Cover not available
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
References
Bouma, Kaya
2016 Engels rukt op in de collegezaal. De Volkskrant 26 August 1.Google Scholar
Bultman, Saskia
2016 Het Maken van het Misdadige Meisje. Constructing a Female Delinquent Self: Assessing Pupils in the Dutch State Reform School for Girls, 1905–1975. PhD dissertation Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University.Google Scholar
Drees, Willem
2016 Engels in de humanities is helemaal niet zo gek. De Volkskrant 23 August.Google Scholar
Edwards, Alison
2016 English in the Netherlands: Functions, Forms and Attitudes [Varieties of English around the World G56]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gerbrandy, Piet
2016 Zo haal je de hartstocht weg: Zonde. De Volkskrant 26 August.Google Scholar
de Haan, Pieter
. Forthcoming 2018 Review of Alison Edwards, English in the Netherlands. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.Google Scholar
de Haan, Pieter & van der Haagen, Monique
2012 Modification of adjectives in very advanced Dutch EFL writing: A development study. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL 1(1):129–142.Google Scholar
Haeseryn, Walter, Romijn, Kirsten, Geerts, Guido, de Rooij, Jaap &. van den Toorn, Maarten
1997 Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst, 2nd edn. Groningen: Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Huygen, Maarten
2016a De professor is niet so good to follow . NRC.next, 9 March 12.Google Scholar
2016b Nederlands Engels wordt een taal apart. NRC.next, 9 March 13.Google Scholar
Jippes, Hieke
2014 Engels spreekt iedereen, maar vraag alleen niet hoe. NRC Handelsblad 16 August, 2–3, Opinie & debat (19 August 2014).
Koster, Jan
1973–1974 Het werkwoord als spiegelcentrum. Spektator. Tijdschrift voor Neerlandistiek 3: 601–618.Google Scholar
Lemmens, Marcel
2010 Engels via de achterdeur. VZV-Bulletin, 21(1) 7 May 2017 <[URL]> (8 May 2017).
Meunier, Fanny
2015 Introduction to the LONGDALE project. In Studies in Learner Corpus Linguistics: Research and Applications for Foreign Language Teaching and Assessment, Erik Castello, Katherine Ackerley & Francesca Coccetta (eds), 123–126. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Moattarian, Aasa
2013 Bidirectional crosslinguistic influence in language learning: Linguistic aspects and beyond. International Journal of Linguistics 5(4): 38–49.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Mol, Linda
2014 Editorial. LINDA.Mode, August.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pavlenka, Aneta & Jarvis, Scott
2002 Bidirectioanl transfer. Applied Linguistics 23(2): 190–214.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rijkens, Maarten
2005 I Always Get my Sin: Het Bizarre Engels van Nederlanders. The Hague: BZZTôH.Google Scholar
Rutjes, Floris
2016 Velen komen speciaal voor het Engels. De Volkskrant 26 August.Google Scholar
Scott, Mike
2012 WordSmith Tools, Version 6.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.Google Scholar
van der Sijs, Nicoline
2009 Loanwords in Dutch. In Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds), 338–359. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sommer, Martin
2016a Nee tegen stone coal English. De Volkskrant 19 August.Google Scholar
2016b Nee tegen stone coal English (2). De Volkskrant 27 August.Google Scholar
Su, I-Ru
2012 Bi-directional transfer in Chinese EFL learners’ apologizing behavior. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 38(2): 237–266.Google Scholar
Witteman, Sylvia
2014 Djiezus. De Volkskrant 12 April.Google Scholar
Zenner, Eline, Speelman, Dirk & Geeraerts, Dirk
2012 Cognitive sociolinguistics meets loanword research: Measuring variation in the success of anglicisms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4):749–792.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zwart, Jan-Wouter
2011 The Syntax of Dutch [Cambridge Syntax Guides]. Cambridge: CUP.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar