Reductieprocessen in het Nederlands. Een knelpunt voor de Tsjechische NVT-student?
| Title in English | Reduction Processes in Dutch. An Obstacle for a Czech Student of Dutch as a Foreign Language? |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Reduction processes are characteristic of spoken contemporary Dutch, both in the informal colloquial language and in formal style registers, and the reduction processes in particular are characteristic of contemporary Dutch. Reduced variants come in different forms and to varying degrees. Regular and irregular reduction patterns are discussed in this context (cf. Ernestus, 2016). The regular patterns are easy to predict, the irregular patterns are not. The Czech native speaker has been brought up with the idea that reduction in speech is an undesirable thing and that reduction is only a characteristic of a sloppy language. The Czech NVT student therefore tends to argue that reduction processes occur very rarely in Czech as compared to Dutch. However, recent research on spoken Czech proves that the reduction processes also often occur in Czech (Machač, 2013) In my research I ask myself the following: what do the reduction processes in spoken language entail? What kinds of reduction patterns are most problematic for the Czech NVT student? At what level, according to the CEFR, are NVT students able to understand language utterances in which reductions occur? Does perceiving the reduction in Czech as something undesirable affect understanding of the reduced speech in Dutch? My hypothesis is that Czech NVT students can only decipher the reduced speech reasonably at the B2 level, but not in detail. Furthermore, I assume that the Contact and the course Dutch to perfection and its glossaries. On the basis of the glossary and themes of these courses I will compile an excerpt that, as dictation in reduced speech, is not understood down to the smallest detail even at C1 level. I also want to investigate which reduction phenomena are the most problematic. In order to answer these questions, I will carry out a study into the intelligibility of reduced variants in students with levels A2, B2 and C1. I will focus on the word-level and sentence-level reductions to determine where the stumbling blocks lie. As a starting point I take the courses a reduced and unreduced form will be offered to test subjects with the aim of determining which aspects of the reduction are most problematic and at what level. |
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