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Moving Humanities Programme & Abstracts ReMA/PhD conference Graduate School for the Humanities Gymnasion, Radboud University Nijmegen Thursday, 23 October 2014

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Moving Humanities

Programme & Abstracts

ReMA/PhD conference

Graduate School for the

Humanities

Gymnasion, Radboud University

Nijmegen

Thursday, 23 October 2014

We are delighted to welcome you to the

Moving Humanities conference. Moving

Humanities spans a wide range of

disciplines within the Humanities. The focus

of this year’s event is on bringing ideas and

practice together in an exchange that should

be both challenging and constructive.

28 PhD candidates and Research Master

students will present their research in

parallel sessions, while Prof Wijnand

Mijnhardt (Utrecht University) will deliver a

keynote lecture entitled 'Why Science Does

Not Work as It Should, And What To Do

about It'. The conference will be kicked off by

three VENI grant recipients, who will hold

workshops on their experiences with the

application process.

We hope that today’s programme will give

you new ideas, and we wish you an inspiring

day!

The organizing committee:

Ruud van den Beuken

Jeroen Dera

Kobie van Krieken

Brenda Mathijssen

Mijntje Peters

Welcome to Moving Humanities 2014

Moving Humanities 2014 is organized by The Graduate

School for the Humanities. The Graduate School for the

Humanities unites the graduate programmes of the three

research institutes in the Humanities at Radboud University

Nijmegen: Centre for Language Studies, Institute for

Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, Research Institute

for Philosophy, Theology & Religious Studies.

What the GSH has to offer

The Radboud University

Graduate School for the

Humanities offers the best

possible research training and

supervision to young academic

talent from the Netherlands and

abroad in the Humanities

disciplines. Our Research Ma

and PhD programs are closely

tied to the outstanding research

institutes within our faculties.

We offer our Research Ma

students and PhD students an

inspiring and multidisciplinary

setting, in which world-leading

scholars collaborate in the

areas of linguistics, language

and speech technology,

communication studies,

literature and literary theory,

cultural studies, history, art

history, archeology, philosophy

and religious studies. Much of

this collaboration is focused in

two multidisciplinary research

themes:

- Europe and its Worlds

- Language in Mind and

Society

The Graduate School for the Humanities

We guarantee intensive

academic training and personal

coaching for each PhD student,

as part of a tailor-made training

and supervision plan. The

training course includes local

course work, and may also

include participation in the

teaching activities organized by

specialized inter-university

research schools.

We offer personalized career

planning courses and training

courses aimed at personal

development. In their daily

research environment, our PhD

students are part of interaction

intensive research peer groups

supervised by outstanding

senior researchers.

Conference venues: Gymnasion & Cultuurcafé

10.00-10.15 Registration with coffee and tea

Foyer

(Noordvleugel

Gymnasion)

10.15-10.30 Opening

GN3

10.30-11.30 Workshops by VENI grant recipients: their roads to success

GN1 Dr Lisette Mol (Tilburg University) CLS

GN2 Dr Floris Overduin (Radboud University) HLCS

GN4 Dr Delphine Bellis (Radboud University) PTRS

11.30-12.45 Parallel sessions 1

Session 1.1 Chair: Dr Anneke de Graaf

GN1 Wendy Jacobs, Enny Das & Sanne Schagen (Communication and Information

Sciences)

Reducing Self-Perceived Cognitive Problems after Breast Cancer Treatment: The

Role of Stereotype Vulnerability

Ferdy Hubers (Linguistics)

Emotional responses in reading groter als ‘bigger as’: An fMRI study

Annemarie Weerman (Communication and Information Sciences)

You did what?! An examination of argument quality manipulations in advertising

research

Session 1.2 Chair: Dr Joost Rosendaal

GN2 Maaike Derksen (History)

Educating and civilising the Javanese: Catholic mission schools in Java 1904-1942

Koen van Zon (History)

In Search of Purpose. The European Parliament in search of alternative repertoires of

legitimacy, 1950-1960

Thomas Smits (Literary and Cultural Studies)

Doing digital humanities: readers of 19th century illustrated newspapers

Conference Programme

Session 1.3 Chair: Prof Peter Nissen

GN4 Ruti Vardi (Theology)

The conceptualisation of emotions in Biblical Hebrew

Ezra Delahaye (Philosophy)

The power of the powerless: the Bartleby case

Jorn Ackermans (Philosophy)

Thomas Aquinas on the Embodied and the Disembodied Soul: An Inquiry into

Thomas’ Accounts of the Soul’s Cognitive-Psychological Functioning in its Embodied

and Disembodied State

12.45-13.30 Lunch

Foyer

(Noordvleugel

Gymnasion)

13.30-14.45 Parallel sessions 2

Session 2.1 Chair: Prof Carla Rita Palmerino

GN1 Frank van Caspel (Open University, Philosophy)

On Proprification

Carli Coenen (Open University, Philosophy)

Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement: from Cartesian dualism to Embodied

Cognition?

