"Gender" puzzels

The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that
started out with intriguing facts from the fi eld of Dutch child language, showing
that children -at a certain stage- have recourse to a default determiner in what
seemed to make part of their way towards acquiring grammatical gender. By
attempting to get grip on the facts, we soon came across the notion of "neuter"
-since Dutch is a language that does not make the familiar distinction between
masculine and feminine nouns, but instead opposes nous that are non neuter
to nouns that are neuter. Moreover, we run into related puzzling facts opposing
adult and child Dutch. In this article, we will show that the Dutch gender system
is not only driven by purely grammatical features, but that other factors have
to be taken into account as well. The starting point for our discussion is recent
work by Carme Picallo, who argues that neuter pronouns in languages like
Spanish and Catalan do not represent a third gender class -next to masculine
and feminine pronouns- but instead are elements that lack grammatical gender
and number. We will investigate whether Picallo’s hypothesis is interesting for
a language like Dutch as well. In the fi rst part of this article, we will show that
this question can be answered positively, and we will show which new questions
are raised as a consequence. In the second part of this article, we will show that
acquisition data of het by Dutch children give support in favour of the hypothesis
under investigation.