Stefan Grondelaers

The Standard Language Situation in the Low Countries: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Variations on a Diaglossic Theme

This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic accountn (Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch,n whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards an stratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between then base dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading ton diaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent historyn of Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top ton bottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization.n Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflectn on the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries andn outline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and Netherlandicn Dutch.

Evaluating Regional Accent Variation in Standard Dutch

This article investigates native speakers’ attitudes toward accent variation in Netherlandic Standard Dutch. Adopting the speaker evaluation paradigm, a demographically controlled sample of listener-judges rated spontaneous speech samples that are representative of four regions in the Netherlands, and from which potentially competing linguistic cues (e.g., pitch and intonation) had not been removed. Speech stimuli were rated on a set of scales integrated from among previous studies conducted in the Low Countries. Regionally marked standard accents activated distinct attitude profiles that were largely invariant with respect to the age, gender, level of education, and regional provenance of the listener-judges. It is argued that these regionally flavored standard varieties were found to be more than social categorization cues: Data reveal that an accent elicits perceptions of its so-called intrinsic euphony and norm status in addition to the status and integrity of its speakers.

A variationist account of constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch

Abstract This paper reports on a corpus-based analysis of constituent ordering in presentative er-constructions in Belgian Dutch. Whereas in the majority of these sentences, the locative typically follows the indefinite subject (cf. Er ligt een bompakket op de zesde verdieping ‘There is a bomb on the sixth floor’), in a small number the locative precedes the subject, as in Er zijn in Brussel geen gettos ‘There are in Brussels no ghettoes’. In order to account for this hitherto unnoticed variation, we extracted 360 er-initial sentences with one locative adjunct (either in final or penultimate position) from a corpus of written and spoken Dutch, and coded them for eight semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic variables. A stepwise logistic regression confirmed our hypothesis that ers inaccessibility marking function (Grondelaers, Brysbaert, Speelman and Geeraerts 2002) is a factor which determines word order variation. At the same time, however, the regression analysis demonstrated that there is a more significant ordering motivation, viz. informational prominence. The finding that it is the more prominent constituent which tends to be sentence-final throws new light on the givenbefore-new principle (Gundel 1988), and rules out any analysis which restricts the constructional meaning of presentative sentences to “introducing an indefinite subject”.

Introducing a new entity into discourse: comprehension and production evidence for the status of dutch er ‘‘there” as a higher-level expectancy monitor

This paper reports on the ways in which new entities are introduced into discourse. First, we present the evidence in support of a model of indefinite reference processing based on three principles: the listeners ability to make predictive inferences in order to decrease the unexpectedness of upcoming words, the availability to the speaker of grammatical constructions that customize predictive inferences, and the use of expectancy monitors to signal and facilitate the introduction of highly unpredictable entities. We provide evidence that one of these expectancy monitors in Dutch is the post-verbal variant of existential er (the equivalent of the unstressed existential there in English). In an eye-tracking experiment we demonstrate that the presence of er decreases the processing difficulties caused by low subject expectancy. A corpus-based regression analysis subsequently confirms that the production of er is determined almost exclusively by seven parameters of low subject expectancy. Together, the comprehension and production data suggest that while existential er functions as an expectancy monitor in much the same way as speech disfluencies (hesitations, pauses and filled pauses), er is a higher-level expectancy monitor because it is available in spoken and written discourse and because it is produced more systematically than any disfluency.

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.

Subjective accent strength perceptions are not only a function of objective accent strength. Evidence from Netherlandic Standard Dutch

Naive listeners can recognize three regional accents of Netherlandic Standard Dutch.Naive listeners agree in their subjective ratings of the strength of these accents.Accent strength can be objectively measured on the basis of vowel formants.Subjective ratings and objective measurements of accent strength strongly correlate.But: subjective accentedness ratings are co-determined by speaker prestige variables. This paper compares subjective ratings and objective measurements of the strength of regional accents of Netherlandic Standard Dutch. In a first experiment, 21 respondents rated 80 short samples of spontaneous speech produced by male teachers of Dutch originating from four areas in The Netherlands; samples were rated in terms of the expected regional origin of the speaker and the strength of his accent. In a second experiment, we computed the phonetic distance between two accent benchmarks (the Randstad accent, the allegedly lightest accent of Netherlandic Standard Dutch, and the Randstad speakers rated as the mildest in the first experiment) and all other speakers accents. The subjective ratings were shown to correlate strongly with the phonetic measurements, but additional regression analysis revealed that subjective ratings of accent strength were also impacted by a number of speaker prestige variables. This indicates that the intrinsically quantitative process of accent strength perception (partly) depends on qualitative evaluations of speaker personality. Recommendations are made for a valid implementation of (native) accent strength in speaker evaluation experiments.