Marc van Oostendorp

  • Diphthongs in Dutch

    I wrote a chapter on Dutch for a handbook on polyphthongs in the world’s languages. Below is the abstract. The manuscript is on LingBuzz


    The core of the Dutch diphtong system are three diphthongs, one at each of the major places that Dutch also reserves for monophtongs: front unrounded /ɛi/, front rounded /ʏy/ and back rounded /ɑu/. In this chapter we first discuss these three core diphtongs, their historical origin and their place in the current system.

    We also compare these to two other sets. The first are the so-called ‘false dipthongs’ /uj, aj, oj, iw, ew/. These differ from the ‘real’ diphthongs in that the consist of vowel parts that are at different places of articulation (whereas real diphtongs are all in one place, differing only in height), and in their syllabification properties (true dipthongs allow non-coronal consonants in the coda, but false dipthongs do not).

    The second set to which true diphthongs need to be compared are the mid vowels which in (Netherlands) Dutch tend to be diphtongized at least phonetically: /ej, øj/øw and ow/. Again the syllabification properties are different and in spite of their phonetics they phonologically still seem to fit completely in the set of monophthongs.

  • Magnetic Grammar. A bugfix

    In D’Alessandro & Van Oostendorp (2020), we proposed Magnetic Grammar, a model of phonological competence in which a language’s segment inventory is characterised entirely by features that attract or reject other features within a segment. The paper referred to a Python implementation demonstrating the learning algorithm. This squib reports on a bug in that implementation and presents a corrected version, which leads to a small but theoretically meaningful refinement of the learning algorithm.

    The corrected implementation, with Jupyter notebook in which one can learn about and test the updated theory, is available as an open-source repository at https://github.com/fonolog/MagneticGrammar. A short explanation is on LingBuzz. The original paper is here.

  • Textbook online

    Here is a recent version of my free textbook on Phonology (always under construction).

  • New article: Looking at Language with Chatbots

    The Dutch scholarly journal TNTL just published my article ‘Looking at Language with Chatbots’. Here is the link; the abstract is here:

    The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has profound implications for both research and education, also within linguistics. This article explores how chatbots can serve as innovative tools for the didactics of reflection about language and language use. Using concrete examples from interactions with LLMs, it demonstrates how these technologies make the four perspectives on language formulated by the Dutch Meesterschapsteam Nederlands (2016, 2018) – language as a system, as an individual phenomenon, as a social phenomenon, and as a historical phenomenon – accessible in new and interactive ways. At the same time, working with LLMs in the classroom highlights the fundamental differences between human language processing and the computational approach of LLMs, including criticisms of the nature of their ‘understanding’ and ‘creativity’. The article argues for a critical integration of chatbots into Dutch language and literature education, with an emphasis on ‘conscious literacy’ and experiential learning, and discusses the ethical considerations as well as the shifting role of the Dutch studies scholar in this new landscape.