Carel van Wijk

Plagiarism: Punish or Prevent? Some Experiences with Academic Copycatting in the Netherlands.

OUR STUDENTS WRITE PAPERS in many of their courses to improve their writing skills and to foster an active attitude toward learning. Every year, they hand in hundreds of papers for us to assess. This stream may get polluted in two ways: by simple copying from Internet sources and by the exchange of text fragments between students. These practices pose a serious threat to any kind of valid grading of individual performances. Fortunately, the very same Internet also offers us the instrument to clean up this stream.

Prosodic, lexico-syntactic and regional influences on word order in Dutch verbal endgroups

Abstract This paper looks into the question to what extent prosodic factors correlate with word order variation in a particular type of syntactic structure in Dutch. Subordinate clauses in this language may contain verbal groups in sentence-final position consisting of an auxiliary (aux) and a participle (part). The order of these verbal elements is fundamentally free. Both aux+part and part+aux combinations occur. This paper describes the results of two studies: a corpus analysis and an experiment using preference judgments. The first study analyses a set of spontaneous speech materials, which contained 146 clauses whose verbal endgroups were evenly distributed over both orders. Distributional analyses showed that prosodic and lexico-syntactic factors coincided with the use of a particular order. However, the study did not allow us to draw conclusions about the unique contribution of these factors. Therefore, an experiment was set up in which stimuli were systematically varied with respect to a number of prosodic and lexical features; utterances that only differed in word order were presented in pairs to subjects who had to choose which order was more felicitous. The results supplemented and clarified those from the corpus analysis, showing that word order is affected by type of auxiliary, length of participle, and accent placement. In addition, a listeners regional background appeared to be a relevant factor for word order: Flemish subjects tended to prefer part+aux order, whereas Dutch subjects preferred aux+part.

Going Dutch or Joining Forces? Some Experiences With Team Teaching in the Netherlands

Lu Rehling is a professor in the Technical & Professional Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where she has taught since 1994. She also has over 15 years of professional industry experience as a writer, editor, trainer, manager, and consultant. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan. Address correspondence to Lu Rehling, HUM 413, SF State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132; email: RehLingL@sfsu.edu.In the Netherlands, most universities have a Faculty of Humanities that offers several bachelor’s and master’s programmes in the field of communication and information sciences. Each of these programmes outnumbers the classical studies such as linguistics, history, and philosophy, in terms of students that is, not in terms of teaching staff. The high student-staff ratio in the communication programmes necessitates a careful investment of teaching resources. Here we report on some recent developments within our institutes. The Need for Team Teaching A teacher has two challenges when facing a large group of 50 to over 300 students: to instill an active attitude toward learning and an academic attitude toward knowledge. The first challenge is addressed in all our courses by fostering the students’ repertoire for self-directed learning.

Talking about Relations: Factors Influencing the Production of Relational Descriptions

In a production experiment (Experiment 1) and an acceptability rating one (Experiment 2), we assessed two factors, spatial position and salience, which may influence the production of relational descriptions (such as “the ball between the man and the drawer”). In Experiment 1, speakers were asked to refer unambiguously to a target object (a ball). In Experiment 1a, we addressed the role of spatial position, more specifically if speakers mention the entity positioned leftmost in the scene as (first) relatum. The results showed a small preference to start with the left entity, which leaves room for other factors that could influence spatial reference. Thus, in the following studies, we varied salience systematically, by making one of the relatum candidates animate (Experiment 1b), and by adding attention capture cues, first subliminally by priming one relatum candidate with a flash (Experiment 1c), then explicitly by using salient colors for objects (Experiment 1d). Results indicate that spatial position played a dominant role. Entities on the left were mentioned more often as (first) relatum than those on the right (Experiments 1a–d). Animacy affected reference production in one out of three studies (in Experiment 1d). When salience was manipulated by priming visual attention or by using salient colors, there were no significant effects (Experiments 1c, d). In the acceptability rating study (Experiment 2), participants expressed their preference for specific relata, by ranking descriptions on the basis of how good they thought the descriptions fitted the scene. Results show that participants preferred most the description that had an animate entity as the first mentioned relatum. The relevance of these results for models of reference production is discussed.

