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In an online experiment among native speakers of Dutch we measured addressees' responses to emails written in the informal pronoun T or the formal pronoun V in HR communication. 172 participants (61 male, mean age 37 years) read either the V-versions or the T-versions of two invitation emails and two rejection emails by four different fictitious recruiters. After each email, participants had to score their appreciation of the company and the recruiter on five different scales each, such as The recruiter who wrote this email seems ... [scale from friendly to unfriendly ]. We hypothesized that (i) the V-pronoun would be more appreciated in letters of rejection, and the T-pronoun in letters of invitation, and (ii) older people would appreciate the V-pronoun more than the T-pronoun, and the other way around for younger people. Although neither of these hypotheses was supported, we did find a small effect of pronoun: Emails written in V were more highly appreciated than emails in T, irrespective of type of email (invitation or rejection), and irrespective of the participant's age, gender, and level of education. At the same time, we observed differences in the strength of this effect across different scales. • There is a tendency to use the informal pronoun more and more in the Netherlands, also in formal contexts. • The use of a formal pronoun in emails inviting or rejecting applicants for an interview has an overall positive effect. • The participants in this study are the addressees, not observers. • The distribution of evaluation scores varies widely for different evaluative adjectives and texts. • Different statistical models for analyzing the data converge, giving similar results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directly addressing the consumer in advertisements has a positive impact on their perception of the product. Dutch, however, makes a distinction between a formal and an informal second person pronoun. If and how this distinction impacts consumers' appreciation in and beyond advertising has not received much attention. Quantifying consumers' appreciation in terms of the attitude toward the advertisement and toward the product, purchase intention, and price estimation, we show experimentally that customers' attitude toward the advertisement receives higher scores when the informal pronoun is used than when its formal counterpart is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imperatives are usually thought of as direct and therefore impolite. However, imperatives such as Have some coffee, Enjoy your holiday, or Sleep well are not considered impolite. The reason seems to be that these imperatives refer to actions that are beneficial to the hearer only. We make a distinction between two types of imperatives, those referring to actions that are beneficial to the speaker and those that are beneficial to the hearer. We have conducted an experiment in order to examine the relation between the two types of imperatives and how they are perceived by speakers of Dutch. The results show that there is indeed a significant difference in interpretation between the two types of imperatives in Dutch. In addition, we have tested the effects of adding a politeness marker alsjeblieft 'please' or discourse particles to the imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High degree adverbs, or so-called intensifiers, constitute a large and apparently ever growing set of words in Dutch, even to the degree that each generation appears to recruit their own set of them. We address the question of what exactly determines the strength of an intensifier by investigating which factors influence their (perceived) strength. The results of an experiment among over 300 high school students show that intensifiers are perceived as stronger when they are (perceived as) more frequent and also when they are (perceived as) more modern. This explains the ongoing extension and renewal of the set of intensifiers in Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]