How Does the Predictability of the Subject in a Sentence Change the Preference for the Use of the Word ‘er’ in Dutch Language?

Melcherts, Matthew (2021) How Does the Predictability of the Subject in a Sentence Change the Preference for the Use of the Word ‘er’ in Dutch Language? Bachelor's Thesis, Artificial Intelligence.

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Abstract

This thesis focuses on the preference of Dutch language users for the use of the Dutch word ‘er’ in sentences where it can be omitted. It aims to look at the disparity between Dutch prescriptivists saying that ‘er’ should be omitted, and Grondelaers et al. (2009) saying it has some sort of ‘expectancy marker’ function for unexpected sentence subjects. To look further into whether the Dutch word ‘er’ has such an ‘expectancy marker’ function in a sentence and measure the preference of Dutch language users, three experiments were conducted. First, to obtain expected sentence subjects, a cloze task was conducted in which the participants filled in an expected sentence subject in a gap sentence. Second, to obtain unexpected sentence subjects which are considered plausible within the sentence, a plausibility experiment was conducted in which the participants ranked sentence subjects based on their plausibility within the sentence. Third, a preference survey was conducted in which participants were asked whether they preferred a sentence with or without ‘er’, containing either an expected or unexpected sentence subject. The results show no significant difference in preference between sentences with expected and unexpected sentence subjects. The difference between the results of the preference survey and earlier research is discussed with multiple possible explanations.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Supervisor name:	Jones, S.M.
Degree programme:	Artificial Intelligence
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	12 Jul 2021 08:39
Last Modified:	12 Jul 2021 08:39
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/25156

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