Search

This study aims at exploring the production of Dutch word stress by Francophone learners of (Belgian) Dutch. Following other studies, it was hypothesized that participants would show a preference for stressing the final syllable. This hypothesis was confirmed, but the large variability in the data and the lack of agreement between labellers suggest that there is more to it.

Swahili has a larger inventory of (more or less \"basic\") colour terms than most Bantu languages. The aim of this article is to present this colour terminology and to point out semantic, syntactic and morphological divergences. We also look at the etymology of the various colour terms and try to establish a chronology of the growth (and decline?) of Swahili colour terminology.

Kiswahili hat ein doppeltes System der nominalen Klassifikation. Das erste System ist das aus dem Bantu (Niger-Congo) bekannte System der konkordierenden nominalen und \"pronominalen\" Präfixe; das zweite, jüngere System gründet sich auf das Bedeutungsmerkmal [belebt]. Die grammatische Kategorie NUMERUS (SINGULAR::PLURAL) gilt nur im zweiten System; innerhalb des ersten Systems ist die Bildung der Nominalpaare, z .B. mtulwatu, ein derivationeller Prozeß und bezieht Konkordanz sich ausschlieBlich auf die Kategorie KLASSE.

This paper explores (non-)native speakers use and perception of accent as a cue to information status in Dutch and French as foreign languages. On the production side, French-speaking learners of Dutch tend not to vary the accent distribution according to the information status of the words in the utterance and generally do not deaccent contextually given information in a nativelike fashion, whereas Dutch-speaking learners of French, though on the whole closer to the L1 French target, tend to overuse the French “focus accent” in such a way that their accent patterns more closely reflect the information status of the words than the patterns produced by L1 French speakers. These results are explained in terms of the “markedness relationships” between Dutch and French. A pilot perception experiment then investigates (non-)native listeners perception of prominence relationships in L1 and L2 Dutch. The data show that the accented elements produced by L2 speakers of Dutch are perceptually less prominent than accented elements produced by L1 speakers, that this reduced prominence makes it more difficult for L1 listeners to correctly identify the intended patterns, and that non-native listeners generally find it difficult to identify the intended accent patterns in their L2.