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While kinship relations in Dutch are usually introduced by a possessive determiner, Twitter users have recently been observed to use a definite article in that position. To learn more about the characteristics of this construction, we performed an exploratory investigation of the definite article possession construction with Dutch kinship terms on Twitter. We analysed 100 tweets for 24 kinship terms each, and annotated for the type of pre-nominal modifier used. Results show that the phenomenon is far from peripheral, as 13.2% of all selected tweets featured a definite article. The construction was most frequent with descending and horizontal relationship terms, and with improper kin terms (i.e. terms with a non-kin meaning at least as prominent as kinship use; Dahl & Koptsjevkaja-Tamm 2001: 202). These findings were explained by pointing to redundancy and the comical effect of distancing the construction creates.

Expressing syllable weight by moras leads to two problems. First, there are languages, such as Wolof, with long vowels and geminates, which both make a syllable bimoraic, but where only long vowels, but not geminates, count as heavy for stress. Second, there are languages in which closed syllables are light for stress, but heavy for segmental modifications (laryngeal metathesis in Cayuga and degemination in Chugach Alutiiq). It is argued that a two-layered mora model is not required and that a straightforward Harmonic Serialism is able to directly express that laryngeal metathesis and degemination make an unstressed syllable light.

This mixed-method quasi-experimental study examined whether metaconceptual grammar teaching impacts on (a) students’ L1 grammatical understanding, (b) their ‘blind’ use of grammatical concepts and (c) their preference of using explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in explaining grammatical problems. Previous research, involving single group pre-postintervention designs, found positive effects for metaconceptual interventions on secondary school students’ grammatical reasoning ability, although a negative side effect seemed to be that some students started using grammatical concepts ‘blindly’ (i.e., in an inaccurate way). While there are thus important clues that metaconceptual grammar teaching may lead to increased grammatical understanding, there is a great need for more robust empirical research. The current study, involving 196 Dutch 14-year old pre-university students, is a methodological improvement of previous work, adopting a switching replications design. Bayesian multivariate analyses indicate medium to large effects from the metaconceptual intervention on students’ grammatical understanding. The study found a similar effect of the intervention on students’ ability to use explicit grammatical concepts over everyday concepts in tackling grammatical problems. No evidence for increased ‘blind’ concept use as a negative byproduct of the intervention was found. Additional qualitative analyses of in-intervention tasks provided further evidence for the effectiveness of metaconceptual interventions, and seemed to indicate that cases of blind concept use, rather than being a negative side effect, might actually be part of a gradual process of students’ growing understanding of grammatical (meta)concepts. We discuss these findings in relation to previous work and conclude that linguistic metaconcepts can improve L1 grammatical understanding.

Contains fulltext : 252757.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 40 p.

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In this article, we investigate social meaning as a determinant of linguistic diffusion by confronting laboratory and corpus data of Citétaal, a multi-ethnolect that has spread across Flanders. In a speaker evaluation experiment, we found that Citétaal was upgraded on ‘streetwise dynamism’, even by respondents unfamiliar with its migrant origin. From this, we conclude that it is Citétaal’s third-order indexicality, pruned of ethnic associations, which carries the diffusion. To determine the relative importance of streetwise cool vis-à-vis other predictors, we studied the diffusion across Twitter of the principal Citétaal shibboleth (/s/ palatalization). As a production proxy for streetwise cool, we included expressive compensation strategies such as lengthening (verrry), which turned out to be among the main predictors of the Citétaal form. We argue that social meaning is a major change determinant, and that Twitter is the optimum source to track both a diffusion and the factors, including social meaning, which drive it. (Rapid linguistic diffusion, social meaning, streetwise prestige, speaker evaluation experiment, corpus linguistics, Twitter). online first, no volume /issue number ispartof: Language In Society vol:52 issue:2 pages:1-26 status: published

