The aim of this thesis was to determine whether Polish-Dutch bilinguals benefit from knowing a second language when learning to assign stress to English words. Specifically, the research targeted...Show moreThe aim of this thesis was to determine whether Polish-Dutch bilinguals benefit from knowing a second language when learning to assign stress to English words. Specifically, the research targeted children who were learning English in Dutch primary education, aged 10 to 12 years old. Earlier research on second language acquisition shows that because of language transfer, knowing an extra language is beneficial for learning a new language (Bartolotti & Marian 2016, Ellis 2015, Schwartz 2015). To find out if the bilingual children did better or worse in assigning stress to English words than monolingual Dutch children, a survey was carried out as a small pilot study on three participants. Here, the participants had to pronounce fifteen words from a word list. Next, the number of words where the participants had assigned stress correctly or incorrectly were counted and presented in different tables. This showed that although the overall performance of the Polish-Dutch bilingual participant was not better than that of the monolingual Dutch participants, the bilingual participant did significantly better in assigning stress to the English words that receive penultimate stress.Show less
After the conquest of Banda in 1621, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) introduced the perkeniersstelsel to ensure a monopoly on nutmeg and mace. Due to the commercial nature of the spices and the...Show moreAfter the conquest of Banda in 1621, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) introduced the perkeniersstelsel to ensure a monopoly on nutmeg and mace. Due to the commercial nature of the spices and the use of slave production, the perkeniersstelsel is often compared to the Atlantic plantation system. This study traces the development of the perkeniersstelsel between 1621 and 1640 and compares it to the Atlantic plantation system. This study argues that although the VOC was attempting to develop the perkeniersstelsel in the direction of the Atlantic mode, Banda’s unique environment and the VOC’s weaknesses in accessing terrestrial resources led the system down its own path. Furthermore, it proposes that Banda slavery should be regarded as the first expansion of slavery into rural areas in Southeast Asia, rather than the first penetration of European slavery into Southeast Asia.Show less
When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) came to Asia, its presence was contingent on relations with Asian polities. Elephant gift-giving was one of the practices the VOC conducted and experienced...Show moreWhen the Dutch East India Company (VOC) came to Asia, its presence was contingent on relations with Asian polities. Elephant gift-giving was one of the practices the VOC conducted and experienced with Asian rulers alongside trade. The VOC acted as a giver and a receiver; it received gift-elephants from Southeast Asian polities plus Kandy and transferred them westward. This study examines the Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy and sociocultural foundations behind the diplomatic scene during the seventeenth century. It argues that the existing Dutch acknowledgment of elephant gift-giving traditions and imaginations and perceptions of the emblematic elephant facilitated the elephant diplomacy between the VOC and Asian polities. In other words, these mentalities were integral to the commensurability in the Dutch-Asian elephant gift-giving. Furthermore, the case of the emblematic elephant imagined and perceived by the Dutch shows that the seventeenth-century historical change in worldview from emblematic to empirical was more nuanced and not linear.Show less
This thesis compares the functions of discourse sentence-final particles in Dutch and Japanese. Focusing specifically on Dutch he and hoor and Japanese yo and ne, the thesis clarifies the overlap...Show moreThis thesis compares the functions of discourse sentence-final particles in Dutch and Japanese. Focusing specifically on Dutch he and hoor and Japanese yo and ne, the thesis clarifies the overlap and the diversion in their meaning based on questionnaires participated by native Dutch and Japanese speakers.Show less
This paper investigates how well adult Spanish-Dutch bilinguals have acquired grammatical gender agreement in Dutch and whether individual speakers apply specific strategies to resolve difficulties...Show moreThis paper investigates how well adult Spanish-Dutch bilinguals have acquired grammatical gender agreement in Dutch and whether individual speakers apply specific strategies to resolve difficulties associated with gender in Dutch. Both Spanish and Dutch have two-fold gender systems: Spanish differentiates between a feminine and a masculine gender; and Dutch distinguishes between a common and a neuter gender. In Spanish each gender is marked on the determiner and the adjective with a distinct morphological marker (e.g. the indefinite articles un – amasc and una - afem). In Dutch the indefinite article converges into one form for both genders (i.e. een) and the rules of adjectival agreement are less straightforward than the rules in Spanish. To examine how adult bilinguals