 [Google Scholar]
  24. Schütze, Carson T. & Jon Sprouse
    2013 “Judgment data.” Research methods in linguistics, ed. by R. J. Podesva and D. Sharma , 27–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Sirin, Selcuk R. , Donald R. McCreary & James R. Mahalik
    2004 “Differential reactions to men and women’s gender role transgressions: Perceptions of social status, sexual orientation, and value dissimilarity.” The Journal of Men’s Studies12 (2): 119–132. 10.3149/jms.1202.119
     https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.1202.119 [Google Scholar]
  26. van der Sijs, Nicoline
    ed. 2011 Dialectatlas van het Nederlands. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Subbarao, K. V. & B. Lalitha Murthy
    2011 “Lexical anaphors and pronouns in Telugu.” Lexical anaphors and pronouns in selected South Asian languages: A principled typology, ed. by B. C. Lust , K. Wali , J. W. Gair and K. V. Subbarao , 217–274. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. de Vogelaer, Gunther
    2007 “De Nederlandse en Friese subjectsmarkeerders: geografie, typologie en diachronie.” Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Weijnen, A. A.
    1966 Nederlandse Dialectkunde. Assen: Van Gorcum.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Zaręba, Alfred
    (1984–5) “Osobliwa zmiana rodzaju naturalnego w dialektach polskich.” Zbornik Matice Srpske za Filologiju i Lingvistiku 17–18: 243–247.
     [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
Loading
Gender-mismatching pronouns in context
Linguistics in the Netherlands 35, 97 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
/content/journals/10.1075/avt.00007.pie
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Dutch; gender; Limburgian; possessive pronoun; stereotypes

Most Cited

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error