Introduction: Speech intelligibility is an important indicator of the degree of speech impairment in pathological speech. Articulation, as a key feature of dysarthria, has been found to be a stronger contributor to intelligibility of dysarthric speech compared to voice quality, nasality, and prosody. In fact, therapy addressing articulation is often used by speech-language pathologists. Since phoneme-level measures are more directly related to articulation, they may contribute to better evaluating articulation imprecision in speakers with dysarthria and to monitoring the effectiveness of therapy. Method: We collected two types of phoneme-level measures: a) Accuracy of Phonemes, the percentage of correctly transcribed phonemes, and b) Phonetic Distance, from orthographic transcriptions obtained from expert raters in two types of speech materials (i.e., meaningful sentences and word lists). We first examined the measures’ interrater reliability using Generalizability Theory. Then we studied the validity of the measures by correlating them to three criterion variables. Following this, we explored their ability in distinguishing speakers in two classification tasks according to speakers’ types (i.e., healthy vs dysarthric) and their severity levels of dysarthria, respectively. Results: The results showed that both types of phoneme-level measures are highly reliable and valid in two different speech materials. They also showed acceptable results for both classification tasks in different speech materials, with word lists performing better than meaningful sentences. The differences between the two speech materials may be largely caused by differences in word structures and contextual cues in the materials. Conclusion: The results indicate that both types of phoneme-level measures show largely similar reliability and validity in both speech materials. These measures perform better in word lists than in meaningful sentences, suggesting an advantage for using word lists in clinical practice and research. On the other hand, meaningful sentences can be used for classifying healthy and dysarthric speakers. Our results suggest that using different speech materials gives a better overview of the speakers’ intelligibility at the segmental level and the implications of their articulation impairments. &nbsp

Contains fulltext : 292301.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Radboud University, 16 mei 2023 Promotores : Hinskens, F.L.M.P., Oostendorp, M. van 443 p.

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

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Contains fulltext : 253705.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Dutch language constructions like groter als and hele mooie auto may seem wrong, but are they really? As Marten van der Meulen’s PhD research reveals, twentieth-century Dutch grammar books show considerable variation in the evaluation of language issues. What’s wrong to one person is right to another. Linguistic issues can also develop differently, with language experts become stricter or more relaxed over time. These books appear to have a more complex relationship with actual language use than is often assumed. Statements like ‘this is becoming commonplace’ and ‘this is normal in everyday language’ tend to miss the mark. However, one case study on language rules and their application in Dutch parliamentary reports point to a link between language use and language rules. Attitude also plays a complicated role in this, which makes this dissertation an important starting point for re-evaluating the complex interplay between language norms, language use and language attitude. Radboud University, 16 januari 2023 Promotores : Sijs, N. van der, Hoop, H. de vii, 259 p.

How many dialects were spoken in nineteenth-century Amsterdam? In his Algemeen Nederduitsch en Friesch Dialecticon (1874) Johan Winkler stated, after consultation with Jan ter Gouw, that in 19th-century Amsterdam 19 different dialects could be distinguished. This article investigates whether it is possible to find evidence for this assertion in the surviving language material. For this purpose all language phenomena mentioned in 57 sources up till the mid-twentieth century have been put into a database, with information on the neighbourhood where they were used, and other metadata. The resulting database contains 9000 language phenomena of which around 4000 could be linked to a specific neighbourhood. From this it appeared that the number of 19 dialects mentioned by Winkler and Ter Gouw is an exaggeration: on the basis of the available linguistic information, we can only distinguish 5 of the 19 dialects mentioned by them. Next to these, however, we can distinguish a dialect not mentioned by Winkler and Ter Gouw, that of the higher classes (spoken along the Herengracht and Keizersgracht), and 5 sociolects or technical jargons: the Bargoens of thieves and tramps, the jargons of diamond workers, dock-workers, street musicians and players of bingo. Around 1900 the variation is reduced and the dialects gradually merged into a more or less uniform Amsterdam city dialect, due to mobility of labour.

