In this paper, I explore the following research question: are there differences between the tendencies of speakers of English and Dutch, native and non-native, monolingual and non-monolingual, when...Show moreIn this paper, I explore the following research question: are there differences between the tendencies of speakers of English and Dutch, native and non-native, monolingual and non-monolingual, when referring to un(der)specified subjects1? Do native speakers of these languages use different tactics to refer to generic human subjects whose (gender) identity is either unknown or unimportant (in context) than non-native speakers? Also, how does artificial intelligence mimic these tendencies? To answer these questions, I have researched the intuitions of native speakers of English and Dutch, created a survey-writing task hybrid experiment based on the findings, and tested whether the found patterns are (re)produced by participants as well as text-generating artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT (GPT- 3.5). I have found that the consensus of literature appears to be that native Dutch users tend to use the singular third person masculine generically, while native English users prefer to use ‘he/she’. Meanwhile, English and Dutch participants use the (neuter) formal and informal singular second person forms. The ChatGPT-generated texts also predominantly include second person forms in both languages.Show less
Touch and interactivity is becoming increasingly popular in museums countering decades of traditional museum styles and creating new ways to experience culture. This paper examines five cultural...Show moreTouch and interactivity is becoming increasingly popular in museums countering decades of traditional museum styles and creating new ways to experience culture. This paper examines five cultural heritage institutions in the Netherlands and specifically focuses on the use of handling and interactivity with collection and display objects for the general public. Niel Kotler's 2004 article "New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing" provides the basis for the ideas on where museums fit into a cultural framework and the importance of experience for education. By exploring this idea this paper answers questions about what modern museums and collections are doing to meet the growing public demand and general necessity of increased accessibility to and understanding of objects with importance to cultural heritage. How these methods for allowing touch and interactivity contribute to the learning and understanding of participants about the objects and their cultural importance is one of the main focuses. Each institution is discussed thoroughly under a division of themes between how handling is introduced through an educational lens and an exhibition lens. The paper concludes that museums are far more open to interactivity with collection objects than is often assumed by both museum studies and by the public. A positive outlook is concluded on behalf of the efforts which provides an understanding of the importance of the work being done to increase public knowledge and understanding of historical and cultural objects through the ability to handle and closely interact with objects. These efforts will be essential for the continued preservation of objects as well as technqiues, stories, cultures, and histories for years to come.Show less
This thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric...Show moreThis thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric Specialization for Lexical Pitch–Accent in Japanese Infants' (2010). Sato et al. found that Japanese infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in Japanese disyllabic words, and that they start processing these stimuli mostly in the left hemisphere (rather than bilaterally) as they get older in their first year of life, suggesting that Japanese infants perceive lexical pitch-accent as a lexical acoustic cue. Since Dutch does not use pitch-accent as a lexical cue, we would not expect Dutch infants to start processing tonal patterns in the left hemisphere as they get older within their first year. The first step to examining this expectation is carrying out a behavioural discrimination task to establish whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords in the first place. Only then does it become fruitful to carry out a NIRS experiment like Sato et al. to investigate in what parts of the brain Dutch infants process lexical tonal patterns, and whether this differs as they get older. We found that Dutch infants do seem to be able to distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. Though the sample size of this pilot is small, the effect that we found is of such significance that we expect to find it in the larger sample size of the official study as well, showing that Dutch infants can distinguish words on the basis of their tonal pattern. We therefore expect that performing a NIRS study like Sato et al. (2010) will be feasible.Show less
