In linguistics, coming up with a certain continuation in a sentence before even reading or hearing that sentence is called prediction. People pre-activate upcoming possibilities when reading...Show moreIn linguistics, coming up with a certain continuation in a sentence before even reading or hearing that sentence is called prediction. People pre-activate upcoming possibilities when reading earlier words in a sentence. In this study a sentence completion study, a likelihood scale questionnaire and a reading time experiment are conducted to test this effect called prediction in a semantically constrained context. That participants can be lead to a certain semantic expected word is found in the sentence completion task. The likelihood scale questionnaire gave us insight in how likely the most frequent and less frequent given instrumental noun continuations were and provided us with the sentences for the reading time experiment. In this reading time experiment, there is found a significant effect, given a same specific constrained semantic contexts, that expected logical semantic instrumental nouns are read faster than unexpected illogical instrumental nouns in Dutch.Show less
This thesis presents a preliminary theory on the occurrence of rising declaratives in Dutch. The analysis consists of a series of hypotheses that were tested in a pilot experiment. The most...Show moreThis thesis presents a preliminary theory on the occurrence of rising declaratives in Dutch. The analysis consists of a series of hypotheses that were tested in a pilot experiment. The most important claim in the theory is that the element of surprise plays an important role in the licensing of the rising declarative in Dutch. This claim was partially supported by the data.Show less
