Dutch Texts Research Articles

Culture and discourse structure: A comparative study of Dutch and Iranian news texts

Many studies of structure in present-day Western news texts have shown that the dominant structure is the inverted pyramid, even if the use of a chronological narrative structure is acknowledged. However, the relevant literature has exclusively investigated Western news texts. In this study, we challenge the dominance of the inverted news structure by including a non-Western and less-investigated culture and ask whether textual structure of news texts can differ between cultural contexts. In total, 100 crime news texts from national Iranian and Dutch newspapers were analyzed for both the overall text and the journalists’ statements. Those texts that showed a hybrid structure (combining inverted pyramid and chronology) were subsequently studied qualitatively to understand how chronology is applied in them. News texts from the two cultures were significantly different in their structure. Qualitative analysis of the journalistic statements uncovered a quotation-based structure, a way of news writing in Iranian journalistic statements in which the journalist mainly narrates reporting eventualities that are new to Western eyes. The study offers implications for further ethnography of news and communication, suggesting that the role, pattern and effects of (journalistic) communication can be culture-specific.

Dutch in Eighteenth-Century Japan

In the first hundred years of the Dutch presence in Japan, the Dutch language was used by Dutch, other Europeans and Japanese in a range of social domains. This article considers how Dutch functioned in Japan in the following hundred years, i.e. c. 1700–1800. After discussing who knew Dutch in Japan, it examines the use of the language not by social domain, but rather by the linguistic processes that resulted from contact between Dutch and other languages in Japan. These include the learning of Dutch by non-native speakers, bilingualism, language competition, code switching and loanword integration. Particular attention is paid to the subject of translation, for it was during this period that Japanese interpreters and scholars began to translate Dutch texts to a significant degree and the discipline known as rangaku (lit. ‘Dutch studies’) emerged. This article therefore aims to increase our knowledge of Dutch as an emigrant language and of the linguistic diversity and resultant language processes in early modern Japan.

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

Abstract 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.

Middle Dutch literary studies and translation studies

ABSTRACTMiddle Dutch literature relies heavily on sources in other languages, the most important of which are Latin and French. From the nineteenth century onwards, scholars of Medieval Dutch literature have paid a great deal of attention to the foreign sources of the Middle Dutch texts. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was a renewed interest in translations, which continues to the present day. This renewal was mainly due to the research of Wim Gerritsen and Frits van Oostrom, who introduced new theoretical frameworks and new methods for translation analysis. This article investigates how these approaches to Middle Dutch translations relate to the theories and insights of contemporary translation studies. It also intends to show that cross-fertilization between medieval studies and translation studies can be enriching for both disciplines.

Measuring syntactical variation in Germanic texts

We present two new measures of syntactic distance between languages. First, we present the ‘movement measure’ which measures the average number of words that has moved in sentences of one language compared to the corresponding sentences in another language. Secondly, we introduce the ‘indel measure’ which measures the average number of words being inserted or deleted in sentences of one language compared to the corresponding sentences in another language. The two measures were compared to the ‘trigram measure’ which was introduced by Nerbonne & Wiersma (2006, A Measure of Aggregate Syntactic Distance. In Nerbonne, J. and Hinrichs, E. (eds.) Linguistic Distances Workshop at the joint conference of International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, July, 2006, pp. 82–90.). We correlated the results of the three measures and found a low correlation between the results of the movement and indel measure, indicating that the two measures represent different kinds of linguistic variation. We found a high correlation between the results of the movement measure and the trigram measure. The results of all of the three measures suggest that English is syntactically a Scandinavian language. Because of our unique database design we were able to detect asymmetric relationships between the languages. All three measures suggest that asymmetric syntactical distances could be part of the explanation why native speakers of Dutch more easily understand German texts than native speakers of German understand Dutch texts (Swarte 2016).

Vernacular Eschatology or Eschatology in the Vernacular? The Representation of Death in Fourteenth-Century Vernacular Brabantine Writings

The goal of this article is to examine the theme of death in a representative sample of Middle Dutch texts from Brabant in the broader context of the Latinitas, in order to stimulate a discussion on the significance of eschatological themes in vernacular texts. It will become apparent that it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between the treatment of death in the vernacular corpus analysed for this case study and the broader Latin tradition. This finding is then contextualised within the scholarly concept of ‘vernacular theology’, for it supports the recent notion that the significance of vernacular theology is in communicating theological knowledge in all its variety in the vernacular. The extended discussion of eschatological themes in vernacular writings therefore should be seen as being closely connected to the general intellectual and religious emancipation of the laity in the late Middle Ages.

