QLVL members - Gert De Sutter
Gert De Sutter obtained his MA in Germanic Languages from the University of Leuven in July 2000. From October 2000 to December 2002, he was a researcher on the OOI-project 'Vorax' (OOI-2000/23), for which he developed an on-line corpus linguistics tutorial in support of the corpus linguistics classes at the University of Leuven (in collaboration with Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts). From January 2003 to October 2006, he worked on the FWO-project 'The stratification of supragregional Dutch in Flanders' (G.0086.03), in the course of which he completed his PhD on word order variability in Dutch bipartite verb clusters, supervised by Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman. He now works as an assistant professor at the School of Translation Studies of the University College Ghent.
Research
Gert's
research focuses predominantly on syntactic variation
and the stratification of supraregional Dutch in Flanders.
His interest in syntactic variation resulted in a PhD,
which he defended at the University of Leuven in June
2005. In his PhD, he studied one of the most intriguing
types of syntactic variation in Dutch, viz. word order
variation in bipartite verb clusters consisting of a
past participle and the auxiliary verb zijn
"to be", hebben "to have"
or worden "to be(come)":
(a) [...] dat moordende chauffeurs van de weg gehaald
worden
(green word order)
[...] that murderous drivers from the road removed are.
[...] that murderous drivers are removed from the road.
(b) [...] dat moordende chauffeurs van de weg worden
gehaald
(red word order)
[...] that murderous drivers from the road are removed.
[...] that murderous drivers are removed from the road.
The goal of this research was to assess the mechanisms
that influence the choice between green (a) or red (b)
word order in contemporary Dutch, and to answer the
question why both word order variants are available.
On the basis of attested language use, extracted from
two representative corpora, the effect of a set of 10
language-internal (semantic, structural, discursive)
factors on the choice of word order was analyzed empirically
and quantitatively (by means of a.o. logistic regression
and CART analysis). The results of these analyses showed
that the word order variation at hand is essentially
multivariate in nature, since 8 out of 10 language-internal
variables are simultaneously significant. They also
revealed that the most powerful variable in the model
is the semantic variable, and that the model is able
to explain and predict the bulk of the variation. On
the basis of these results, it was argued that the syntactic
alternation is (at least partially) motivated by cognitive
and social mechanisms. More specifically, it was hypothesized
that the green (a) word order is the basic word order
on which language users fall back in circumstances of
heavy processing demands, whereas red (b) word order
is considered a socio-stylistic option that can be chosen
in circumstances where processing is (relatively) easy.
More information about Gert's PhD research can be found
on his personal website (see the link above).
Since 2003, Gert is also involved in a larger research programme that aims at (i) detecting the principal parameters of substandard Belgian Dutch (so-called tussentaal) and (ii) defining its relation to the standard variety. To that end, a whole range of lexical and non-lexical variables are collected and extracted from the CGN corpus of spoken Dutch. By means of multidimensional scaling and clustering techniques, the stratificational position of substandard Belgian Dutch in comparison to the standard variety is computed in a bottom-up way. Results of this project will be presented in the course of 2006.
Representative publications
The following publications are representative of Gert's research. The rest of his published work can be found in the QLVL publication list.
De Sutter, G., D. Speelman & D. Geeraerts. Submitted. "Detecting and balancing determinants of word order variation in Dutch clause final verb clusters". Linguistics.
De Sutter, G., D. Speelman & D. Geeraerts. 2005. "Regionale en stilistische effecten op de woordvolgorde in werkwoordelijke eindgroepen". Nederlandse taalkunde 10(2), 97-128.
De Sutter, G., D. Speelman, D. Geeraerts & S. Grondelaers. 2003. "Woordvolgordevariatie in tweeledige werkwoordelijke eindgroepen. Naar een statistische evaluatie van zes factoren". In T. Koole, J. Nortier & B. Tahitu (eds.), Artikelen van de vierde sociolinguïstische conferentie 111-121. Delft: Eburon.