In this article we rely on accent evaluation to test the ‘intersectional invisibility hypothesis’1 that social cognition about men (but not women) is overrepresented in group-level beliefs.2 As a case in point, we investigate the evaluation of male and female Moroccan accents to gain insight into impression formation of Muslims in the Netherlands, and to find out whether stereotypical qualities associated with Moroccan-Dutch people, such as aggressive, macho, and criminal, are in fact associated with Moroccan-Dutch men. Two matched-guise experiments featuring regional and ethnic accents of Dutch (one with male speakers, one with female speakers) confirm the intersectional invisibility hypothesis, but the inclusion of traditional and modern prestige measures in accent evaluation research results in arguably richer stereotype and prejudice accounts, and in this sense, the present investigation adds nuance and shade to Gloria Wekker’s (2016) pessimistic account of racism in Dutch society. Male Moroccan-Dutch speech is strongly deprecated and is always deemed inferior to indigenous speech; at the same time it is also found to be the most dynamically prestigious of all accents. Female Moroccan-Dutch speech does not engender extreme reactions, but it is not regarded as dynamic either and a long way from being accepted as indigenous speech.

Contains fulltext : 288876.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Interspeech, 18 september 2022

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Traditional L1 grammar teaching focuses on students’ learning the correct grammar rules rather than learning how to deal with grammatical issues in real life. This is mainly due to the fact that tr...

Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α

Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This is potentially problematic, since relevant syntactic indices may not be the same across languages. The current study is the first to explore which syntactic features predict text quality in Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative writing. In order to do so, the quality of 125 argumentative essays written by students was rated and the syntactic features of the texts were analyzed. A multilevel regression analysis was then used to investigate which features contribute to text quality. The resulting model (explaining 14.5% of the variance in text quality) shows that the relative number of finite clauses and the ratio between the number of relative clauses and the number of finite clauses positively predict text quality. Discrepancies between our findings and those of previous studies indicate that the relations between syntactic features and text quality may vary based on factors such as language and genre. Additional (cross-linguistic) research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of the relationships between syntactic constructions and text quality and the potential moderating role of language and genre.

Knowledge about Language (KaL) is an important part of L1 language education around the world. A controversial part of KaL is grammatical or syntactic knowledge, i.e., knowledge about the form, meaning and use of sentences and phrases. In the current international discourse on L1 grammar teaching, grammar is principally motivated by the desire to enhance students’ literacy development, befitting the communicative turn in mother tongue education and following high quality research which has shown that contextualized grammar teaching can impact on students’ writing development. However, there are also other potentially meaningful reasons to teach grammar, which remain underresearched and underdiscussed in curriculum discussions: (1) the general importance of language justifies that L1 speakers understand how their language works; (2) grammar teaching provides more insight into the workings of the human mind; (3) grammar teaching can be used to facilitate students’ reasoning and stimulate their critical thinking abilities. These reasons for teaching grammar do not necessarily relate to literacy development; rather, they pertain to a general conceptual importance of knowledge about grammar. This paper explores these arguments and argues, partly based on empirical evidence from recent research, that knowledge-related rationales deserve a more prominent place in curriculum discussions about grammar teaching.

There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker’s ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions.

Item does not contain fulltext S. Aalberse Heritage languages. A language contact approach Amsterdam:John Benjamins ,2019 9789027204714

To compare the incidence of respiratory symptoms and short-term consequences between children with Down syndrome and children from the general population, we conducted a prospective parent-reported observational study. Children with Down syndrome (≤ 18 years) were included between March 2012 and June 2014. Caregivers received a baseline questionnaire with follow-up 1–2 years after inclusion. Caregivers received a weekly questionnaire about respiratory symptoms, fever, antibiotic prescriptions, doctor’s visits, and consequences for school and work attendance. Children with Down syndrome were compared to a cohort of the general population (“Kind en Ziek” study) with similar weekly questionnaires. A total of 9,011 childweeks were reported for 116 participants with Down syndrome (75% response rate). The frequency of respiratory symptoms was higher in children with Down syndrome than in children from the general population (30% vs 15.2%). In addition, symptoms subsided later (around 8 vs 5 years of age). The seasonal influence was limited, both in children with Down syndrome and children from the general population. Consequences of respiratory disease were significant in children with Down syndrome compared to children from the general population, with a higher rate of doctor’s visits (21.3% vs 11.8%), antibiotic prescriptions (47.8% vs 26.3%), and absenteeism from school (55.5% vs 25.4%) and work (parents, 9.4% vs 8.1%). Conclusion: Children with Down syndrome have a higher frequency of respiratory symptoms and symptoms last until a later age, confirming the impression of professionals and caregivers. Individualized treatment plans might prevent unfavorable consequences of chronic recurrent respiratory disease in children with Down syndrome. What is Known:• Children with Down syndrome have an altered immune system and are prone to a more severe course of respiratory tract infections.• The overall conception is that patients with Down syndrome suffer from respiratory tract infections more often. What is New:• Children with Down syndrome suffer from respiratory symptoms more frequently than children from the general population.• The respiratory symptoms in children with Down syndrome subside at a later age compared to children from the general population.

