Over the centuries, the French language has had a lot of influence on the Dutch language. Thousands of words from French entered Dutch and apart from that, Dutch has borrowed morphological... Show moreOver the centuries, the French language has had a lot of influence on the Dutch language. Thousands of words from French entered Dutch and apart from that, Dutch has borrowed morphological elements such as suffixes from French. Moreover, it is assumed that the popularity of certain Dutch morphosyntactic constructions can be attributed to language contact with French. Despite the fact that histories of Dutch often speak of so-called ‘Frenchification’ because of these French influences, hardly any empirical research has been carried out so far on the actual influence of French on Dutch. The aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the influence that French had on the Dutch language between 1500 and 1900. This is done by means of corpus analyses with the diachronic Language of Leiden corpus, which comprises texts from Leiden from different social domains. The corpus analyses aim to trace the language changes in Dutch as a consequence of language contact with French on three language levels: lexicon, morphology, and morphosyntax. In this way, this thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical language contact between Dutch and French. Show less
Prospective (also known as proximative, imminent or pre-inchoative) aspect presents some subsequent situation as imminent while underspecifying its realization. An English example is be about to,... Show moreProspective (also known as proximative, imminent or pre-inchoative) aspect presents some subsequent situation as imminent while underspecifying its realization. An English example is be about to, as in ‘I am about to leave’. Dutch has several expressions tied to this semantics, including op het punt staan ‘lit. stand on the point: be about to’. This squib presents the first exploration of this type of viewpoint aspect in Dutch. Drawing on corpus data, I show that there are at least six prospective patterns in Dutch, and discuss (i) the source structures their prospective meaning derives from, (ii) the restrictions they impose on their complement, and (iii) their interaction with the perfect. Show less
In linguistic research, present-day Dutch has been characterized as a pluricentric language, meaning that there are multiple centers from where language norms spread. Within the Dutch language area... Show moreIn linguistic research, present-day Dutch has been characterized as a pluricentric language, meaning that there are multiple centers from where language norms spread. Within the Dutch language area, we can discern a center in the Northern Netherlands (the Randstad area) and the Southern Netherlands (around the province of Brabant). Traditional histories of the language suggest that pluricentricity for Dutch is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. However, based on findings from empirical historical-linguistic research, we could expect to situate pluricentricity at least 100 years earlier in time. This dissertation therefore provides an in-depth study in which pluricentricity is put into a broader historical perspective.Through systematic corpus analyses, this dissertation aims to assess the usefulness of the modern concept of pluricentricity in Dutch language history. A total of six linguistic features is examined in the Historical Corpus of Dutch (HCD), a new multi-genre, diachronic corpus, involving central and peripheral regions in both the North and the South. Moreover, by integrating Northern and Southern varieties of Dutch in the study, and by mapping the interactions between the different regions, we want to lay the foundation for an integrated history of Dutch. Show less
In this article, I discuss a piece of occassional poetry commemorating a treaty concluded between the city of Ghent and the episcopal court of Tournai in 1439. The short poem is found in a... Show moreIn this article, I discuss a piece of occassional poetry commemorating a treaty concluded between the city of Ghent and the episcopal court of Tournai in 1439. The short poem is found in a collection of official documents, now kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It was first copied in Dutch after which a second user (probably a native speaker of Dutch) added a French translation. Show less
This chapter focuses on translation in the Low Countries from c. 500 CE to 1550 CE. While the focus is on literary translation from Latin and French into Dutch, there is also attention for... Show moreThis chapter focuses on translation in the Low Countries from c. 500 CE to 1550 CE. While the focus is on literary translation from Latin and French into Dutch, there is also attention for translation into French and Latin, devotional and religious texts, practical 'Artes' literature, and the translation of official documents. Show less