Tekstgenres analyseren op lexicale complexiteit met T‑Scan

Abstract Using T-Scan to analyse the lexical complexity of text genres T-Scan is a tool for the automatic analysis of Dutch text. This paper presents the first large-scale corpus analysis with T-Scan, focusing on lexical complexity. A collection of nearly 1000 text specimens was assembled, containing ten genres: travel blogs, celebrity news features, novels, textbooks for vocational secondary schools, textbooks for general secondary schools, news reports, opinion pieces, political programs, medical advice texts and research articles. The lexical complexity features in the analysis include morphology, word frequency, various word concreteness indices, personal pronouns, names and verb tense. Systematic genre differences are found, such that a genre detection model comprising 18 T-Scan features correctly identifies 83 percent of the corpus texts. Most lexical features differentiating genres intuitively relate to text topic complexity. A closer analysis is offered of the contrast between the two textbook samples in the corpus, which differ only in the educational levels they cater for. Again, topic variation seems a more important factor than stylistic variation. We demonstrate a new method to examine stylistic variation, which consists of within-genre comparisons using the genre prediction; more specifically, ‘deviant’ texts are compared to ‘typical’ members of their genre.

In How Far is Elckerlijc Dutch? References to the Dutch Origin in the Polish Reception of the Middle Dutch Text

Abstract The sixteenth-century morality play Elckerlijc is one of the few texts mentioned in almost all Dutch canon lists. It is no surprise that this is one of the few medieval Dutch texts transferred into different languages and cultures. There are two Polish texts based on it, the first from 1921 by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (Kwidam), the second from 1933 by Stanisław Helsztyński (Każdy (Everyman): średniowieczny moralitet angielski). The text was though never directly translated into Polish from Dutch. The main issue is whether these translations have influenced the image of Dutch literature in Poland. It appears that secondary literature has seen the plays of Iwaszkiewicz and Helsztyński only as transfer of German or English literature and ideas and that it is rarely known that the original story originates from the Netherlands.

Authorship verification for different languages, genres and topics

Authorship verification is a branch of forensic authorship analysis addressing the following task: Given a number of sample documents of an author A and a document allegedly written by A, the task is to decide whether the author of the latter document is truly A or not. We present a scalable authorship verification method that copes with this problem across different languages, genres and topics. The central concept of our method is a model, which is trained with Dutch, English, Greek, Spanish and German text documents. The model sets for each language specific parameters and a threshold that accepts or rejects the alleged author as A. The proposed method offers a wide range of benefits, e.g., a universal (static) threshold for each language and scalability regarding almost any involved component (classification function, ensemble strategy, features, etc.). Furthermore, the method benefits from low runtime due to the fact that no natural language processing techniques nor other computationally-intensive methods are involved. In our experiments, we applied the method on 28 test corpora including 4525 verification cases across 16 genres and a huge number of mixed topics, where we achieved competitive results (75% median accuracy). With these results we were able to outperform two state-of-the-art baselines, given the same training and test corpora.

Assessment of voice, speech, and related quality of life in advanced head and neck cancer patients 10-years+ after chemoradiotherapy

Assessment of long-term objective and subjective voice, speech, articulation, and quality of life in patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) treated with concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CRT) for advanced, stage IV disease. Twenty-two disease-free survivors, treated with cisplatin-based CRT for inoperable HNC (1999-2004), were evaluated at 10-years post-treatment. A standard Dutch text was recorded. Perceptual analysis of voice, speech, and articulation was conducted by two expert listeners (SLPs). Also an experimental expert system based on automatic speech recognition was used. Patients' perception of voice and speech and related quality of life was assessed with the Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and Speech Handicap Index (SHI) questionnaires. At a median follow-up of 11-years, perceptual evaluation showed abnormal scores in up to 64% of cases, depending on the outcome parameter analyzed. Automatic assessment of voice and speech parameters correlated moderate to strong with perceptual outcome scores. Patient-reported problems with voice (VHI>15) and speech (SHI>6) in daily life were present in 68% and 77% of patients, respectively. Patients treated with IMRT showed significantly less impairment compared to those treated with conventional radiotherapy. More than 10-years after organ-preservation treatment, voice and speech problems are common in this patient cohort, as assessed with perceptual evaluation, automatic speech recognition, and with validated structured questionnaires. There were fewer complaints in patients treated with IMRT than with conventional radiotherapy.