In the field of comparative German-Dutch linguistics, there is a preconception that AN-compounds are much more productive in German than in Dutch (Booij 2019: 10, Hüning 2004: 160). After analyzing...Show moreIn the field of comparative German-Dutch linguistics, there is a preconception that AN-compounds are much more productive in German than in Dutch (Booij 2019: 10, Hüning 2004: 160). After analyzing a list of German and Dutch AN-compounds, this does not seem true. Both languages have a substantial number of AN-compounds. In the framework of Construction Morphology, the productivity of a pattern is defined as the openness of one ore more ‘slots’ (Booij 2010, Jackendoff & Audring 2020). AN-compounds have two slots: in the first slot we find adjectives, in the second slot we find nouns. A pattern is productive if the slots are open for new words, so new combinations (new AN-compounds) can easily be made and understood. In this MA thesis, the lists of attested German and Dutch AN-compounds, collected from the Celex database (http://celex.mpi.nl), will be analyzed for each variable slot (A and N respectively). The goal is to find out which of the slots in the [AN]N pattern is more open and to identify potential restrictions for each slot. We could assume that some adjectives are more frequent than others, for instance that there are a lot of compounds which start with half-/ Halb- but not so many with the Dutch adjective astraal- or the German adjective achter-. This will raise the question whether the pattern [AN]N is productive or if it is just the subpattern [half-N]N and if those subpatterns influence our perception of the productivity of the [AN]N pattern. It might be possible that those subpatterns are in fact the productive ones instead of the [AN]N pattern itself. In this thesis I will research how productive the compounding of adjectives and nouns is in German and Dutch, what the differences are between the two languages and what the subpatterns tell us about the productivity of a word formation.Show less
This study deals with morphosyntactic variation in Paraná Dutch, an endangered heritage variety of Dutch spoken in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. Its original objectives were (i) to...Show moreThis study deals with morphosyntactic variation in Paraná Dutch, an endangered heritage variety of Dutch spoken in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. Its original objectives were (i) to describe divergences from Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands (NLD) as well as retained dialectal features (ii) to compare these variations to findings of other studies on Dutch as a heritage language (HL), and (iii) to relate the findings to extralinguistic features. Due to the situation of intergenerational language loss encountered during the fieldwork conducted for this study, it was deemed important to add a fourth objective, namely to assess the vitality of the heritage variety. No previous linguistic research on language variation in Dutch as a HL in Paraná exists, and this study will therefore extend our knowledge of morphosyntactic divergences and dialectal retentions in the Dutch heritage varieties. More than 22 hours of naturalistic speech data of 82 Dutch heritage speakers (HSs) in three communities – Arapoti, Carambeí and Castrolanda – was gathered between November 2018 and January 2019, and coded for morphosyntactic divergence from NLD or dialectal variation. The sample consisted of speakers of different ages (16-91), generations (first till fourth) and with varying levels of exposure to and usage of Dutch. Two models for language vitality assessment (UNESCO, EGIDS) were used to describe the endangerment of Paraná Dutch. According to the models, the heritage variety is definitively endangered (UNESCO), and threatened or shifting (EGIDS). Morphosyntactic divergences from NLD found in the speech of the participants include the overgeneralization of SVO word order, omission of determiners, variation in grammatical gender assignment, variation in nominal plural markers, pronoun drop, and variation in present verb inflection. Morphosyntactic divergences from the standard language that can be attributed to Dutch dialects or regional languages include the merger of the verbs kennen ‘to know’ and kunnen ‘can’, use of heb ‘to have’ for the 3SG.PRES, and the use of periphrastic doen ‘to do’. Of the morphosyntactic divergences found in the data, the six mentioned previously were used by a sizeable part of the sample (at least ten participants). Many of these divergences have also been attested in Dutch heritage varieties in Anglophone countries, Indonesia and in other parts of Brazil. The divergences from NLD are either due to interference from the majority language Portuguese, due to internal development in the HL, or due to a combination of the former two (multiple causation). Participants whose speech contained morphosyntactic divergences from NLD tend to be of the second generation or later and have a lower usage of and exposure to Dutch than the average of the sample. Although most of the dialectal features present in the speech of the first-generation participants have not been attested in the speech of later generations, some have been retained or even spread throughout the community. The three morphosyntactic features that originate from Dutch dialects or regional languages mentioned above have been retained and transmitted to speakers of the second generation or later.Show less