The phoneme /h/ is absent in French and its acquisition has been described as being difficult for second language learners of Dutch, a language with /h/ in its phoneme inventory. In this study,... Show moreThe phoneme /h/ is absent in French and its acquisition has been described as being difficult for second language learners of Dutch, a language with /h/ in its phoneme inventory. In this study, several factors were examined that may affect the production of /h/ by Belgian-French learners of Dutch. Specifically, the factors included in this exploratory study were (1) L1-to-L2 transfer, (2) semantic contrastiveness, (3) the monitoring of one’s speech, and (4) educational grade. L1-to-L2 transfer was operationalized as the effect of liaison/elision contexts on /h/-production. The expectation was liaison contexts might transfer and would therefore hinder /h/-production. Semantic contrasts in minimal pairs including an h-initial word would elicit more /h/-productions if that word was contrasted with an empty onset than an onset (oor-hoor) filled by some other consonant (hand-tand). If a speaker pays more attention to his/her speech in an increased-monitoring task, the speaker is expected to produce /h/ more often, and finally it was expected that increased exposure to Dutch would result in more correct productions.In a cross-sectional study, students from the first, third and sixth grades of secondary education (60 in total, aged between 12 years and 19 years old) took part in two reading-aloud tasks, which were assumed to differ in the degree of speech monitoring they require. The first task was a text, with which L1-to-L2 transfer was assessed, and the second a list of minimal pairs containing h-onsets contrasting with either empty or filled onsets. Monitoring was assessed by comparing results between reading tasks.Results showed that increased monitoring positively influenced the numbers of [h]s produced, but that L1-to-L2 transfer of liaison/elision contexts did not occur. A small difference between conditions was found, but in the opposite direction. There was large between-learner variability and no performance increase with amount of exposure from first to sixth grade. Overall, performance left much room for improvement relative to native Dutch speakers and to the learners’ teacher. Further research is needed to better understand the development of French-speaker learners’ production of Dutch /h/. Show less
This dissertation contains a history of public financial student support policies in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, from their establishment in 1815 until today. It focuses especially on the... Show moreThis dissertation contains a history of public financial student support policies in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, from their establishment in 1815 until today. It focuses especially on the political and administrative decisions that led to actual policies. This history is divided in seven episodes during which policies had different goals and took different shapes. This way, the episodes reflect the changing role of the national government in Dutch society. Policy makers used financial student support as an instrument in their efforts to influence the course of social developments, with varying success. They tried to influence supply on the job market, to stimulate the development of individual talents and to advance social justice. Larger objectives were state formation, economic and cultural development and the emancipation of particular groups in society. Ever since the introduction of child benefits in the system in 1953, it has been impossible to tell whether student support is a form of education policy, income policy or social support. It has had close links with all three of them, causing reforms in one of these aspects to have unacceptable effects in the other. Public student support policy has become a complex administrative knot, still struggled with today. Show less
There is increasing evidence that non-native speech is more readily understood by listeners who share the native-language background with the speakers. Mandarin-accented English can be expected to... Show moreThere is increasing evidence that non-native speech is more readily understood by listeners who share the native-language background with the speakers. Mandarin-accented English can be expected to be better understood by Mandarin listeners than by American native listeners. The most likely reason for the effect would be that the non-native listeners fruitfully use their (intuitive) knowledge of the interfering source language (Mandarin) to classify the sounds as intended by the speaker (Cutler 2012). This phenomenon has been called the Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (or ISIB) in its weak version (Bent & Bradlow 2003). There is also a strong version of the ISIB hypothesis which states that any non-native speaker of a language will be more intelligible to any non-native listener, simply because foreigners tend to speak more carefully and slowly than native speakers