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Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingualism: In honor of Aafke Hulk
Edited by Elma Blom, Leonie Cornips and Jeannette Schaeffer
[Studies in Bilingualism 52] 2017
► pp. 101–126

Comparative studies of variation in the use of grammatical gender in the Danish and Dutch DP in the speech of youngsters

Free versus bound morphemes

| Meertens Instituut & Maastricht University
| University of Copenhagen

The paper reports on a cross-linguistic study on speech data produced by monolingual and bilingual Dutch and Danish teenagers. The prediction that both monolingual and bilingual Danish youngsters show less variation in grammatical gender due to more morphological input cues for gender in Danish than in Dutch is borne out. More precise results of this cross-linguistic study are that free morphemes may vary in teenagers’ actual language use in Danish whereas bound morphemes may not. Further, the teenagers produce far more common than neuter nouns in both languages and the bilinguals overuse common gender of the definite determiner in Dutch and, though demonstrably less, the indefinite determiner in Danish.

Keywords: gender assignment and agreement, morphological cues, Danish and Dutch, variation, free vs. bound morphemes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical gender in Danish and Dutch
    • 2.1Grammatical gender in general
    • 2.2Grammatical gender in Dutch
    • 2.3Grammatical gender in Danish
  • 3.Developmental factors in Dutch and Danish and the other Scandinavian languages
    • 3.1Dutch
    • 3.2Danish and other Scandinavian languages
  • 4.Methodology of the Dutch and Danish studies
    • 4.1Dutch methodology
    • 4.2Danish methodology
  • 5.The Danish results
    • 5.1The monolingual youngsters speaking Danish
    • 5.2The bilingual youngsters speaking Danish
    • 5.3Variation in gender assignment and/or agreement
  • 6.The Dutch results
  • 7.Comparison between Danish and Dutch results
    • Free morpheme versus bound morpheme
    • Danish and Dutch: Within groups
    • Danish and Dutch: Between groups
    • Neuter versus Common
    • Mono- versus bidirectional overuse
    • Danish complex DPs
  • 8.Discussion
    • 8.1Developmental factors
    • 8.2Structural perspective
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.52.06cor
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