Internationale Neerlandistiek - Volume 49, Issue 3, 2011

Both German children and adults acquiring Dutch as a second language are tested on their production of determiners and adjectival inflection in attributive position. Both groups tend to overgeneralise the common determiner (de). Children overgeneralise the inflected adjective, while adults make mistakes in two directions: they overgeneralise both the inflected and the uninflected adjective. This age effect is reminiscent of what is found for L2 learners of Dutch with a Turkish and a Moroccan Arabic background (see Blom, Polišenská & Weerman 2006, 2008b), but there are differences as well. The most conspicuous difference is that the German children seem on the right track with respect to the uninflected adjective, whereas the Turkish and Moroccan Arabic children fossilise the inflected variant. It is argued that the L1 background cannot explain this difference and in general only plays a marginal role in the acquisition of Dutch determiners and adjectival inflection. Instead it is suggested that the quality and the quantity of the Dutch input plays a role, alongside the age difference.

The central issue in this article is a specific aspect of the relationship between literature and natural science in early modern times. It examines how the perception of natural phenomena is directed by parsing texts and how the discovery of certain structures found in nature influence early modern manners of reading and writing. In order to analyse this coherence, three problems are discussed: the relation between &I;auctoritas and autopsie (autopsy) in early modern times and its influence on the practice of science, its ensuing aesthetic manners of reading in the ‘Boek der Natuur’ (Book of Nature) by Dutch, seventeenth century scientists, and the change in the auctoritas concept under the influence of cartesianism from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Specific attention is paid to medical texts since, in this genre in particular, the correlation between rhetorical techniques and knowledge acquisition plays a crucial role.

In this paper, an attempt is made to sketch the first years of the artistic career of the Dutch writer and painter Armando (1929) in relation to the scrapbooks he made himself from 1954 to 1973. In addition to an introduction to the themes and works of this multi-talented artist, the paper confirms that the scrapbooks, especially the first that was made in 1954-1960, illustrate the image of an aggressive and provocative Armando. Frustration about negative criticism of his poems has lead to aggression and bolstering this attitude in the composition of the scrapbook.