of the target language. I will draw on several published intelligibility studies, in which speakers and listeners from a wide variety of native-language backgrounds (including L1 English speakers and listeners) communicate with one another in English (Smith & Rafiqzad 1979, Bent & Bradlow 2003, Wang 2007, Van Heuven & Wang 2007, Wang & Van Heuven 2014), to assess the validity of the ISIB claim. I will show that the ISIB effect is found only occasionally and inconsistently when it is quantified in an absolute way. Generally, native listeners of the target language outperform any L2 listener, even when the L2 listener has the same mother tongue as the L2 speaker. However, if we quantify the ISIB in a relative manner, where R-ISIB is defined as the discrepancy between the actual intelligibility and the score predicted from linear addition of main effects of speaker and listener language background, the notion of interlanguage benefit begins to make more sense. It then appears that the combination of a speaker and listener who do not share the same native language suffers from a negative R-ISIB (even if one interlocutor is a native speaker of the vehicle of communication), but that any combination of speakers and listeners sharing the same mother tongue (whether L1 or L2 speakers of the vehicle of communication) show a consistently positive R-ISIB. Show less
This tutorial-like presentation provides a survey of acoustical correlates of word and sentence stress, with emphasis on Germanic languages such as Dutch and English. It also reviews what is known... Show moreThis tutorial-like presentation provides a survey of acoustical correlates of word and sentence stress, with emphasis on Germanic languages such as Dutch and English. It also reviews what is known about the perceptual cue value of the acoustic correlates of stress, and show that highly reliable correlates are not necessarily strong perceptual cues, and conversely that the strongest perceptual cue (pitch change) is an unreliable correlate. Show less
How did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite... Show moreHow did common people write in the late eighteenth century? Little is yet known on this topic, since our knowledge is mainly based on printed texts written by a small part of the (male) elite population. This dissertation __ written from a sociolinguistic point of view __ gives us new insights into late-eighteenth-century language use. For this purpose a large number of Dutch private letters has been used. These letters were captured by the English in times of warfare between the Dutch and the English and are still preserved at the National Archives in Kew (London). The research is based on a selection of approximately 400 letters, written between 1776 and 1784 by Dutch male and female letter writers from all social ranks. This study into late-eighteenth-century language variation can be regarded as a first broad exploration of this valuable material. Therefore various linguistic phenomena have been examined: forms of address, negation, reflexivity and reciprocity, schwa-apocope, deletion of final -n, diminutives and the genitive and alternative constructions. The case studies clearly establish more variety in eighteenth-century written language than previous studies suggested. Almost every linguistic feature under discussion appears to show social variation, and gender and social class, in particular, are influential factors. Show less
Op 3 juni 1621 verleenden de Staten-Generaal het octrooi aan de West-Indische Compagnie waarmee zij het alleenrecht verwierf op de scheepvaart en handel in het Atlantisch gebied. Dit... Show moreOp 3 juni 1621 verleenden de Staten-Generaal het octrooi aan de West-Indische Compagnie waarmee zij het alleenrecht verwierf op de scheepvaart en handel in het Atlantisch gebied. Dit handelsmonopolie werd periodiek verlengd en zou betreft de handel op West-Afrika tot 1730 onveranderd van kracht blijven. Overtreding van het octrooi werd zwaar bestraft, maar desondanks werd dit handelsrecht stelselmatig door schepen uit de Republiek geschonden. Vooral na de heroprichting van de WIC in 1674 hebben Zeeuwse smokkelschepen dit handelsmonopolie op grote schaal ontdoken. Deze lorrendraaiers, zoals ze destijds werden genoemd, zeilden met snelle en wendbare schepen naar de West-Afrikaanse kust waar zij Europese koopwaren tegen Afrikaanse producten en slaven verhandelden. Voor de bestrijding van deze illegale goederen- en slavenhandel rustte de WIC kruisers uit die op de West-Afrikaanse kust patrouilleerden. Gedurende de laatste octrooiperiode (1700-1730) wisten compagnieschepen ruim vijftig lorrendraaiers op te brengen. Dat ging niet altijd zonder slag of stoot en bij deze schermutselingen vonden vele tientallen zeelieden de dood. In dit boek wordt de illegale goederen- en slavenhandel tijdens de laatste octrooiperiode van de WIC behandeld. Uit de onderzoeksresultaten blijkt dat de omvang daarvan veel omvangrijker is geweest dat tot nu toe werd aangenomen. Show less
