A pronominal view of gender agreement

In modern linguistic theory, grammatical genders are seen as agreement classes. Agreement is the primary evidence for how many genders a language has and which nouns belong to which gender. Yet, agreement behaviour is not always straightforward: languages show inconsistencies, mismatches and variation. This article focuses on gender agreement on pronouns, the most problematic of all agreement targets. With the help of data from modern spoken Dutch, a language that abounds in pronominal mismatches and variation, theoretical assumptions about gender and agreement are discussed, in particular the notion “hybrid”.