[en] Studies on developments in pronominal gender agreement often focus on the semantic guidelines that are used to replace grammatical agreement with. However, pragmatic factors contribute to the competition between syntactic and semantic agreement as well. This paper analyzes two prominence factors contributing to the overall discourse salience of the antecedent noun and their impact on grammatical agreement in personal pronouns. First, the results will reveal that the antecedent’s referential status i.e. the assumed cognitive status the antecedent has in the mind of the addressee (cf. the Givenness Hierarchy) exerts influence on the use of gender-marked pronouns. Secondly, this study will indicate that antecedents in subject position trigger more syntactic agreement than antecedents with other grammatical functions.
Disciplines :
Languages & linguistics
Author, co-author :
De Vos, Lien ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des langues et littératures modernes > Philologie historique néerlandaise
Language :
English
Title :
On variation in gender agreement: the neutralization of pronominal gender in Dutch
Publication date :
2013
Event name :
International Workshop on Gradualness in change and its relation to synchronic variation and use
