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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2018
Edited by Bert Le Bruyn and Janine Berns
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 35] 2018
► pp. 111–124

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The Dutch verb-spelling paradox in social media

A corpus study

 | Radboud University
 | Radboud University
 | Radboud University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 3 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00008.sch
Abstract
Although the Dutch verb spelling system seems very straightforward, many spelling errors are made, both by children and adults (e.g., . 2004. “Still errors after all those years…: Limited attentional resources and homophone frequency account for spelling errors on silent verb suffixes in Dutch.” Written Language & Literacy 7 (1): 61–77. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). These errors mainly occur with verbs with two or more homophonous forms in their inflectional paradigms. Ample experimental research has been carried out on this topic, but these studies hardly reflect everyday language behavior. In the current corpus study, we reassessed previously found experimental results, but now in a Twitter corpus containing 17,432 tweets with homophonous verb forms. In accordance with previous results, we found a clear preference for the suffix -<d> compared to both -<dt> and -<t> , as well as a frequency effect, resulting in fewer errors for more frequent word forms. Furthermore, the results revealed that users with more followers make fewer errors, and that more errors are made during the evening and night.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Homophone pair 1 (first vs. third person singular)
    • 3.2Homophone pair 2 (third person singular vs. past participle)
    • 3.3Worden
    • 3.4Vinden
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (22)
References
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