Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2018Edited by Bert Le Bruyn and Janine Berns
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 35] 2018
► pp. 111–124
Edited by Bert Le Bruyn and Janine Berns
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 35] 2018
► pp. 111–124
The Dutch verb-spelling paradox in social media
A corpus study
Although the Dutch verb spelling system seems very straightforward, many spelling errors are made, both by children and adults (e.g., Sandra, Frisson, & Daems 2004). These errors mainly occur with verbs with two or more homophonous forms in their inflectional paradigms. Ample experimental research has been carried out on this topic, but these studies hardly reflect everyday language behavior. In the current corpus study, we reassessed previously found experimental results, but now in a Twitter corpus containing 17,432 tweets with homophonous verb forms. In accordance with previous results, we found a clear preference for the suffix -<d> compared to both -<dt> and -<t> , as well as a frequency effect, resulting in fewer errors for more frequent word forms. Furthermore, the results revealed that users with more followers make fewer errors, and that more errors are made during the evening and night.
Keywords: verb spelling errors, homophones, frequency effect, mental lexicon, everyday language behavior
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Method
- 2.1The corpus
- 2.2Analysis
- 3.Results
- 3.1Homophone pair 1 (first vs. third person singular)
- 3.2Homophone pair 2 (third person singular vs. past participle)
- 3.3 Worden
- 3.4 Vinden
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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Gahl, Susanne & Ingo Plag
2022. Spelling errors in English derivational suffixes reflect morphological boundary strength. The Mental Lexicon ► pp. 1 ff.
Sandra, Dominiek
2022. Too Little Morphology Can Kill You: The Interplay Between Low-Frequency Morpho-Orthographic Rules and High-Frequency Verb Homophones in Spelling Errors. In Developing Language and Literacy [Literacy Studies, 23], ► pp. 191 ff.
Surkyn, Hanne, Dominiek Sandra & Reinhild Vandekerckhove
2022. Adolescents and Verb Spelling: The Impact of Gender and Educational Track on Rule Knowledge and Linguistic Attitudes. Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 11
Chamalaun, Robert J. P. M., Anna M. T. Bosman & Mirjam T. C. Ernestus
2021. The role of grammar in spelling homophonous regular verbs. Written Language & Literacy 24:1 ► pp. 38 ff.
de Bree, Elise & Madelon van den Boer
2021. Wrong place, wrong time: Children’s sensitivity to present tense spelling conventions. Applied Psycholinguistics 42:5 ► pp. 1221 ff.
Surkyn, Hanne, Reinhild Vandekerckhove & Dominiek Sandra
Surkyn, Hanne, Reinhild Vandekerckhove & Dominiek Sandra
2021. The impact of analogical effects and social factors on the spelling of partially homophonous verb forms in informal social media writing. Written Language & Literacy 24:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Rey, Arnaud, Jean-Luc Manguin, Chloé Olivier, Sébastien Pacton, Pierre Courrieu & Francesca Peressotti
2019. Spelling performance on the web and in the lab. PLOS ONE 14:12 ► pp. e0226647 ff.
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