Referential personal pronouns are sensitive to the nominal features number, person and gender (cf. Section 15.1.1), but this is not sufficient to give a complete classification of these pronouns; other criteria are also involved. A first division of the pronouns can be made by appealing to number and person: all referential personal pronouns have a singular and a plural form and are marked as either first, second or third person. Third-person pronouns are further divided into three groups based on gender: masculine, feminine and neuter. To arrive at a complete classification, we need to make three additional distinctions. First, there are two case forms: the (nominative) subject form and the (accusative/dative) object form. Second, there is a distinction between the strong (phonetically non-reduced) and weak (phonetically reduced) forms of the pronoun. Finally, there is a distinction between the regular and honorific (polite) form of the second-person pronouns. The full set of personal pronouns is given in Table 7; the object form is also used as the complement of a preposition.

		singular				plural
		subject		object		subject		object
		strong	weak	strong	weak	strong	weak	strong	weak
1st person		ik	’k	mij	me	wij	we	ons	—
2nd person	regular	jij	je	jou	je	jullie	—	jullie	—
	honorific	u		u		u		u
3rd person	masculine	hij	-ie	hem	’m	zij	ze	henacc hundat	ze
	feminine	zij	ze	haar	(d)’r
	neuter	?het	’t	*?het	’t

Many southern varieties of Dutch use the second-person subject form gij/ge instead of jij/je and jullie; in other varieties of Dutch the use of gij/ge is considered archaic. The form uyou is used by all speakers as an honorific subject pronoun, but speakers who use gij/ge can also use u as a regular second-person object form. See Haeseryn et al. (1997:243ff.) and Barbiers et al. (2005:§2) for more detailed discussions.

The conventions regulating the regular and honorific forms of the second-person pronouns are subject to subjective, social, and regional variation. In general, the use of the honorific form reflects a difference in social status or age, but it may also reflect a lack of intimacy. The honorific form uyou originated as a third-person singular pronoun, which is still reflected in its present-day agreement behavior. That uyou is still syntactically singular is clear from the fact that it is never combined with a plural verb: apart from the honorific meaning aspect, the two examples in (324) can be used in the same context, but trigger a different number marking on the finite verb.

That uyou is syntactically third person is suggested by the examples in (325). The (a)-examples first show that the singular second-person pronoun jij/je can trigger a -t ending on the finite verb in the present tense, but only if it precedes it; if it follows it, the ending is zero. The pronoun u in the (b)-examples, on the other hand, patterns with the singular third-person pronouns in that it always triggers the -t ending.

That the honorific pronoun is syntactically third person is especially clear from the fact that it can be the antecedent of the third-person reflexive pronoun zich(zelf); cf. Section 19.2.1.5, sub I.

However, the finite form of certain irregular verbs can sometimes be the same as the form used for second-person subjects. This is clearest in the case of the verb zijnto be in (327a), where the original third-person form U is ... feels somewhat obsolete and is usually replaced by the third-person form U bent ...; cf. taaladvies.net/u-heeft-of-hebt/. The use of the third person form is also possible as a perhaps slightly marked option with hebbento have in (327b); cf. taaladvies.net/u-heeft-of-hebt/. Similar variations can be found with several modal verbs

Example (328) shows that the use of a second-person form of the finite verb does not block the use of a third-person reflexive.

The variation between the older third-person form and the more recent second-person form has received a lot of attention in various language tutorials/services; cf. the taaladvies.net pages mentioned above for references.

In addition to the forms in Table 7, there is the [+human] pronoun menone, which can only be used as the subject of a finite clause. The examples in (329) show that this pronoun is used when the speaker cannot (or does not want to) identify the referent of the subject properly, or when he wants to make a general statement. The inflection on the finite verbs shows that men is formally a third-person singular pronoun, and the fact that the possessive zijnhis in (329b) can take men as its antecedent shows that the latter is formally masculine or neuter.

The pronoun men is somewhat formal and is mainly used in written language. In speech, there are two alternatives for (329a) that allow the speaker to conceal the identity of the source of information: either the weak plural subject pronoun zethey, as in (330a), or a passive construction such as (330b).

The non-referential, “semi-existential” use of ze seems more or less restricted to verbs with agentive subjects, like inbrekento burgle and plagento tease in the (a)-examples in (331); examples such as (331b) with an unaccusative verb like arriverento arrive seem only compatible with a referential reading of the pronoun. Note, however, that the judgments on the corresponding imperfect constructions seem less clear; cf. Vanden Wyngaerd (1994:§4.2).