Waardering van inhoud en vorm in informerende teksten

This article describes a part of a research aimed at evaluating text-optimizing techniques. The respondents were presented with original texts and with differently manipulated versions of them. The text types studied here were an instruction manual to a digital camera and written instructions on how to fill in the annual tax declaration form. The original texts came in two language variants, namely Slovak and Dutch. They were tested on native speakers of both languages and learners of Dutch. Among other post-reading tasks, the respondents were asked to freely comment on the text they just had read. One interesting detail came up among the comments on the Dutch version of the texts that accompany the tax form: namely, there were relatively many comments questioning if these texts fulfill the canon of a “real” administrative text. On the other hand, no such questioning comments were recorded for the Slovak texts. More interestingly, the Slovak texts were more heavily manipulated than the Dutch ones, because the original Dutch texts were more suitable for the end recipient. Another striking fact is that the manipulation of the Dutch texts did not lead to statistically significant changes in the ability of the respondents to score better in questions about the facts in the texts, whereas the Slovak respondents did score better.

Dutch East India Company shipbuilding: the archaeological study of Batavia and other seventeenth-century VOC ships

Eight months into its maiden voyage to the Indies, the Dutch East India Company's Batavia sank on June 4, 1629 on Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the western coast of Australia. Wendy van Duivenvoorde's five-year study was aimed at reconstructing the hull of Batavia , the only excavated remains of an early seventeenth-century Indiaman to have been raised and conserved in a way that permits detailed examination, using data retrieved from the archaeological remains, interpreted in the light of company archives, ship journals, and Dutch texts on shipbuilding of this period. Over two hundred tables, charts, drawings, and photographs are included.

Critiques

Critiques Claudia Nelson Like our spring issue, ChLAQ 40.2 does not have an official theme, but the articles included here nonetheless share an interest in works in which children serve as the vehicles for social critique. The genres they examine range from comic strips to picture books to young adult dystopian novels and beyond, but together, these articles indicate ways in which literature for children and young adults may interrogate particular social constructs and seek to replace them with others. We begin with Lara Saguisag’s “Family Amusements: Buster Brown and the Place of Humor in the Early Twentieth-Century Home.” In contrast to critics who see Buster Brown primarily as a subversive text, Saguisag argues that it instructs readers in using humor to shore up the family, an institution widely perceived as under threat during the strip’s heyday. In doing so, however, Buster Brown supported not the family in general but the companionate family in particular, a model inimical to hierarchy. Buster and his parents thus function simultaneously to critique patriarchy and to support what was increasingly offered as an alternative to it. The main title of Vanessa Joosen’s “Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other” speaks to the kind of child-adult exchanges going on both within Buster Brown and in the strip’s crossover appeal, but Joosen’s focus is not on the Progressive Era US but rather on present-day Europe. Using a sample of four award-winning Dutch and British texts, Joosen examines “how old age and intergenerational relationships are constructed” in these works, asking “how insights from age studies can contribute to interpreting and contextualizing these fictional constructs.” Much as Buster Brown, in Saguisag’s reading, privileges both the playful child and the adult who is willing to play along with him, Joosen sees in her selected texts a validating of playful child and playful elder that comes at the expense of authority situated in the (implicitly joyless) middle-aged. Continuing this focus on the potential social power of play, David Aitchison turns to the concept of “puerility” in “Little Saboteurs, Puerile Politics: The [End Page 101] Child, the Childlike, and the Principled Life in Carl Hiaasen’s Ecotage Novels for Young Adults.” Aitchison reads Hiaasen’s Hoot, Flush, and Scat as indicative of how today’s environmentalist discourse offers “a certain political possibility for the child and the childlike: a license to react strongly, respond playfully, and get into trouble in the name of protecting the environment.” Simultaneously, Aitchison suggests, it is important to recognize that this discourse exists in the context of “a deeply politicized fear of childishness,” so that Hiaasen’s novels may productively be understood as “rethink[ing] what it means for children to be responsible.” Although Suzanne Collins’s protagonist Katniss Everdeen is famously involved in events designated “games” by her culture, the Hunger Games do not invite the reader to see them as play. We can, however, readily see the discourse of the Games as enabling social criticism, not least because Collins traces how this discourse contributes to the revolution of which Katniss is the public face. Kathryn Strong Hansen’s contribution, “The Metamorphosis of Katniss Everdeen: The Hunger Games, Myth, and Femininity,” combines an examination of Collins’s use of Greek myth with a gender studies approach. Tracing the presence in the trilogy of two feminine archetypes upon which Katniss is invited to model herself, namely Artemis and Philomela, Hansen argues that ultimately Katniss must reject both in order “to create a form of femininity that allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.” The article section of this issue concludes with a consideration of another contemporary dystopian novel for young adults. Amy Elliot’s “Power in Our Words: Finding Community and Mitigating Trauma in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner” argues that Dashner’s popular novel, the first installment of a trilogy later augmented by a prequel, seeks to school its adolescent readers in a crucial emotional skill by “convey[ing] the nature of trauma and suggest[ing] productive responses to help mitigate grief.” In Elliot’s reading...