Gauwain van Kooten Niekerk (Religion Studies)

Forging meaning in the interaction between viewer and film

Session 2.2 Chair: Dr Stefan Frank

GN2 Lieke Verheijen (Dutch Language and Culture)

The Linguistics of Computer-Mediated Communication – A Register Analysis of Dutch

Youngsters’ Written CMC

Huib Kouwenhoven (Communication and Information Sciences)

Register variation and communication strategy use by Spanish users of English

Lisa Morano & Mirjam Ernestus (Linguistics)

Learning reduced words in a foreign language

Conference Programme

Session 2.3 Chair: Prof Alicia Montoya

GN4 Lieke van Deinsen (Dutch Language and Culture)

Collecting Culture and the Culture of Collecting: Forging Cultural History in

Eighteenth-Century Cabinets of Curiosities.

Jordy Geerlings (History)

Catholics in Leiden sociability (1750-1800)

Floris Solleveld (History)

What happened to the Republic of Letters?

14.45-15.00 Coffee and tea

Foyer

(Noordvleugel

Gymnasion)

15.00-16.15 Parallel sessions 3

Session 3.1 Chair: Dr Maarten de Pourcq

GN1 Meta Links (English Language and Culture)

Correlative Constructions in Earlier English

Isabel Kimmelfield (History)

Byzantine History and Heritage in Tophane, Istanbul: A New Approach to Studying

the Suburbs of Constantinople

Eveline Rutten (Greek Language and Culture)

A very short introduction to digital editing for Humanities

Esmée Bruggink (Greek Language and Culture)

Variation in Plato’s Quotation of Homer: an illustration

Session 3.2 Chair: Yvette Linders MA

GN2 Nienke Fortuin (Religion Studies)

Interpreting death from a cultural context

Christa van Mourik (German Language and Culture)

Poetics and catchwords

Conference Programme

Guusje Jol & Wyke Stommel

‘How do you know?’ Questions about sources of knowledge in police interviews with

child witnesses

Session 3.3 Chair: Dr Martine Veldhuizen

GN4 Christel Theunissen (Art History)

Medieval choir stalls on the move: solving an art historical puzzle

Kor Bosch (History)

Not all roads lead to Rome. Descriptions of travel by visitors to the papal court(s) in

an age of schism, 1378-1449

Bernardien van den Berg (Religious Studies)

The religious of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in Helmond (1462-1543): choir or

converse sisters?

16.15-17.00 Keynote lecture by Prof Wijnand Mijnhardt (Utrecht University)

GN3 Why Science Does Not Work as It Should, And What To Do about It

17.00 - … Drinks and snacks

Cultuurcafé

Conference Programme

A

Jorn T.G. Ackermans

Thomas Aquinas on the Embodied and the

Disembodied Soul

An Inquiry into Thomas’ Accounts of the Soul’s

Cognitive-Psychological Functioning in its

Embodied and Disembodied State

In the thirteenth century a turning point in the

philosophical discourse in the Latin West can be

distinguished. The Augustinian-Platonic tradition

that dominated this discourse seemed to part for

Aristotelian philosophy. Aristotelianism, however,

proved to be difficult to integrate within the

existing Augustinian-Platonic philosophical

discourse. Creating a synthesis between

(dominant) Christian doctrines and Aristotelian

thought was most difficult. One notoriously

difficult issue proved to be the immortality of the

soul. It seemed nearly impossible to prove the

continued existence of the soul after the

corporeal death using a true Aristotelian

framework that views humans as a hylomorphic

compound of body and soul.

In the midst of these issues, Thomas Aquinas

seemed to succeed in reconciling Christian

doctrine with Aristotelian philosophy, also on this

topic. In investigating Thomas’ views on the

cognitive-psychological functioning of the soul,

one of my foci of interest was comparing

Thomas’ account of the embodied soul (which

can be found in his Summa Theologiae) and the

disembodied soul (which, for the most part, can

be found in his Summa Contra Gentiles). From

this investigation I draw the conclusion that

Thomas’ account of the embodied soul is indeed

of a very Aristotelian nature. His account of the

disembodied soul however, seems to be using an

Augustinian-Platonic framework. Various

underlying mechanisms could be the cause of

this apparent ambiguity.

