This paper seeks to find the best linguistic analysis of the German semispecified, productive pattern N hin, N her (for example, Krieg hin, Krieg her, es muss eine gute Show werden ‘War or no war, it must be a good show’). The basic question is whether the properties of N hin, N her can be accounted for in a rule-based approach or whether they are to be regarded as idiosyncratic properties of this construction. One of the characteristic features of N hin, N her is the identity of the nouns. This raises the question of whether or not N hin, N her is an instance of syntactic reduplication. It is shown that rule-based copying accounts fail when they are applied to the case of N hin, N her. The paper argues for an alternative, constructionist account of N hin, N her, which is able to cover both regular and idiosyncratic aspects of the construction in a systematic fashion. However, the paper goes beyond a standard constructionist account by also arguing that the idiosyncratic features of the construction can be further explained if one takes into account general pragmatic principles. This requires a theory that incorporates a systematic interface with pragmatics.*

This paper presents the results of a corpus study of pronominal gender agreement in Middle Dutch. In present-day Dutch and in several other Germanic varieties, pronouns show semantic gender agreement that is based on the degree of individuation of the referent. Dutch pronouns show variation between this type of agreement and lexical gender agreement. This study investigates how old semantic agreement based on individuation is. In particular, it aims to answer the question of whether semantic agreement has developed in response to the change from the Germanic three-gender system to a two-gender system or dates back to before this change. The results show that agreement based on individuation already existed in Middle Dutch, when the original three-gender system was still in place. This shows that this type of agreement did not develop in response to the change from three to two nominal genders. The semantic interpretation of the genders along the lines of individuation apparently existed already and could be an old Germanic, possibly Indo-European, feature. What seems to have changed over time is the proportion of semantic to lexical agreement, as semantic agreement appears to occur more frequently in present-day Dutch than in Middle Dutch. This shift in agreement preference may be due to the loss of adnominal gender marking and the resulting reduced visibility of lexical gender in the noun phrase.