Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 56, Issue 2, 2018

Ot and Sien are the main characters of the famous Dutch children’s book Het boek van Ot en Sien [The Book of Ot and Sien] (1906), written by Hindericus Scheepstra and (assisted by) Jan Ligthart. Less known is the fact that in 1911, an edition for the Dutch reading lessons in the Dutch East Indies was published: Ot en Sien in Nederlandsch Oost-Indië [Ot and Sien in the Dutch East Indies] (1911). Both the stories and the illustrations were ‘verindischt’: adapted to the Dutch colonial situation in ‘the East’. Until now, scarcely any attention has been paid to this children’s book in general and to the colonial ideology within this text in particular. This article offers a critical, postcolonial reading of Ot en Sien in Indië, focusing on unequal power relations between the colonizer and colonized people. Which strategies are used by the authors to represent the colony and its people? And to what extent did an ‘innocent’ children’s book play a role in the legitimation of the Dutch colonization?

This paper characterizes the difference in evidentiality between two parenthetical constructions in Dutch, denk ik ‘I think’ and dacht ik ‘I thought’. On the basis of a qualitative corpus study of spoken Dutch, in which we systematically compare utterances with evidential denk ik ‘I think’ to their counterparts with dacht ik ‘I thought’ and vice versa, we argue that the difference between the two constructions can be analyzed as a difference between inferential and assumed evidentiality, respectively (Aikhenvald 2004). We argue that it is not a mere coincidence that the difference between inferential and assumed evidentiality is captured by the grammatical difference between two tenses. There is a straightforward relation between the two types of indirect evidentiality and the two tenses. The tenses reflect the times at which the evidence that the inference or assumption is based on has become available to the speaker. The present tense variant denk ik ‘I think’ is used when the speaker infers something on the basis of sensory evidence in the present, whereas the past tense variant dacht ik ‘I thought’ is used when the speaker assumes something on the basis of reportative or sensory evidence obtained in the past.

In 1996, Monika Fludernik published the book Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology in which she introduces a new narratological model. The ‘natural narratology’ mainly deals with the way people process narratives on a cognitive level. According to Fludernik, the cognitive frames by which human beings impose narrativity on certain types of discourse, are grounded in real-life, i.e. ‘natural’, experiences. Such an assumption has contributed to the creation of the ‘unnatural narratology’, a narratological model that focuses on the ‘unnaturalness’ of many narratives. The previously mentioned narratological models may be useful while discussing strange elements in narrative texts. In addition, the ‘natural narratology’ also offers an explanation of how readers could make those elements seem ‘natural’ again.