handle the opaque Dutch gender system, data from four late Spanish-Dutch bilinguals (L1 Spanish, L2 Dutch), seven early Spanish-Dutch bilinguals and six monolingual Dutch speakers were collected by means of elicited production and analyzed for grammatical gender agreement on definite determiners and adjectival inflection. It was found that the four highly proficient late speakers of Dutch show non-target-like performance in their data involving agreement on both definite determiners and adjectives, regularly overgeneralize to the common gender, and tend to produce fewer indefinite than definite phrases in comparison to the monolinguals and early bilinguals. The findings in this study are discussed in light of previous research regarding the different mechanisms of child and adult (second) language acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch (Blom et al., 2006, 2008; Prevost and White, 2000; White, 2003). The evidence from the current experiment suggests that: a. adults use two different routes for acquiring gender agreement in Dutch - a lexical route for agreement at the determiner, and a rule-based route for agreement at the adjective (Blom et al., 2006, 2008); b. adult speakers may have the knowledge of the rules of gender agreement in Dutch but are not successful in applying the rules consistently in their production (Prevost and White, 2000; White, 2003).Show less
This thesis questions the representation of the Dutch West- and East-Indies slavery pasts in current museum exhibitions. What is on display? Whose stories are told? Whose voices are silenced? Which...Show moreThis thesis questions the representation of the Dutch West- and East-Indies slavery pasts in current museum exhibitions. What is on display? Whose stories are told? Whose voices are silenced? Which sources could be added to create more critical and multi-perspective museum narratives?Show less
This thesis describes a study in which Dutch learners of English are asked to interpret a set of novel Dutch and English noun-noun compounds. The complete set of test items is divided into a set...Show moreThis thesis describes a study in which Dutch learners of English are asked to interpret a set of novel Dutch and English noun-noun compounds. The complete set of test items is divided into a set with compounds designed to encourage participants to select the appropriate semantic relation in the compound, and another set with compounds designed to elicit figurative interpretations. The thesis investigates whether there are significant differences between Dutch ESL learners’ interpretations of Dutch (L1) novel noun-noun compounds and their interpretations of English (L2) compounds. Differences were found for the figurative compounds, but not for the relation-based compounds.Show less
Dutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the...Show moreDutch uses cardinal posture verbs (/zitten/ ‘to sit’, /staan/ ‘to stand’, and /liggen/ ‘to lie’) for all sorts of purposes, many of which have received considerable research attention — like the posture progressive, e.g. /zitten te lezen/ ‘lit. sit to read: to be reading’. This thesis investigates an understudied posture verb pattern in which a posture verb is combined with a complementive past participle, e.g. /zitten vastgeplakt/ 'lit. sit stuck: to be stuck' and /staan volgepriegeld/ 'lit. stand scribbled full: to be scribbled full'. Previous analyses disagree on the status of this pattern in terms of its productivity (is it fixed or are new combinations possible?), meaning (what does the pattern as a whole express?), and structure (is the complementive participle verbal or adjectival?). By examining over 6,000 attestations of the pattern in a corpus of written Dutch, this thesis evaluates these competing accounts, concluding that (i) the patterns are indeed productive; (ii) constraints on that productivity can be accounted for in terms of the meaning of the pattern as a whole, i.e. 'locativity' and 'resultativity'; and (iii) the pattern's syntax appears highly heterogeneous: some past participles behave like adjectives, others like verbs. Finally, I show that this heterogeneity is compatible with the semantic properties of past participles in general, and of the posture verb-participle pattern in particular.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis is about Dutch prepositional phrases (PPs) headed by the preposition aan ‘on, at, to’, which generally denote locations, but are also regularly used in a ‘non-locational’ sense....Show moreThis thesis is about Dutch prepositional phrases (PPs) headed by the preposition aan ‘on, at, to’, which generally denote locations, but are also regularly used in a ‘non-locational’ sense. Specifically, this thesis concerns the second, ‘non-locational’ group, which is termed ‘situational’ because on closer inspection, they do denote not locations but situations. These 'situational aan-PPs' have a fixed structure: the preposition aan, followed by a definite article, and finally either an infinitive, verb stem or a noun as aan's complement. The first pattern, paired with the verb zijn 'to be', has been characterized in previous work as a ‘progressive construction’. This raises two questions: what exactly is progressive aspect, and how do the different verbs and complements that occur in the situational