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Part of
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. 337–351

Chapter 15
The EFL teacher’s nightmare

Information structure transfer from L2 English to L1 Dutch

| Radboud University Nijmegen

This chapter reports on a study of two small dedicated corpora of L1 Dutch and Dutch translations by Dutch students of English. The study illustrates the syntactic challenges students face translating from English into Dutch, especially in word order differences and their consequences for information structure. The focus is on the Dutch middle field. Typically English word orders are increasingly occurring in Dutch instead of more typically Dutch word orders, suggesting that the Dutch middle field may be gradually losing its flexibility. This is observed in the placement of adjuncts and prepositional objects, in Dutch counterparts of English gerunds, especially those with complex complementation structures. The results may be relevant for translation courses in Dutch higher education.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1The translation corpus
      • 3.1.1“Pearl Corlioney”
    • 3.2The Dutch composition corpus
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.15haa
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