@article{aup:/content/journals/10.5117/TET2009.1.SCOT, author = "Scott, Alan K.", title = "Feminine gender marking using female-marking suffixes in Standard Dutch", journal= "Taal en Tongval", year = "2009", volume = "61", number = "3", pages = "165-187", doi = "https://doi.org/10.5117/TET2009.1.SCOT", url = "https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/TET2009.1.SCOT", publisher = "Amsterdam University Press", issn = "2215-1214", type = "Journal Article", abstract = "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.", }