The Thesis explores how developments of literature and politics are intertwined in the history of modern Iran. The short story Antari Ke Lutiyash Morde Bud by Iranian author Sadegh Chubak is...Show moreThe Thesis explores how developments of literature and politics are intertwined in the history of modern Iran. The short story Antari Ke Lutiyash Morde Bud by Iranian author Sadegh Chubak is analyzed as an aesthetic source which offers insights in Iranian political developments. The themes of freedom and imprisonment and how they relate to each other in the text are read in the context of Iran's political history.Show less
In this master thesis, the phenomenon of insubordination will be treated. This phenomenon has been described by Evans (2007:367) for the first time as “the conventionalized main-clause of what, on...Show moreIn this master thesis, the phenomenon of insubordination will be treated. This phenomenon has been described by Evans (2007:367) for the first time as “the conventionalized main-clause of what, on prima facie grounds, appear to be formally subordinate clauses”. Although this phenomenon has been defined several times in prescriptive grammars, Evans (2007) was the first who has done descriptive research for many Indo-European languages, including Dutch. Unfortunately the French language has not been described. Therefore the main subject of this MA thesis will be to compare the theory of Evans (2007) for the Dutch language and apply it to the French language. This thesis will be limited to the conjunctions “if” and “that” which introduce the conventionalized main-clauses. The main objective of this research will be a comparative research into the Dutch and French language, more specific into the two conjunctions “if” and “that”. The reason why those two conjunctions have been chosen is the fact that they appear most often in all the languages which have examined by Evans (2007). The methodology of this MA thesis will be comparative and theoretical. Moreover, there will be a section including some case studies. The content of the different sections will be thus: the first chapter will give an overview of all the literature concerning the phenomenon insubordination. The second chapter will be dedicated to the conjunction “if” in Dutch and French. The next chapter will be dedicated to the conjunction “that” and the fourth chapter will be showing some case studies to support my theory. The Corpus d’Orléans has provided the information for this thesis. Finally, all results will be summarized in the conclusion.Show less
Politeness is an intrinsical part of human communication and has inspired a multitude of research, among which Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. There have been multiple critiques with...Show morePoliteness is an intrinsical part of human communication and has inspired a multitude of research, among which Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. There have been multiple critiques with regards to the universality of their theory in relation to non-Western cultures, inducing the question if politeness strategies are employed differently and thus translated differently across languages. This study examines how politeness strategies are translated from Korean to English and Dutch fansubs by employing Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory and Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation procedures.Show less
Talmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed ...Show moreTalmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed (V) languages, that express Path of motion in the main verb and express Manner only when explicitly foregrounded for some reason. Given this background, how do late second learners of Portuguese, whose L1 (Dutch) is characterized as an S-language, lexicalize spontaneous dynamic Motion events in their L2, which is characterized as a V-language? In this study we investigate Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking (TFS) hypothesis (1996a), which states that the language we speak influences the way we are thinking during the mental processes of preparing content for speech and that restructuring these TFS patterns during second language acquisition may be difficult. As the L2 learners are acquiring a language that differs typologically from their L1, we investigate if they restructured their TFS patterns to those of the L2, or still use the TFS patterns of their L1. To do this, we look into the lexicalization patterns of Portuguese L2 (Dutch L1) learners and compare them to both Portuguese native speakers’ and Dutch native speakers’ performance. This study makes use of data gathered by the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC) [http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/llc], a collection of spoken and written data of Dutch learners of Romance languages. In total 42 participants were selected for this study: 11 native speakers of Dutch; 11 native speakers of Portuguese; and 20 second language learners of Portuguese. Participants’ linguistic patterns in encoding Motion events were examined by presenting them a selection of fifteen images taken from the picture book Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969), which is regularly used in data elicitation for Motion event research. The participants were told to produce a narrative, describing as complete as