
Gert-Jan SchoenmakersUtrecht University | UU · Department of Languages, Literature and Communication
Gert-Jan Schoenmakers
PhD in Linguistics
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24
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Publications (24)
Direct objects in Dutch can precede or follow adverbs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as scrambling. The linguistic literature agrees in its assumption that scrambling is regulated by the topicality and anaphoricity status of definite objects, but theories vary as to what kinds of objects exactly are predicted to scramble. This study reports exp...
This paper addresses the relation between two types of word order variation in two stages of Dutch: OV/VO variation in historical Dutch and scrambling in present-day Dutch. Information structural considerations influence both types of word order variation, and we demonstrate by means of a comprehensive corpus study that they have a comparable patte...
This paper reports on a literary corpus study of four grammatical tenses across four European languages. The corpus consists of a selection of eight chapters from Javier Marías’s Spanish novel Así empieza lo malo ‘Thus bad begins’, and its translations to English, Dutch, and French. We annotated 1579 verb forms in the Spanish source text for tense,...
Linguistic judgment experiments typically elicit judgments in terms of the acceptability or surface probability of a sentence. There is evidence that the dimension of the scale on which sentences are judged influences the outcome of the experiment, but to date this evidence is only limited. This is not a trivial matter, as the elicited judgment dat...
This paper gauges the acceptability of wh-extraction from four island types in Romanian, an understudied language in this respect. Linguistic theories predict wh-dependencies to be unacceptable when the gap is located inside adjuncts, complex NPs, embedded interrogative clauses, or subjects. After reviewing different theoretical approaches to islan...
Embedded interrogative clauses are known to constitute islands for extraction. While there is little
debate in the literature with respect to the impossibility of adjunct extraction, argument extraction is said to be
ameliorated when the filler is D-linked/lexically restricted. Recent studies moreover argue that there are further
differences betwee...
Does it matter whether applicants are addressed with formal or informal pronouns in online job interviews? This study shows that it does indeed, at least for speakers of French and German. Both French (n = 171) and German (n = 198) participants were more positive about a recruiter who addressed them with formal pronouns. The use of informal pronoun...
Previous research has shown that readers experience stronger immersion while reading first-person narratives than third-person narratives, but whether this difference in processing is time-sensitive remains unclear. We report on a self-paced reading experiment in which French participants read short stories in first and in third person. Additionall...
Some languages make a distinction between formal and informal pronouns of address. When organizations communicate in such a language, they have to choose between the formal and informal form. The goal of this paper is to explore the role of the V-T distinction in organizational communication, specifically in generic job advertisements, through two...
In Netherlandish Dutch, Belgian Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, speakers have a choice between formal (V) and informal (T) pronouns of address. We present a quantitative study of how V and T are used on recruitment pages of multinational companies. Our corpus-based method is inspired by studies on pronouns of address in Netherlandish and Belgia...
The results of a self-paced reading experiment show that reading times in Dutch increase when there is a gender mismatch between the subject and a subsequent possessive pronoun, signaling an increase in processing difficulty. We hypothesized that Dutch learners of French incorrectly apply the rules of their L1 in their L2 and should therefore also...
This paper reports on an experimental study of the use of two Spanish markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality, creo que 'I believe that' and pienso que 'I think that', by native speakers, and by Dutch and German learners of Spanish. We found a clear preference for creo que among the native speakers of Spanish, but with differences between t...
In certain varieties of Dutch spoken among young people, the preposition and determiner in locative and directional PPs can sometimes be omitted. We argue on the basis of language data taken from Twitter and intuitions of young speakers of Dutch that nominal arguments in these constructions do not have a DP layer, the absence of which leads to a sp...
This paper experimentally explores the optionality of Dutch scrambling structures with a definite object and an adverb. Most researchers argue that such structures are not freely interchangeable, but are subject to a strict discourse template. Existing analyses are based primarily on intuitions of the researchers, while experimental support is scar...
Incremental comprehension of head-final constructions can reveal structural attachment preferences for ambiguous phrases. This study investigates how temporarily ambiguous PPs are processed in Dutch verb-final constructions. In De aannemer heeft op het dakterras bespaard/gewerkt ‘The contractor has on the roof terrace saved/worked’, the PP is local...
This paper addresses the role of the adverb in Dutch direct object scrambling constructions. We report four experiments in which we investigate whether the structural position and the scope sensitivity of the adverb affect acceptability judgments of scrambling constructions and native speakers' tendency to scramble definite objects. We conclude tha...
Docenten worden de laatste jaren steeds vaker geconfronteerd met een onverwacht gebruik van het woord echter, bijvoorbeeld in verslagen en e-mails van hun leerlingen en studenten. Het gaat dan om zinnen waarin echter als eerste zinsdeel wordt gevolgd door een werkwoord, zoals in onderstaande tweet. Waarom doen leerlingen en studenten dit zo vaak ve...