aan-PPs differ conceptually from that analysis? To answer these questions, an attempt is made at teasing apart the concepts constitutive of ‘progressivity’. There turn out to be four core components: temporal decomposability, dynamicity, boundary effectuation by the subject, and non-gnomicity. Next, the possible verbs (e.g. zijn 'to be', gaan 'to go', krijgen 'to obtain') and complements (i.e. infinitive, stem and noun) are analyzed in terms of these four components. For the complements, the four components turn out to be sufficient to distinguish them semantically: all three of them may exhibit the full, quadripartite 'progressive cluster', but infinitives do not require the effectuation of boundaries, verb stems do not exclude gnomic interpretations, and nouns strictly impose neither of these restrictions. The three complements do impose, by definition, temporal decomposability and dynamicity, which can therefore be seen as situational aan-PPs’ conceptual core. Regarding the verbs, at least eight features are relevant, including decomposability and boundary effectuation, but also (among others) causativity, continuativity and modality. These properties are contributed by the verbs, which are thus to a greater or lesser degree compatible with the conceptual structure of each of the complements. The main outcome of this thesis is a more integrated and precise account of situational aan-PPs, making it possible to gain a broader understanding of the well-known progressive construction 'zijn aan het + infinitive'. That broader understanding also sheds some light on the way that the expression of aspect is organized in Dutch. This thesis adds to the impression that this organization may be more systematic than is generally assumed.Show less
Secondary schools in the Netherlands have been offering Chinese Language and Culture as an official exam subject for three years now. Studies on Dutch students SLA of Mandarin are very limited in...Show moreSecondary schools in the Netherlands have been offering Chinese Language and Culture as an official exam subject for three years now. Studies on Dutch students SLA of Mandarin are very limited in number, and established literature often studies participants in their twenties with English as their L1. This study aims to look at improvement shown in tonal production by Dutch teenagers aged 13-17 who follow the relatively new Mandarin course in secondary school, to provide deeper insight into SLA of Mandarin by Dutch teenagers, and into the effectiveness of the course. There were two groups of participants: students with four months of experience in Mandarin, and students from the same school with three and a half years of experience. They were asked to produce a selection of both monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Their tones were visualized using Praat, and compared to both the tonal production of native speakers to identify errors. The production of the two different grades was then compared to one another to identify points of improvement. The results showed that female students showed improvement mainly in pitch contour, and to some extent even acquired tonal coarticulation. The male students showed improvement in pitch height, and very little improvement in pitch contour. For both genders the production of tone 3 appeared most difficult, followed by tone 4, then tone 2. Tone 1 was the easiest to produce.Show less
This paper presents a study of article omission in two types of headlines, focusing on the differences between article omission in printed headlines and article omission in digital headlines. The...Show moreThis paper presents a study of article omission in two types of headlines, focusing on the differences between article omission in printed headlines and article omission in digital headlines. The study is carried out on a corpus of 120 news items collected from ‘De Volkskrant’, with half of the material from the physical paper and the other half from the corresponding digital news items. The research reflects on earlier findings in the field of article omission and presents new findings regarding the differences between article omission in physical and digital headlines and regarding other determiners that can be omitted as well. A theory about shifting the focus of investigation to the realization of articles instead of the omission thereof, initiated by Oosterhof and Rawoens (2017), is further elaborated.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
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
2022-02-01T00:00:00Z