possible what is happening with the boy, the dog and the frog in the pictures. The oral data was transcribed using the software Praat. The speech was divided into clauses. All the clauses that contained a spontaneous 6 dynamic Motion event, if the figure moves self-contained from one location to another (e.g. ‘The boy falls into the water’), were extracted. All verbs and modifiers were classified into the following motion categories: Manner verb (manner of motion); Path verb (direction or trajectory of motion); Manner+Path verb, (intermediate position between ‘pure’ Manner verbs and ‘pure’ Path verbs and has both a manner and a path component); Neutral verb (verb that expresses motion, but does not provide information about the manner or trajectory of motion). Native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese performed as I expected, with the Dutch speakers using more Manner verbs and the Portuguese showing a preference for Path verbs. L2 learners’ patterns of motion event lexicalization do not resemble those of either Dutch or Portuguese native speakers. This in-between pattern found in L2 learner’s production suggests two possible explanations: the first explanation builds on the theory of ‘Interlanguage’ as first proposed by Selinker in 1972 (Slabakova, 2016), which claims that the L2 system should be considered a system in its own right and not a defective copy of the target language. The second explanation builds on practical constraints of. This explanation builds on the fact that L2 learners did not possess the same amount of grammatical and lexical knowledge as the native speakers, and therefore they did not perform as native speakers of the target language.Show less
The current report is an examination of language and identity in the context of Brussels. Brussels is sociolinguistically interesting as an official bilingual city with great diversity in languages...Show moreThe current report is an examination of language and identity in the context of Brussels. Brussels is sociolinguistically interesting as an official bilingual city with great diversity in languages and cultures. Theoretical notions of language attitude, accommodation and social identity are linked in the multilingual context of Brussels. To investigate a possible relation between language and identity, the language choice preferences of speakers of Dutch are mapped, as well as identifications they make on different levels. The link between language choice and identification is examined by investigating three small groups of speakers of Dutch in Brussels. An attitudinal online survey, expert interviews and a rapid and anonymous survey offer data that provide insights in the language, and identifications the speakers make. Qualitative analyses imply that speakers of Dutch in Brussels show a tendency to be flexible towards language switch and being addressed in another language. The Dutch language tends not to be a distinctive feature to the speakers’ identity, but multilingualism and positive traits attributed to multilingualism are part of the identity of the speakers of Dutch in Brussels.Show less
A search for a legal translation approach involving a third, auxiliary language. The thesis concisely discusses and compares English, Dutch and Spanish criminal law, as well as general translation...Show moreA search for a legal translation approach involving a third, auxiliary language. The thesis concisely discusses and compares English, Dutch and Spanish criminal law, as well as general translation strategies.Show less
In this thesis I have researched the lexical influence the Dutch language has had on the Japanese language during the Edo period (1603-1868). To do this I have analyzed several sources which...Show moreIn this thesis I have researched the lexical influence the Dutch language has had on the Japanese language during the Edo period (1603-1868). To do this I have analyzed several sources which document this influence and I have used the framework of Johanson (2001) for this analysis. From this analysis I have concluded that the lexical influence of Dutch on Japanese is mostly limited to words related to trade or science, and that these words are mostly copied globally or combinationally and that whether they are copied globally or combinationally depends on whether they are compound words consisting of words of the native language or not.Show less
The paper will examine the work of design duo Scholten & Baijings, and in particular consider the thesis that they are aware of their personal gender roles and seek to emphasise and exaggerate...Show moreThe paper will examine the work of design duo Scholten & Baijings, and in particular consider the thesis that they are aware of their personal gender roles and seek to emphasise and exaggerate certain aspects of this in their work. By using a certain colour spectrum often associated with the female gender and combining this with products often aimed at women, the designs of Scholten & Baijings lean towards a feminine stereotype. Yet, the application of colours to products may shift to a masculine connotation in terms of the actual products. The main thesis is: is the work of Scholten & Baijings as a whole, and especially is the project Mini Colour One, influenced by pre-conceived gender roles? Show less
