Multi-gender nouns in Old English and Contemporary Dutch: an attempt at explaining the past with the present

In the last decades there have been a lot of studies on gender renewal (Unterbeck et al. 2000; Fernández Ordoñez 2009; Fanego et al. 2011), all of them stressing the relevance of conceptual categories, like animacy and individuation, in the transition towards (more) semantic systems. All these studies mainly concern pronominal agreement strategies, while more marginal phenomena like multi-gender nouns (Corbett 1991) have been generally left aside. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap in gender studies by comparing Old English multi-gender nouns and contemporary shifts in Dutch NP-internal agreement. This comparison not only shows relevant commonalities: a closer look at the factors that determine gender variation in both systems also suggests a common explanation, i.e. multi-gender nouns as a matter of semantic-pragmatic agreement.