Example (332a) shows that generic statements of the kind in (329b) usually contain the weak singular second-person pronoun jeone in speech. Descriptive statements such as (331a&a'), however, do not seem to allow this non-referential reading of je; the referential reading is clearly the prominent one in the (b)-examples in (332).

Referential personal pronouns are normally used when the speaker assumes that the addressee will be able to identify the intended referent without the aid of a noun phrase with more descriptive content. In order to identify the referent, the addressee can use clues from both the linguistic and non-linguistic context. At least three subcases can be distinguished: deictic, anaphoric and bound pronouns. We will discuss these in the following subsections and conclude with a brief remark on so-called impersonal het.

The anaphoric use of the referential personal pronoun means that the situation in which the sentence is uttered is not sufficient for the addressee to establish the intended referent, but that more information about the activated domain of discourse is needed. This information may be part of the shared knowledge of the speaker and the addressee. Thus, the referent set of the plural pronoun wijwe may vary with the activated domain of discourse: when discussing domestic matters, wij may refer to the speaker and his family, in a commercial setting wij may refer to the speaker and the company he is affiliated with, and when discussing an incident in the pub, wij may refer to the speaker and his friends. And, of course, something similar applies to the plural pronoun jullieyou.

Sometimes anaphoric pronouns are modified to allow the addressee to establish the intended referent set of the pronoun. Some typical examples, adapted from the internet, are given in (334). Note that in these cases the pronoun cannot appear in its reduced form.

The referent set of the plural pronouns wij and jullie can be determined by the preceding linguistic contexts. If the speaker is telling a story about Marie and himself, he can refer to this discourse topic with the pronoun wij. And naturally, when the addressee takes over, he will use the pronoun jullie to refer to the same discourse topic. This is shown in (335a). Third-person referential personal pronouns are often used in this anaphoric way; a typical example is het in (335b).

A referential personal pronoun is bound if it has a c-commanding antecedent in the same sentence. In speech, bound pronouns typically occur in their weak (phonetically reduced) form, but this is not usually reflected in the written form of the language, where the use of the strong form is dominant; this is true even when there is a generally accepted orthographic weak form, as in the case of wij/wewe, jij/jeyou and zij/zeshe. Consider the examples in (336), where the unmarked interpretations of the pronouns in speech are indicated by indices; the use of number signs expresses that coindexing of Jan and the pronoun may be acceptable in contrastive contexts.

In example (336a), the strong pronoun hijhe can only be used to refer to a contextually determined person. This is also possible in (336a') with the reduced pronoun -ie, but in addition this example allows a reading in which the noun phrase Jan functions as the antecedent of the pronoun. Something similar holds for the object pronouns in the (b)-examples: the strong pronoun hem is normally construed as referring to a contextually determined person (although it seems possible to override this by assigning contrastive accent to the pronoun), while the weak pronoun ’m can easily be construed as coreferential with the subject of the matrix clause. In the following examples, we no longer indicate whether the pronoun is weak or strong, but follow the orthographic convention.

Example (337a) shows that binding opens up new possibilities for the interpretation of the pronoun when we are dealing with universally quantified antecedents. In this example the universally quantified pronoun iedereeneveryone and the referential personal pronoun are part of the same sentence. This sentence allows two readings: one in which the personal pronoun refers to a contextually determined person, and one in which it refers to the people getting coffee; cf. Higginbotham (1980). The latter reading is called the bound variable reading, since the pronoun behaves as a variable bound by the universal quantifier expressed by iedereeneveryone. A more or less formal representation of this reading is given in (337b), where the referential pronoun is represented by the second variable x.

There are several kinds of restrictions on the bound variable reading of referential pronouns. For example, the pronoun is usually masculine: the subject pronoun hij cannot be replaced by its feminine counterpart zij unless the universally quantified phrase is headed by a head noun denoting female persons (although this restriction is often lifted in politically correct speech).

As already mentioned, personal pronouns with a bound variable reading cannot carry word accent: in speech, the weak referential pronoun zeshe in (338b) cannot be replaced by its strong counterpart zij, and the pronoun hijhe in (338a) must be pronounced as [i], i.e. cannot be realized phonetically in its strong form [hεi]. The same holds for the object pronoun hem in (339a), which cannot be realized in its strong form [hεm], but must be pronounced in its phonetically reduced form [əm]. For completeness’ sake, we show that the same holds for possessive pronouns with a bound variable reading: zijnhis in (339b) must be pronounced as [zən], i.e. cannot be realized in its strong form [zεin].

