From: tysoj@solb1.essex.ac.uk (Tyson J R)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.netherlands
Subject: Help! Geniuses Needed!
Date: 21 Jul 92 19:08:44 GMT
Reply-To: tysoj@essex.ac.uk (Tyson J R)
Organization: University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Hello their Nedernetlanders,

This is a beggin post...

I am hoping that I can persuade you all to answer a few simple
questions about Dutch.  The idea is not primarily for me to learn
anything about Dutch grammar, but to begin an investigation of
a strange phenomenon!  I will not tell you what it is at the
moment, even though many of you will guess, since I don't want
to interfere with any answer you might give.  If you would like
to know what it is about, I will be happy to tell you by e-mail.

Below is a list of possible translations of the following two
English sentences.  I am sorry that they are not very exciting
sentences but my aim is to keep things as simple as possible.
If this experiment gets any results, I may try some more
exciting examples.

John saw Marie's book	Marie saw John's book

If you have the time, I would like you to give each of the
translations listed a mark out of ten.  A mark of 0 means that
you simply don't consider the answer Dutch, a mark of 10 means
you consider the example to be good Dutch.  A mark somewhere
between 1 and 10 will be read as an indication of a degree of
acceptability; the marking is entirely up to you.  My only
advice is that you shouldn't worry too much about fine grained
differances, just give some estimate of your relative judgements.

I am primarily interested in *spoken Dutch* but for comparison
I would be grateful if you could give each sentence a further mark
for its acceptability in written Dutch.

The sentences are numbered, so to answer you simply list the numbers
of the sentences in a column and next to the appropriate number
give *first* the mark for the spoken language, *second* the mark
for the written language.

Some of you may be native speakers of a variety of Dutch other than
ABN/Standard Dutch.  If you wish feel free to include a note of
where you are from or what your home variety is.  Please, especially
do so if your home variety is West Flemish or Limburgs.

If you are not a native speaker of Dutch (and of course I include
Flemish speakers) or a true bilingual (ie Frysk/Dutch), please
if you feel inclined to answer, make this clear!

Well...here at last are the sentences.  Following them is a ready
made score sheet so you can just hit 'R' (shift-r) to reply.

1	Jan heeft  het boek van Marie gezien
2	Marie heeft het boek van Jan gezien
3	Jan heeft Maries boek gezien
4	Marie heeft Jans boek gezien
5	Jan heeft Marie haar boek gezien
6	Mary heeft Jan zijn boek gezien
7	Jan heeft Marie der boek gezien
8	Marie heeft Jan z'n boek gezien
9	Jan heeft Marie zijn boek gezien
10	Jan heeft Marie z'n boek gezien

			spoken		written
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10


If you have any comments to make, please feel free.  If you are
interested in knowing what the results are like, let me know and
I will post them.

With thanks in advance

Jim Tyson

ps: if you wish to e-mail me apart from replying to the
    questionnarire, please use: jim@be.ac.kuleuven.et
Newsgroups: soc.culture.netherlands