This dissertation investigates how sound change is adopted by speakers and listeners, based on a currently-ongoing cluster of changes in Dutch termed the ‘Polder shift’. The main aim of the... Show moreThis dissertation investigates how sound change is adopted by speakers and listeners, based on a currently-ongoing cluster of changes in Dutch termed the ‘Polder shift’. The main aim of the dissertation is to form a bridge between five key areas of linguistics: historical phonology, sociophonetics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and quantitative linguistics. A unified account of these different angles to the study of sound change is not trivial. This dissertation uses psycholinguistic experiments combined with detailed quantitative analysis to study the contributions of the different components to the adoption of sound change in the medium and long term. The population studied in this dissertation is sociolinguistic migrants: in this case, Flemish speakers of Dutch who have migrated to the Netherlands, and thereby migrated from a non-Polder-shift area to a Polder-shift area. The methods adopted in this dissertation include a corpus study of regional variation, longitudinal psycholinguistic experiments over nine months’ time, cross-sectional psycholinguistic experiments spanning multiple decades of apparent time, and two neurolinguistic studies using EEG. Results show that the sociolinguistic migrants rapidly acquire allophonic variation at the phonological level (albeit not necessarily the associated sociolinguistic knowledge), but that it takes a long time (more than nine months, up to multiple decades) for this to carry forward to their behavioral production and perception, and moreover is subject to significant individual differences. The contributions by this dissertation show how the fundamentally sociolinguistic phenomenon of sound change can be studied empirically using psycho- and neurolinguistics, and profit from recent innovations in statistics. 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
In the National Archives in Kew, London, a treasure is kept which is of great importance for the history of the Dutch language: a collection of seventeenth-century letters written by men and women... Show moreIn the National Archives in Kew, London, a treasure is kept which is of great importance for the history of the Dutch language: a collection of seventeenth-century letters written by men and women from various social backgrounds. Given the fact that much of the linguistic research of seventeenth-century Dutch has been perforce based on printed texts and linguistic data produced by a relatively small number of upper-class __ usually male __ writers, not much is known with certainty about the everyday Dutch of seventeenth-century lower- and middle-class people. The letters hidden in the National Archives can change this. In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 letters written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective. The topics treated are: forms of address, reflexivity and reciprocity, negation, schwa-apocope, diminutives, and the genitive and alternative constructions. The case studies show that there was still a lot of variation in seventeenth-century Dutch and that some linguistic changes had not progressed as far in the everyday Dutch of __ordinary__ people as previous research has suggested. Furthermore, it is shown that gender and social class are important factors of influence on the seventeenth-century language use, especially when interpreted in terms of education and writing experience. Show less