A restriction of a syntactic nature is that the bound variable reading cannot arise when the universally quantified expression and the referential pronoun are in separate sentences; the referential personal pronoun hijhe in examples such as (340a) can only refer to a contextually determined person. We can refer to the chattering people by using the plural pronoun zethey as in (340b), but this will not lead to the bound variable reading; the plural pronoun refers to the chattering people as a group, which is also clear from the fact that the pronoun zij can be accented, i.e. need not be pronounced in its phonetically reduced form [zə], but can also be accented, i.e. pronounced in its phonetically full form [zεi].

More specifically, the bound variable reading in (337b) requires that the quantifier c-commands the referential pronoun: this predicts not only that the two pronouns in (337a) cannot be swapped, but also that the quantifier cannot be embedded in e.g. the subject of the matrix clause. That these predictions are correct is shown by the fact that the two examples in (341) do not allow a bound variable reading, i.e. the referential personal pronoun can only refer to a contextually determined person.

The bound variable reading is also ruled out if the quantifier and the referential pronoun are too close together: they are not allowed to be co-arguments, and as a result the referential pronoun in (342a) can only refer to a contextually determined person. This restriction need not surprise us, since referential pronouns can never be bound by a co-argument: binding of co-arguments is only possible if we replace the referential pronoun by a reflexive one; cf. Chapter 23 for further discussion.

While most pronouns are normally used with a clear referential function, the third-person singular neuter pronoun can sometimes lack such reference. This is typically the case in “weather” contexts like (343).

Furthermore, impersonal het occurs in numerous more or less fixed expressions. Two examples, adapted from Haeseryn et al. (1997:259), are given in (344).

Another typical non-referential use is the use of het as an anticipatory pronoun, i.e. in its syntactic function as a “placeholder” of a clausal complement. Given that het triggers R-pronominalization when it functions as the complement of a preposition, it is not surprising that the pronominal part of the PP er ... P has a similar impersonal use.

What the above examples have in common is that none of the occurrences of het can be replaced by a noun phrase or another pronoun.

As discussed in Subsection II, the singular first-person pronoun is used to refer to the speaker, while the plural is used to refer to a referent set that includes the speaker (and possibly the addressee). The singular second-person pronoun is used to refer to the addressee, while the plural is used when there is more than one addressee or to refer to a referent set that includes the addressee (but not the speaker). Third-person pronouns always exclude the speaker and the addressee. Table 8 illustrates this for subject pronouns; the elements between square brackets indicate whether the reference set refers to the speaker(s) [1], the addressee [2], or entities that are neither speaker nor addressee [3]. The plural first-person pronoun wij is often called inclusive when it also refers to the addressee, and exclusive when the addressee is not included.

	singular		plural
1st person	ik ‘I’	[1]	wij ‘we’ (exclusive) wij ‘we’ (inclusive) wij ‘we’ (exclusive)	[1] [1,2] [1,3]
2nd person	jij ‘you’	[2]	jullie ‘you’	[2] or [2,3]
3rd person	hij/zij/het ‘he/she/it’	[3]	zij ‘they’	[3]

The traditional view is that third-person singular pronouns are sensitive to the gender of their antecedent: normally, the masculine pronoun is used when the noun denoting the set containing the intended referent of the pronoun is also masculine, and the same is true for feminine and neuter pronouns. Note, however, that for many, especially northern speakers, the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns is declining, so that masculine pronouns are often used where the dictionary says only a feminine pronoun would be appropriate. This means that other factors are involved in determining the choice of gender features of the pronoun.

The examples in (346) show that considerations of sex can override considerations of syntactic gender. Although the noun meisje in (346a) takes the article het and is therefore formally a neuter noun, most speakers would find it odd to use the neuter pronoun het to refer to it; the feminine pronoun zijshe is the one normally used. Similarly, despite the fact that the noun phrase de huisartsthe GP in (346b) is headed by a masculine noun, the feminine pronoun zij can be felicitously used, provided that the participants in the discourse know that the referent of the noun phrase is a woman.

Other factors may also be relevant. For example, there seems to be a tendency in both spoken and written language to refer to institutional bodies with feminine pronouns even when the noun is neuter; cf. Haeseryn (1997:162) and De Vos (2009). An example of this kind is given in (347).

