Chapter 3 The Dutch Situation - LOT publications

The Dutch Situation
relative pronoun after the neuter noun programma ‘program’ and an instance of a
neuter gender pronoun for the common gender noun post ‘mail’.
(7) Slordig
Ik stoor me aan het groeiend aantal slordigheidsfouten in de Volkskrant.
Een willekeurige greep uit de krant woensdag 5 mei:
een reparatieprogramma die het mankement verhelpt
dat post vooral zoek raakt omdat het in de verkeerde…
‘Sloppy
I’m bothered by the increasing number of sloppy mistakes in the
Volkskrant. An arbitrary selection from the newspaper Wednesday 5 May:
a reparation program(N) that.C cures the problem
that mail(C) is getting lost because it.N [is put] in the wrong...’
(De Volkskrant 10 May 2004)
Another example is a letter published in the rubric Taalergernissen (‘language
offences’) of the periodical Onze Taal (‘Our Language’), complaining about the use
of common gender relative or demonstrative pronouns after neuter nouns. The nouns
listed by the writer are lichaamsdeel ‘body part’, vriendje ‘boyfriend.DIM’,
verkiezingsbord ‘election poster’ and het Turkse leger ‘the Turkish army’ (Onze
Taal 1/2006: 35). Neither of the cases is predicted or explained by the rules of the
ANS or the Groene Boekje.
The highest degree of public awareness is enjoyed by a phenomenon referred to as
“haar-ziekte” (‘haar-disease’), a particular usage of the feminine possessive (full
form) haar. This usage will be discussed below in section 3.1.6. Like no other, it
exemplifies the gap between spoken and written language: it is a phenomenon of
written language that goes so strongly against the speakers’ intuition that it has
attracted general attention.
The situation is very different in spontaneous speech. Cases of self-correction or of
explicit negotiation are rare. The corpus provides one amusing example:
(8) A: als je zo’n intelligente kip hebt heb je
if you such_a intelligent.C chicken(C) have have you
eigenlijk geen hok voor nodig. ‘k bedoel dan blijft ie ook
actually no cage for need I mean then stays 3.M also
wel binnen de ruimtes die je ‘m geeft.
AFF inside the spaces that you 3.M give
‘if you have such an intelligent chicken you don’t really need a run for it.
I mean then it’ll stay in the room you give it’
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