Where Are the Emotions in Scandinavian Arthuriana?: Or: How Cool Is King Arthur of the North?

INTRODUCTION In the North, King Arthur is so cool, that he is hot. That was the answer Keith Busby provided during the discussion of this topic at die Oslo conference on Arthur of the North held in May 2013. And he was right, the study of Scandinavian Arthurian literature was given a great boost by the conference, and also by the Etat present article in the first issue of the Journal of the International Arthurian Society (Sif Rikhardsdottir and Eriksen 2013), and emotions are a hot topic in many different fields of historical research after the affective turn. Medieval Arthurian literature is one of those fields, as evidenced by papers in the Bristol and Bucharest conferences of the International Arthurian Society (IAS) and a forthcoming book on Arthurian Emotions. (1) From a transnational, comparative viewpoint, it is interesting to look at the way emotional passages are translated in the various adaptations of French texts like Chretien's romances. Do, for instance, Scandinavian and Dutch poets deal differently with emotional passages? As a brief exploration of these issues, the presentation of emotions by minor characters and a protagonist in two episodes from Chretien's romances and their Old Norse adaptations will be discussed here. The minor characters appear in Chretien's Erec et Enide, the protagonist in his Conte du Graal. All of them show emotions by means of tears, called forth by joy or despair. (2) Hartmann von Aue's Erec, the Norse Erex saga, the Middle Dutch Perchevael, and the Norse Parcevals saga will also be used in the comparison. ATTRACTIVE EMOTIONS The manuscript of the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, now in the Royal Library in The Hague, was probably the second volume in a set of two. It is therefore somewhat remarkable that it has a brief prologue. After the usual prayer for guidance from God and the Virgin Mary, the narrator refers to the first volume and promises that the second book will also be worthwhile to read and hear. The Middle Dutch text (Besamusca and Postma 1997, 11. 8--16) states: Hier voren hebbic u verplecht Van vele scoenre avonturen, Mar wildi vort int lesen duren, Ghi suit nu horen scone die jeesten, van rouwen ende van feesten, Van ridderscape groete daet, Van selsieneheden menich baraet, Die dese partie hevet in. Nu hort hier int begin. (Before this I have told you many beautiful adventures, but if you will continue reading, you will hear beautiful stories, sad and joyful, of many chivalrous deeds, [you will hear] many entertaining stories of astonishing things, which this section contains. Now hear its beginning.) (3) The key phrase is right in the middle: both sad and It translates the Middle Dutch words Bede van rouwen ende van feesten. There is an interesting concoction of events and ensuing emotions in this translation. The word feesten could be translated as festivities, indicating that the stories describe courtly feasts. But in this context, combined with the word rouwen, which cannot in a parallel way be translated as a noun, it seems better to use an alternative translation for feesten, that is: the adjective joyful. The effect--the experience of sorrow and joy--that the stories will have on the audience is what the narrator advertises here. His narrative will contain astonishing and entertaining adventures, but first and foremost, it will move its audience. Announcing the expected emotional impact of a narrative is a standard element in medieval prologues. Rhetorical handbooks state that the exordium (prologue) should have the three functions of delectare, docere, and movere (to entertain, to teach, and to touch the audience). (4) And in many Arthurian prologues, from Chretien to Caxton, we find references to these functions of prologue and narrative. The finest example is Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, where the poet speaks at length to the noble hearts of his intended audience. …

Lexicon-based sentiment analysis by mapping conveyed sentiment to intended sentiment

As consumers nowadays generate increasingly more content describing their experiences with, e.g., products and brands in various languages, information systems monitoring a universal, language-independent measure of people's intended sentiment are crucial for today's businesses. In order to facilitate sentiment analysis of user-generated content, we propose to map sentiment conveyed by unstructured natural language text to universal star ratings, capturing intended sentiment. For these mappings, we consider a monotonically increasing step function, a naive Bayes method, and a support vector machine. We demonstrate that the way in which natural language reveals intended sentiment differs across our datasets of Dutch and English texts. Additionally, the results of our experiments on modelling the relation between conveyed sentiment and intended sentiment suggest that language-specific sentiment scores can separate universal classes of intended sentiment from one another to a limited extent.

