diff --git a/spacy/_ml.py b/spacy/_ml.py
index 7d11b6973..0b82bbe67 100644
--- a/spacy/_ml.py
+++ b/spacy/_ml.py
@@ -416,7 +416,7 @@ def build_tagger_model(nr_class, **cfg):
         )
     model.nI = None
     model.tok2vec = tok2vec
-    model.softmax
+    model.softmax = softmax
     return model