期刊名称：Taal en Tongval: Language Variation in the Low Countries
印刷版ISSN：0039-8691
电子版ISSN：2215-1214
出版年度：2009
卷号：61
期号：1
页码：165-187
DOI：10.5117/TET2009.1.SCOT
出版社：Amsterdam University Press
摘要：This paper investigates a non-prototypical use of the Dutch suffixes which are usually attached to a noun to denote a female referent. These suffixes may also be attached to nouns whose referent cannot be described in terms of being female; rather, the nouns in question refer back to an antecedent whose referent is either a group of people or is inanimate. Based on corpus data and attestations from the web, it is concluded that this phenomenon is a non-canonical type of agreement resulting from an association between collective nouns and feminine grammatical gender. It is posited that the few cases in which reference is made to a noun with an inanimate referent may involve personification of that referent.
