Er als accessibility marker: on- en offline evidentie voor een procedurele duiding van presentatieve zinnen

This paper elaborates on offline and online research into linguistic status of non-anaphoric 'er' "there" in presentive sentences with a preposed adjunct (e.g. Op de hoek van de straat is (er) een winkel). In a first study (Grondelaers & Brysbaert 1996), we used corpus materials and self-paced reading data to demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between the presence of 'er' in adjunct sentences and the spatial and discursive situating potential of the preposed locative adjunct: the preference for 'er' in such sentences increases as the locative search precision of the adjunct and the topicality of the adjunct referent decrease. Building on additional corpus data and a new self-paced reading experiment, the present paper goes beyond the observation of correlations, and concentrates on 'er's' exact linguistic function. The cumulative empirical evidence suggests that 'er' is an acciessibility marker in the sense of Ariel (1990): 'er' is not - as is generally assumed - an optional dummy element, but a discourse particle inserted to inform the hearer how important the subject to be created is from a communicative point of view, how inferrable it is from the foregoing context, and how much effort the hearer should invest in its creation

Language Identification and Morphosyntactic Tagging: The Second VarDial Evaluation Campaign

We present the results and the findings of the Second VarDial Evaluation Campaign on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects. The campaign was organized as part of the fifth edition of the VarDial workshop, collocated with COLING’2018. This year, the campaign included five shared tasks, including two task re-runs – Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) and German Dialect Identification (GDI) –, and three new tasks – Morphosyntactic Tagging of Tweets (MTT), Discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles (DFS), and Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI). A total of 24 teams submitted runs across the five shared tasks, and contributed 22 system description papers, which were included in the VarDial workshop proceedings and are referred to in this report.Non peer reviewe

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 listener’s 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

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

Contains fulltext : 43758.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)33 p

A quantitative analysis of qualitative free response data

status: publishe

Purism and fashion: French influence on Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch

Departement Linguïstiek.status: publishe

Noord/Zuid-variatie in het gebruik van er

Departement Linguïstiek. Dienst Informatieverwerking Letteren. Diensten Faculteit Letteren.status: publishe

Can speaker evaluation return private attitudes towards stigmatised varieties? Evidence from emergent standardisation in Belgian Dutch

status: publishe