Chapter 3 The Dutch Situation - LOT publications

The Dutch Situation
A slightly different solution is chosen in the Van Dale dictionary, which
distinguishes as many as eight different groups of nouns (again, m. stands for
mannelijk ‘masculine’ and v. for vrouwelijk ‘feminine’, while o. is short for onzijdig
‘neuter’):
– de; m (de-noun, masculine, e.g. berg ‘mountain’, chocolade ‘chocolate’)
– de; v (de-noun, feminine, e.g. gevangenis ‘prison’, universiteit ‘university’)
– de; m,v (de-noun, masculine or feminine, e.g. mens ‘human’, persoon
‘person’)
– de; v(m) (de-noun, feminine (or masculine), e.g. broek ‘trousers’, bank
‘bench/bank’)
– de, het; v(m) (de- or het-noun, feminine (or masculine), e.g. matras
‘mattress’)
– het, de; o en v (het- or de-noun, neuter or feminine, e.g. idee ‘idea’)
– het, de; o en m (het- or de-noun, neuter or masculine, e.g. aanrecht ‘kitchen
unit’, deksel ‘lid’)
– het; o (het-noun, e.g. kind ‘child’, boek ‘book’)
Here, an additional distinction is made within the group of nouns that take de as the
definite article and masculine or feminine pronouns. In reference to persons,
pronoun choice varies according to natural gender. In reference to objects,
preferences mirror differences between north and south, with the tendency of
northern speakers to masculinize former feminines. This is expressed by the label
“v(m)”.
While the Van Dale dictionary has a lengthy help topic on grammatical gender, the
current Groene Boekje does not provide any explanation for its decisions on the
issue. Its criterion is how a word “wordt ervaren en gebruikt” (‘is experienced and
used’, from the preface to the Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal online).
Unfortunately, this approach is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the written
language, the expectations are set by the normative rules of the past, which then reenter
the dictionaries as usage facts. This dilemma highlights the urgency of
research on spoken language, where one can hope to get much closer to the
speakers’ grammatical reality.
For the linguist, there are both theoretical and empirical problems with the current
official account. Theoretically, the two analyses can be criticized for treating denouns
and het-nouns differently in what is used as evidence for the gender of a noun.
Consider the de-nouns vader ‘father’, rijkdom ‘wealth, richness’ and bank
‘bench/bank’. According to the dictionaries, vader is masculine because it denotes a
male person. This is a semantic rule. Also, it takes masculine pronouns, which is a
usage fact. Rijkdom ‘wealth, richness’, by contrast, is masculine because it ends in
the suffix -dom. This is a morphological rule. Bank ‘bench/bank’, in turn, is
masculine or feminine because it is pronominalized as masculine in the north and as
feminine in the south. This is again a usage fact. So far, the choices are
understandable considering that the Dutch gender assignment system is complex and
cannot be explained on the basis of semantics or morphology alone. Yet, for het-
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