Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 39, Issue 3, 2017

Indebted documents: Empirical research on the comprehensibility of the reminder and the court summons in debt collection cases

Every day, thousands of households receive documents concerning debt collection. Unsurprisingly, these documents have a great impact on the lives of many. Do these documents inform readers properly about basics such as the claim, the claimant and what to do when one disagrees? Which literacy skills predict success in understanding this information and how are these results linked to document and task characteristics? In this study two debt collecting documents were examined, the non-judicial reminder and the legal court summons informing the defendant about the claim, about the claimant and about the legal procedure. 83 respondents answered questions about these documents. Their scores have been related to reader characteristics, document characteristics and task characteristics. The reminder was understood by a great majority of the participants. Comprehending information was easy because the document was suitable for the task. In contrast, the court summons enabled readers to understand less than half of the information. This document is characterized by a substantial volume, a style and structure not helping participants to understand basic information. A higher education and a larger vocabulary predicted better success, but prior knowledge about legal debt collection did not help participants to perform better.

Stylistic advice concerning sentence complexity is often phrased in terms of sentence length. This paper examines the relations between sentence length on the one hand and structural complexity factors such as subordination, adverbial modifiers, noun phrase modifiers, coordinated constituents and dependency lengths on the other hand. The data come from an automatic analysis of about 40.000 sentences, taken from ten text genres.

Most genres have mean sentence lengths between 14 and 17 words; the only exceptions are textbooks for vocational schools (10 words) and scientific articles (24 words). Sentence lengths vary enormously within genres and within texts, casting doubt on the usability of sentence length advice. Subordinate clauses are frequent, but multiple subordination within a single sentence is not. Extra propositions can be built into the clause via adjectival and adverbial modifiers and coordination. The number of propositions per clause differs considerably between genres, much more so than the number of propositions per word (so-called propositional density). The final feature is the maximal grammatical dependency length in the sentence. Maximal lengths of more than 10 words are infrequent in simplex sentences, but regularly occur in complex sentences.

Taken together, the complexity factors explain much of the sentence length variance, but conversely sentence length does not strongly predict the occurrence of particular complexity factors. In diagnosing sentences, we should use complexity factors instead of sentence lengths. On a more general note, it remains to be seen to what extent structural complexity adversely affects comprehension, as larger grammatical structures may also help readers to synthesize propositions.

Combined use of u and je in employment advertisements: On the grammatical and cultural context of forms of address

This paper concerns the use of forms of address, especially the second-person pronouns je and u, in employment advertisements in the Netherlands and Flanders. An innovative aspect of our study is that we created a corpus of advertisements in which a special property is that there is a combined use of u-forms and je-forms. Among other things, this makes it possible to find out why authors use a u-form, even though familiar forms of address are used elsewhere in the text. Our study elaborates on research by Vismans (2007), who focusses on forms of address in job advertisements for highly-educated persons. Our corpus, however, is not restricted to advertisements aimed at highly-educated candidates and our method is not based on identifications of whole advertisement texts in terms of very general patterns (as done in earlier research), but we focus on individual occurrences of pronouns. Our goal is to show the combined action of two relevant factors playing a role in the use of forms of address: (1) the differences between the Netherlands and Flanders in terms of cultural values and (2) the syntactic function (subject or non-subject) of the constituent in which the form occurs. We conclude that forms of address are not only determined by cultural factors, but that the choice of a certain form can reflect Flemish dialect and colloquial varieties, in which a u-form exists which is the non-subject-form of ge/gij. The results show that when we compare the use of pronouns in subject and non-subject functions, there is a preference for u-forms to be used in non-subject functions. An unexpected result is that a similar pattern is found in material from the Netherlands. This can be related to the historical paradigm (as described by Vermaas 2005), in which u was only used in non-subject functions in Netherlandic Dutch as well.