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Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 241–262

Chapter 11
What comes second

Cross-linguistic analyses of information structure in Dutch between English and German

| Radboud University Nijmegen

On the basis of previous cross-linguistic analyses of (re)narrations of the same animation film in German and English, the present study shows how these (re)narrations in Dutch as another Germanic language seem to side more with German than with English in the temporal management of the story-line. Dutch speakers – just as German speakers – structure their story in sequential, bounded events, typically introduced by en dan ‘and then’ and pushed forward by an animate protagonist. English speakers use a large number of progressive forms, presenting an overlapping series of unbounded situations. In the management of reference to entities however, Dutch differs in a very subtle way from German in subordinate utterances where Dutch speakers use more inanimate entities as a syntactic subject than German speakers.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The interaction between macro planning rules and grammatical features
  • 3.Progressive aspect, event construal and macro-planning in German and English
    • 3.1Event construal
    • 3.2In macro planning
  • 4.A note about progressive aspect in German, Sandwiched between Dutch and English
  • 5.Word order; English strict SVO and German and Dutch V2
  • 6.Previous findings in film (Quest) retellings; English and German
  • 7.Frequencies in previous comparisons (re) narrations English and German
  • 8.The stimulus and the participants
    • 8.1 Quest
    • 8.2Participants
  • 9. General text properties
  • 10.Features of temporal linking in Dutch compared in English and German
  • 11.Features of reference management in Dutch compared to English and German
  • 12. Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.11sta
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