DF Malan en die Hoër Kritiek

The primary aim of this paper is to bring to light an important unpublished paper from 1910 by Dr DF Malan on the so-called Higher criticism. My paper throws light on Malan’s own theological position as pupil of the Dutch Ethical theologian JJP Valeton. In the first part of my paper I try to explain the issues concerning Higher Criticism and to recount the context in which the paper was written. The second part of my paper contains the original (Dutch) text of Malan’s paper. The final part consists of an annotated bibliography of the debate about Higher Criticism in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa during the first three decades of the 20th century. This serves to situate Malan’s position within the context of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Magic, (colonial) science and science studies

This article draws on Latour's ethnography of science, analysis of the Great Divide and call for a symmetrical anthropology, to follow magic's emergence as a modern category. The focus is ethnology in colonial Indonesia. Tracing a practice initially known as guna-guna, it analyses five successive Dutch texts. Early texts show that guna-guna could affect Europeans but purify guna-guna's effects as either natural or cultural/psychological. In later texts, that translate guna-guna as magic, references to Europeans, efficacy and substances vanish; guna-guna is simply a culturally specific belief. Terming practices magic has ontological and political consequences; irreduction offers an alternative to analytic habits that yield magic.

More breast cancer patients prefer BRCA-mutation testing without prior face-to-face genetic counseling

Currently, most breast cancer (BC) patients receive face-to-face genetic counseling (DNA-intake) prior to BRCA-mutation testing, with generic information regarding hereditary BC and BRCA-mutation testing. This prospective study evaluated a novel format: replacing the intake consultation with telephone, written and digital information sent home, and face-to-face contact following BRCA-mutation testing (DNA-direct). From August 2011 to February 2012, 161 of 233 eligible BC patients referred to our Human Genetics department chose between DNA-direct (intervention) or DNA-intake (control). Exclusion criteria were psychological problems (n = 33), difficulty with Dutch text (n = 5), known BRCA-family (n = 3), non-BRCA-referral (n = 1). 30 declined genetic counseling or study participation. Participants received questionnaires including satisfaction and psychological distress. 59 % chose DNA-direct (p = 0.03), of whom 90 % were satisfied and would choose DNA-direct again (including 6/8 BRCA-mutation carriers); although 27 % hesitated to recommend DNA-direct to other patients. General distress (GHQ-12, p = 0.001) and heredity-specific distress (IES, p = 0.02) scored lower in DNA-direct than DNA-intake, both at baseline and follow-up 2 weeks after BRCA-result disclosure; all scores remained below clinical relevance. DNA-direct participants reported higher website use (53 vs. 32 %, p = 0.01), more referrer information about personal consequences (41 vs. 20 %, p = 0.004) and lower decisional conflict (median 20 [0-88] vs. 25 [0-50], p = 0.01). Processing time in DNA-direct was reduced by 1 month. Mutation detection rate was 8 % in both groups. All BRCA-mutation carriers fulfilled current testing criteria. In conclusion, more BC patients preferred DNA-direct over intake consultation prior to BRCA-mutation testing, the majority being strongly to moderately satisfied with the procedure followed, without increased distress.

Is translated language more standardized than non-translated language?

With this article, we seek to support the law of growing standardization by showing that texts translated into Belgian Dutch make more use of standard language than non-translated Belgian Dutch texts. Additionally, we want to examine whether the use of standard vs. non-standard language can be attributed to the variables text type and source language. In order to achieve that goal, we gathered a diverse set of linguistic variables and used a 10-million-word corpus that is parallel, comparable and bidirectional (the Dutch Parallel Corpus;Macken et al. 2011). The frequency counts for each of the variables are used to determine the differences in standard language use by means of profile-based correspondence analysis (Plevoets 2008). The results of our analysis show that (i) in general, there is indeed a standardizing trend among translations and (ii) text types with a lot of editorial control (fiction, non-fiction and journalistic texts) contain more standard language than the less edited text types (administrative texts and external communication) which adds support for the idea that the differences between translated and non-translated texts are text type dependent.

A 38 Million Words Dutch Text Corpus and its Users

The use of text corpora has increased considerably in the past few years, not only in the field of lexicography but also in computational linguistics and language technology. Consequently, corpus data and expertise developed by lexicographical institutions have gained a broader scope of application. In the European context this has led to a revised view of corpus design. In line with these developments, the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL) has since 1994 been providing external access to steadily improving corpora via Internet. In August 1996, the <i>38 Million Words Corpus</i> was available for consultation by the international research community. The present paper reports on the characteristics of this corpus (design, text classification, linguistic annotation) and on its use, both in dictionary projects and in linguistic research. In spite of limitations with respect to corpus design, the INL corpora accessible via Internet have proved to meet external needs. By providing these facilities, the INL has acquired a much broader experience in corpus-building than before, which is essential for new, internal dictionary projects. Giving external access to corpus data which was developed primarily for internal purposes, may be profitable for all parties involved.