Suggesting motion in health communication pictures: The effect of pictorial and extra-pictorial manipulation

Abstract The static character of pictures often contrasts sharply with the dynamic nature of the message they are meant to convey. Suggesting motion in static pictures is particularly important in communicative contexts in which vital messages and instructions need to be transmitted, for example in the context of health-intervention programmes. Pictures are often the main carriers of health-related messages, for instance when oral or video transmission is not available, or when written information is not accessible because the target group lacks the necessary reading skills. The present study investigates the effect of different design strategies used to suggest motion in static pictures. It compares the suggestive manipulation of iconic pictorial elements (i.e. the suggestive depiction of body parts, bodily expressions and postures) with the use of extra-pictorial (noniconic) devices (such as movement lines or arrows). In study 1, two groups of respondents were presented with one of two versions of the same motion-suggesting pictures: pictures with hands only, and pictures with hands and arrows added. In study 2, an extra group of respondents was exposed to a third version of the same pictures: pictures with arrows only. The results of study 1 reveal that the use of arrows results in a somewhat better recognition of motion and intended motion. However, this effect is small and applies mainly to respondents with relatively higher literacy levels. The results of study 2 show that arrows alone are far less efficient as motion cues than the other two variants. Furthermore, the comments of respondents reveal that arrows are noticed and mentioned far less often as motion cues than body parts or objects involved in the action.

The use of English in Dutch text messages as a function of communicative constraints

The influence of English on other languages such as Dutch is still growing. But how does this influence show up in actual day to day verbal behavior? A promising domain to study this issue is texting by young adults. How often and in what ways do they use English in their digital messages? Are there context factors at work that make them rely less or more on English? In an experimental study the influence of two pragmatic factors has been assessed: social distance and subjective costs. How familiar is the sender with the receiver, and how intrusive is the message? In response to four sketches of a communicative situation, 38 young adults composed in all 148 text messages. Both pragmatic factors proved to be effective. English words and phrases were used most often in communicating with peers for a ‘light’ reason. When addressing more senior receivers with a rather intrusive message, English was used far less. In the undemanding situation English features outnumbered the Dutch ones; in the more demanding situation this pattern was reversed, now the Dutch features were the more frequent ones. The use of English showed a positional effect as well: it occurred for the most part at the beginning and ending of the message, leaving the core content almost untouched. Each of these effects shows that texters take into account several pragmatic considerations. If English is becoming an integral part of Dutch text messages, it seems to do so in a deliberate way.

New Balls Please! The prosody of tennis scores

Tennis scores represent a natural language domain that offers the unique opportunity to study the effects of discourse constraints on prosody with strict control over syntactic and lexical variation. This study analyzed a set of tennis scores, such as 30–15, from live recordings of several Wimbledon and Davis Cup matches. The objective was to uncover how the prosody of these scores depended on three factors: (a) the local discourse context, which varied because, after every point, either the first or the second number was different than it had been in the score reported just previously; (b) the global situation, which varied because either the serving player or the receiving player had the lead in the current game; and (c) the speaker role, which varied as the umpire or a radio reporter uttered the scores. This study excised 96 tennis scores (spoken in English) by 2 umpires and 2 live radio reporters. These scores were labelled and perceptually evaluated in terms of perceived prominence and acoustically analyzed in terms of three prosodic characteristics: loudness, speech rate, and pitch. The perceptual and acoustic analyses both showed that the prominence patterns were affected by the global situation and speaker role, but not by the local context. For both speaker roles, prosodic prominence patterns correlated with whether the game, so far, was proceeding favorably for the serving player. In the umpire data, a favorable situation correlated with extra emphasis on the first word in a score, whereas in the reporter data, an unfavorable situation correlated with more emphasis on the second word.