Much of the literature on heritage language phonology finds heritage speakers to show some influence from their dominant language compared to homeland speakers, but heritage speakers still perform...Show moreMuch of the literature on heritage language phonology finds heritage speakers to show some influence from their dominant language compared to homeland speakers, but heritage speakers still perform more accurately in their heritage language than do naïve speakers. Yet, research on heritage language phonology is limited compared to that on heritage language syntax and morphology. This is even more so the case for research on heritage speakers’ suprasegmental phonology: for instance, very little is known about heritage speakers’ perception of lexical tone. The present study used an ABX task to investigate perceptual segment-tone integration in heritage speakers of Vietnamese in the Netherlands, compared to monolingually raised Dutch and Vietnamese speakers in the homeland, respectively. Heritage speakers were found to have a stronger segment-tone integration than the monolingually raised Dutch, whereas the homeland Vietnamese showed a slightly stronger integration than the heritage speakers. Moreover, the groups’ integrations were asymmetrical: heritage speakers considered both tones and segments in word identification but had a clear preference for segments; the Dutch controls almost exclusively considered segments and the Vietnamese controls had a slight preference for tone-based word identification. The findings thus conform to previous literature on heritage language phonology: the heritage speakers performed intermediately between monolinguals of their heritage and dominant languages.Show less
In the last century the Netherlands went through several large changes. After the Second World War, the Netherlands, as many other West-European countries, modernized which included the creation of...Show moreIn the last century the Netherlands went through several large changes. After the Second World War, the Netherlands, as many other West-European countries, modernized which included the creation of large industry, the process of destratification, secularization, emancipation of women, democratization of politics and the emancipation of minority groups like homosexuals. Supposedly, Iran went through an opposite and backward development. From the glory years of the Shah, when modernization of Iran was top priority, the country rapidly declined, in the eyes of the Dutch, into the realm of a backward religious society which the Netherlands tried to espouse for a long time. The knowledge Dutch people have about Iran is not based on individuals visiting Iran but on how the media portrays Iran and reports on Middle Eastern affairs. However, is this dichotomy between Iran, as an Eastern country, and the Netherlands, as a Western country, so clear? When looking into contemporary documentaries Iran is still portrayed as different country than the Netherlands. Portraying is focused on the religious repression, backward economy, bearded men and veiled women. When comparing the footage of contemporary documentaries with documentaries from the start of this genre in 1960, the same type of footage is shown. Has Iran not changed since then? This type of footage seems to fall under the greater themes of Orientalism and the Western narrative of modernity and have been present in the Western conception of the Middle East for very long. This research focusses on the discourses of Orientalism and the Western narrative of modernity in Iranian representation in Dutch documentaries from 1960 until 2018 and the continuity and discontinuity in this representation. This research contributes to the understanding of the development of Orientalism and the Western narrative of modernity in the 20th and 21st century.Show less
Between 1639 and 1854 was the Netherlands the only European country allowed to trade with Japan. After 1854, when Commodore Perry uses gunboat diplomacy to open diplomatic contact with Japan, the...Show moreBetween 1639 and 1854 was the Netherlands the only European country allowed to trade with Japan. After 1854, when Commodore Perry uses gunboat diplomacy to open diplomatic contact with Japan, the unique position of the Netherlands had changed drastically. Nonetheless, the Dutch government was not eager to give up its monopoly on Japan that easily. As a result, after Japan opened, the Dutch government can be observed undertaking many projects in Japan to convince the Japanese that unique relations with the Dutch were still in the Japanese interest. Especially in Nagasaki, where the Dutch had a trading post for since the 17th century, the Dutch undertook many projects and this started to shape the city going forward. This thesis examines how Dutch influence shaped three prominent sectors in Nagasaki throughout the nineteenth century; the rising military & industrial sectors and the declining trade sector in Nagasaki. The developments in these sectors are framed within wider Japanese history of that era and also the decline of Dutch influence in the nineteenth century. The conclusion of this thesis is that the Dutch still fulfilled a prominent position within Japanese, and then especially Nagasaki, after the years of the opening in 1854. The Dutch worked hard to introduce Japan with new military and industrial knowledge, while simulataneously aiming to include within a new trade network. The Dutch supplied new materials, worked as teacher and also worked as intermediaries with other Western nations. Eventually the Dutch could not keep up with other Western nations and by the 1870s most Dutch experts had disappeared from Japan. Nonetheless, by this time their influence had played a major role in Nagasaki. The basis had been laid for the rise of many factories in the city, the city had become a centre for military knowledge and trade had dwindled from the city. Byt the time the last of the Dutch experts left, Nagasaki had been set on a course to become a military-industrial complex, which would play an important part in the next century.Show less
