This paper discusses the problem of gender agreement in Dutch, arising from the loss of gender markers and resulting in different gender values for nouns and pronouns. On the basis of corpus data from spontaneous speech, the study shows that Dutch pronominal gender is undergoing a functional reinterpretation according to the degree of individuation of the referent. In addition to the antecedent's lexical gender, this conceptual property governs the agreement behavior of personal, possessive, and relative pronouns. Special attention is given to the competition between semantic and syntactic gender agreement and to parallel phenomena in other Germanic languages.Many thanks to Geert Booij, Grev Corbett, Edith Moravcsik, Monika Schmid, Hans Olav Enger, Caroline Sandström, Pieter van Reenen, Frans Hinskens, Florian Haas, and two anonymous referees for comments on versions of this article, to Andrew Spencer for discussion, and to my colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for additional data. The usual disclaimers apply.

The present paper addresses the issue of spoken features in older and younger runic inscriptions, particularly in the Blekinge group of the seventh century. Despite the general expectation of “high” style, it is argued that runic inscriptions represent a continuum of different styles and registers. The present analysis corroborates the claim that runic writing receives no special status among alphabetic writing systems, and that runic texts constitute no exception to the general rule of textual variation. A strong case is provided by the Bekinge curse formula of Stentoften and Björketorp, whose affinity with oral speech is signalled by a series of stylistic and linguistic features.A related lecture entitled “Der Problemkreis der Übergangsinschriften im Lichte neuerer Forschungsbeiträge” was held at the Academy of Science in Oslo on September 4, 2004. In addition to the audience at this presentation and two anonymous JGL reviewers, I owe thanks to Heinrich Beck, Klaus Düwel, Henrik Williams, James E. Knirk, Jan Terje Faarlund, Wolfgang Dressler, and Paul Kerswill for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.