Gert De Sutter

Dutch collective nouns and conceptual profiling

Abstract Collective nouns such as committee, family, or team are conceptually (and in English also syntactically) complex in the sense that they are both singular (“one”) and plural (“more than one”): they refer to a multiplicity that is conceptualized as a unity. In this article, which focuses on Dutch collective nouns, it is argued that some collective nouns are rather “one”, whereas others are rather “more than one”. Collective nouns are shown to be different from one another in member level accessibility. Whereas all collective nouns have both a conceptual collection level (“one”) and a conceptual member level (“more than one”), the latter is not always conceptually profiled (i.e., focused on) to the same extent. A gradient is sketched in which collective nouns such as bemanning (‘crew’) (member level highly accessible) and vereniging (‘association’) (member level scarcely accessible) form the extremes. Arguments in favor of the conceptual phenomenon of variable member level accessibility derive from an analysis of property distribution, from corpus research on verbal and pronominal singular-plural variation, and from a psycholinguistic eye-tracking experiment.

Reassessing the effect of the complexity principle on PP Placement in Dutch

The present paper aims at refining current knowledge about the so-called complexity principle as one of the driving forces in Dutch constituent ordering as well as re-evaluating the common assumption in traditional Dutch reference grammars that the middle field position is the standard slot for non-predicate PPs. Building on journalistic data in the Dutch Parallel Corpus, it is first shown that non-predicate PPs are significantly more often placed in postfield position (the structural position after the final verb cluster) than in middle field position (the position before the final verb cluster), which indicates that the postfield position rather than the middle field position should be considered the standard slot for PPs in written Dutch. Second, a binary logistic regression analysis is fitted in order to empirically test the complexity principle. The results show that the syntactic weight of the PP affects PP placement significantly, which is in line with was found earlier, but contrary to previous findings the weight of the middle field position itself has no significant effect and, interestingly, the interaction between PP weight and postfield weight appears to be a significant predictor too. On the basis of these findings, we propose a refined account of the complexity principle, in which both PP weight and postfield weight govern the positioning of non-predicate PPs in written Dutch.

Between language policy and language reality: a corpus-based multivariate study of the interlingual and intralingual subtitling practice in Flanders

ABSTRACT The present study explores how subtitlers in Dutch-speaking Belgium deal with the linguistic tension between the norm-adherent language policy of the broadcaster they work for (VRT) – which is oriented towards the use of Belgian Standard Dutch – and the particular language situation in Flanders, which is characterized by the increasing use of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD) in spoken contexts. Subtitlers, who produce written reproductions of spoken language, therefore need to mediate between the official language policy and language reality. In this context, this study aims to measure the extent to which the language used in Flemish subtitling conforms to the official language policy. Additionally, we analyze which contextual parameters affect the subtitlers’ linguistic choices. The data are extracted from the SoNaR corpus and subjected to profile-based correspondence analysis, visualizing the linguistic behavior, and hence the degree of norm conformity, in the subtitles. The results reveal that subtitles on Flemish television are norm-adherent to a large extent, although certain contextual parameters (source language and program genre) enhance the use of (nonstandard) CBD. These results evidence the spread of CBD features from exclusively spoken registers to a written register that was, until recently, under heavy normative control.

Corpus-based translation studies: Across genres, methods and disciplines

This paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art research in translation studies as represented in this special issue, with a special focus on corpus-based approaches that (re-)connect translation studies with other fields of corpus-based research in linguistics or which explore new types of translation data in the broadest possible sense of the term. It does so by singling out papers that illustrate different methods of data harvesting, on the one hand, particularly in areas that are currently underrepresented in the field, i.e. interpreting and subtitling, and by presenting studies that approach translation data from a perspective other than that of “translation universals”.

Corpus studies in contrastive linguistics

1. Introduction 2. Developments in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics (by Marzo, Stefania) 3. Articles 4. Believe-type raising-to-object and raising-to-subject verbs in English and Dutch: A contrastive investigation in diachronic construction grammar (by Noel, Dirk) 5. Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English: A corpus-based contrastive analysis of the language-internal and -external properties of English depend, French dependre and Dutch afhangen, liggen and zien (by Defrancq, Bart) 6. Cultural differences in academic discourse: Evidence from first-person verb use in the methods sections of medical research articles (by Williams, Ian A.) 7. Cognitive verbs in context: A contrastive analysis of English and French argumentative discourse (by Fetzer, Anita) 8. Mood and modality in finite noun complement clauses: A French-English contrastive study (by Kante, Issa) 9. Choice of strategies in realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian: A corpus-based study (by Usoniene, Aurelia)