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Contains fulltext : 253710.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Radboud University, 26 september 2022 Promotores : Strik, H., Hout, R.W.N.M. van Co-promotor : Härmä, A. xi, 224 p.

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Contains fulltext : 289672.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) We studied German students’ academic writing skills in English at a Dutch university. Their performances are typical examples of English as a lingua franca (ELF) as these students are non-native users of English evaluated by subject lecturers who are non-native users as well. Our database is a corpus of written answers to an open examination question in the context of an EMI (English Medium Instruction) bachelor in psychology. We aimed to detect those characteristics in this specific type of discourse that may affect the comprehensibility of the students’ answers, which in turn may have consequences for their grading by the course lecturer. English language experts assigned Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels and commented on grammar, use of (academic) vocabulary, and text coherence. First, we correlated the grades assigned by the course lecturer and the CEFR levels. There was no correlation. Second, we analyzed the linguistic comments. We found that academic style was poorly present in this type of text. Importantly, we found no proof of communicative blockings or obstacles related to English proficiency levels between the student writer and the lecturer reader. We conclude that informed content interpretation based on contextual appropriateness of the answers overrules grammatical and lexical non-standard characteristics and outweighs the lack of semantic coherence. 08 februari 2023 24 p.

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Contains fulltext : 287414.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 05 december 2022 9 p.

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Contains fulltext : 252767.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) This article re-examines the evidence for OV and VO variation and the loss of OV order in historical English, and presents a novel and unified analysis of Old and Middle English word order based on a uniform VO grammar, with leftward scrambling of specific types of objects. This analysis provides an insightful framework for a precise analysis of how OV word orders differ from VO word orders. We show in detail (following up Struik & van Kemenade 2020) that OV with referential objects involves discourse-given objects. We then present a phase-based analysis from a VO base in which objects undergo feature-driven movement to spec,vP triggered by the information structure of the object. We propose that this analysis also yields a syntactic framework for analysing the derivation of preverbal quantified and negated objects, as well as a natural explanation for the stepwise loss of OV word order. 09 maart 2022

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R-pronouns are R-words which feature as pronouns in prepositional phrases (among other things). They are common in Dutch and German (e.g., D. daarmee, G. damit, lit. ‘therewith’, ‘with that’, D. erna, G. danach, lit. ‘hereafter’, ‘after this’). This contribution concerns a quantitative study of variation in R-pronouns in modern Moroccan and Turkish ethnolectal Dutch. In conversational speech of bilingual speakers of Moroccan Dutch, Turkish Dutch and two groups of monolingual ‘white’ Dutch (one of them being the control group), R-pronouns appear to vary in three dimensions: the R-pronoun can or cannot be realized (with the latter option violating the norms of Dutch); if it is realized, the R-pronoun and the preposition can or cannot be split (both options conform the norms of Standard Dutch), if the R-pronoun is not realized, then either another pronoun is used instead or there is no substitute (both variants violate the norms of Dutch). For all three dimensions of variation, statistical analyses were carried out, starting from a total of 1160 realizations by 52 representatives of the four groups. The analyses involved three internal parameters and four social ones. The results serve to answer research questions concerning the origin of the variation, its place in the verbal repertoires and the social spread of the variation.

Contains fulltext : 252769.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 18 p.

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