Furthermore, corpus research by Audring (2009) has shown that, at least in colloquial speech, pronouns are used as indicated in (348). This shows that the system in which pronouns and their antecedents must exhibit syntactic agreement is gradually being replaced by a system in which the gender of the pronoun is determined by certain semantic properties of the antecedent.

The plural third-person pronoun is normally used to refer to a plural noun phrase. However, when a singular noun phrase is headed by a collective noun referring to a set, as with mass nouns like politiepolice or collective nouns like groepgroup, the plural pronoun is commonly used. This again shows that the syntactic agreement system is gradually being replaced by a more semantically based system.

Although the use of the weak forms is preferred in speech, the strong form is generally used in written text (a convention we follow in our examples when the distinction between weak and strong forms is not important). In speech, the strong form is more or less restricted to contrastive contexts, unless of course there is no weak form available: in standard Dutch, this applies to all forms of the honorific pronoun uyou, the subject and object form of the second-person plural pronoun jullieyou, and the object form of the first-person plural pronoun onsus; cf. Table 7.

Topicalized phrases are usually stressed. As a result, topicalized object pronouns must have the strong form; topicalization of a weak object pronoun results in a degraded result. Some examples are given in (354).

The third-person neuter object pronoun het is special in that it is usually pronounced in its reduced form ’t and therefore resists accent. The only exceptions are cases such as Ze hebben ’t/het gedaanThey had sex, where the strong pronoun het receives contrastive accent and refers to a sexual activity, especially the act of copulation; the weak pronoun can also refer as a regular deictic pronoun. Example (355) shows that, because of this special property, the third-person neuter object pronoun never occurs in the clause-initial position.

The requirement that the clause-initial constituent be stressed does not apply to subjects: both weak and strong pronouns can be used in the clause-initial position. As a result, the neuter subject pronoun het in (356c') differs from the object pronoun het in that it is possible in the clause-initial position.

A special case is the weak third-person masculine subject pronoun -iehe, which cannot appear in the clause-initial position. This is probably due to the fact that it forms a phonological unit with its preceding element: note that if the preceding element ends in a vowel, as in (357c), an intervocalic -d- appears.

The weak feminine form of the third-person singular object pronoun has two allomorphs: ’r and d’r. The alternation is mainly conditioned phonologically: ’r is used after non-nasal consonants; d’r is used after schwa; after nasal consonants, tensed vowels and diphthongs the two forms seem to alternate freely. Note that lax vowels occur mainly in closed syllables and are therefore not relevant here.

The use of the strong form is also semantically restricted. While the (a)-examples in (359) show that the strong third-person plural pronouns can refer to [+animate] referents, the (b)-examples show that they cannot refer to [-animate] referents; in order to refer to an inanimate referent, the weak form ze must be used. This is true for both subject and object pronouns, although the effect is weaker for the former.

With the singular third subject pronouns there also seems to be a tendency to use the weak form, although this tendency is not so strong that the use of a strong form to refer to an inanimate referent leads to unacceptability; if the subject pronoun is masculine and occupies the clause-initial position, using the strong form is even the only option since the reduced form -ie cannot be used here.

Many speakers of standard Dutch no longer make a systematic distinction between masculine and feminine nouns and would not use the feminine pronoun zij/ze in an example such as (360a), but would use the masculine pronoun hij instead. Although such speakers readily allow the strong pronoun hij to refer to [-human] entities, they still prefer the use of the weak object pronoun ’m to the strong form hem: the use of the latter in (361) suggests that the speaker has put a person in the refrigerator.

Haeseryn et al. (1997:243) report that the reduced object pronoun ’r/d’r is never used to refer to non-human antecedents; speakers who still distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns use the phonologically light form ze for this purpose. For these speakers we find the pattern in (362): ’r/d’r can only be used to refer to female persons, whereas ze can be used to refer to both persons and objects. Speakers who do not distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns never use ze as a singular pronoun (hence the % sign).

There are a number of syntactic environments in which weak pronouns cannot occur. Generally, these are contexts in which the pronoun must be stressed; cf. the discussion of topicalized object pronouns in Subsection B.

This subsection discusses some special uses of the referential personal pronouns. We begin with the use of the second-person singular subject pronoun je and the third-person plural subject pronoun ze as generic pronouns. This is followed by a discussion of the use of the first-person plural pronoun wewe to address the addressee. We conclude with some remarks on the emphatic pronoun ikkeI.