Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 56, Issue 1, 2018

According to a recent manifesto titled Manifest Nederlands op School, the secondary school subject Dutch Language and Literature is incoherent, unchallenging and unscientific. In order to solve this problem, the school subject should strive to reach levels of conscious language proficiency (‘bewuste taalvaardigheid’), for example by drawing on insights from the related academic discipline. By doing so, the school subject and the discipline of Dutch Language and Literature (‘neerlandistiek’) could engage in a perspective of cooperation. There have been several proposals for ways of achieving both a more conscious level of language proficiency as well as the subsequent state of cooperation. One such proposal argues that scientific insights fostered from classical rhetoric could well be used to achieve conscious writing proficiency (Jansen 2016). However, empirical evidence to support this claim is lacking. Therefore, in this exploratory study, we investigated Jansen’s assertion by looking at the effect lessons based on classical rhetoric have on secondary school pupil’s use of tropes, such as irony or antithesis. We judged the quality of their tropes and additionally, we looked at whether or not pupils could use them consciously. Results support Jansen’s claim and reveal that classical rhetoric can indeed be used to achieve greater conscious proficiency in writing.

The early nineteenth century saw the introduction of the first national orthography and grammar of Dutch, commissioned by the government and officially codified by Siegenbeek (1804) and Weiland (1805), respectively. However, the effectiveness of this so-called schrijftaalregeling ‘written language regulation’ on actual language usage has never been investigated empirically. Based on a newly compiled multi-genre corpus of Dutch private letters, diaries and newspapers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this paper sheds light on the impact of the nationalist language policy on linguistic patterns of variation and change in the Northern Netherlands. The case study focuses on the orthographic representation of final /t/ in second and third person singular and second person plural present indicative forms of verbs with a d-stem (e.g. worden ‘become’, vinden ‘find’), which attracted a great deal of attention in metalinguistic discourse. While the corpus results indicate a considerable effect of standard language norms on language practice, they also disprove the traditional assumption that nineteenth-century spelling was entirely homogeneous.

This paper compares the ways to express negation in Dutch and in Hungarian. It points out what changes the two languages have experienced through the centuries as far as the multiple negation is concerned and gives examples of sentences containing multiple negative elements, both in Negative Concord (NC) and Double Negation (DN) languages. Based on the data I analyze the consequences of the differences in the two languages on the acquisition of negation by Hungarian learners of Dutch. The paper is organized as follows: Paragraph 2 describes the types of negation. Paragraph 3 provides a background by surveying the differences in negation in present-day Dutch and Hungarian. Paragraph 4 deals with the multiple negation while Paragraph 5 demonstrates the problems of acquiring the negation of Hungarian learners of Dutch.

The Dutch press at the end of the 18th century played a crucial role in the political changes in the Netherlands. At that time, the society was divided into two oppositional groups, namely the patriots and the orangists. Their leaders made use of numerous journals to present their vision about the future of the state. One of those journals, called De Politieke Kruyer (1782-1787), combined the idea of freedom with detailed plans, which consisted of several changes in the relation between the government and the society. One of the key term of the articles written by Jan Hespe, the editor of the journal, was the freedom of the press. Hespe criticized the censorship of the Orange House and used therefore many rhetorical devices and figures, based on the classical rules of Quintilians ars retorica. In my article, I analyse how Hespes texts relate to the ars retorica; what kind of rhetorical devices the editor of De Politieke Kruyer used to attract his readers and to convince them to his vision of the free Dutch Republic.