B

Bernardien van den Berg

The religious of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in

Helmond (1462-1543): choir or converse sisters?

The subject of my research project is the

production, ownership and use of the books of

the convent of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw in de Hage in

Helmond (1462-1543). This convent was a

member of the Chapter of Venlo, a group of

convents that stemmed from the Devotio

Moderna. Most of the manuscripts have been

passed down through the Soeterbeeck

Collection, which was loaned to Nijmegen

University Library in 2014.

The corpus of manuscripts consists of, at least,

two devotional books in Dutch, a book of hours

and eleven liturgical manuscripts in Latin. Except

for a psalter, all of the liturgical manuscripts

contain texts for the canonical offices of Vespers

and Compline. A manuscript containing what

appear to be the statutes of the convent has also

survived.

An article on lay sisters of St. Augustine by Koen

Goudriaan (2008) casts doubt on the status of

the Helmond sisters as choir sisters. By

comparing the Helmond sisters’ liturgy in

practice, as derived from the manuscripts, with

their liturgy in theory, as described in the

statutes, I would like to clarify Goudriaan’s

doubts, in order to get a better understanding of

the manuscript’s actual use.

Abstracts

Kor Bosch

Not all roads lead to Rome. Descriptions of travel

by visitors to the papal court(s) in an age of

schism, 1378-1449

In the late medieval period, large numbers of

visitors from all over Europe – and beyond –

flocked to the papal court. They went there to

petition the pope for legal support and to receive

justice, to seek employment or promotion denied

to them at home, or to gain permission to travel

to the Muslim-held Holy Land. But from 1378

onwards, two – and later three – men claimed to

be pope, each with their own court. Due to the

popularity of the journey to the papal court, a

fairly standardized way of describing it had

developed by the fourteenth century. But with

multiple papal courts competing for attention

after 1378, this standard way of describing the

spatial reality of Europe and the position of the

papacy in it was no longer straightforward. If the

papal court had been the centre of Europe, how

did travellers respond to the existence of multiple

coexisting courts? Did the redirection of travel

affect descriptions of topography and space?

And what narrative strategies did visitors employ

in their writing to make sense of the complex

religious reality of Europe during the Western

Schism?

Esmée Bruggink

VARIATION IN PLATO´S QUOTATION OF HOMER: AN

ILLUSTRATION

Homer should be denied any chorus, Socrates

concludes in the Republic of Plato (c. 427-347

BC). Yet by singling him out for criticism, it is

Plato himself who grants Homer a platform.

Throughout the philosopher’s oeuvre, his verses

are quoted. Whereas with some of these

references Plato criticizes Homer and all who

appropriate Homer in his time, he seems to take

part in precisely this culture with others: just like

the bards and sophists, he makes use of the

epics to strengthen his argument and share his

ideas. And this is not the only level on which the

Homeric influence is sensed: to judge from the

form, content and style of his dialogues, Plato is

indebted to the authoritative poietes. In his own

appropriation of Homer, Plato felt free to adapt

passages to his own purposes, presenting them

in a different version than his audience knew

from ‘their’ Homer. Sometimes, the quotations

themselves differ significantly from the Homeric

text as it is known to us. How can these

variations be accounted for? Were the citations

deliberately manipulated in line with Plato’s

fashion? Or do they reflect an Athenian edition of

the Iliad and Odyssey? What do these witnesses

tell us?

C

Frank van Caspel

On Proprification

Step right up to hear all about a new concept:

proprification! It signals cases in which

phenomena are made into, or thought of as,

properties. Specifically, I focus on the

proprification of processes, which yields a class

of properties which cannot be causally

efficacious. I will therefore make a case against

proprifying processes, and for eliminating

properties defined as a process or causal role.

The payoff comes last, when I argue why we

should care about proprification: in philosophy of

mind proprification of processes is a very real

problem,

which drives the debate on mental causation.

Carli Coenen

Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du component:

from Cartesian dualism to Embodied Cognition?

My research is guided by an interest in the

following two closely interrelated philosophical

problems. First, the mind-body problem: the

problem of how to understand the relation

between our ‘mind’ (our cognition, our

consciousness, our subjectivity) on the one hand,

and our ‘body’ on the other. Second, the problem

of intentionality: the problem of how to

understand how our cognition (bodily or not) is

related to the world it cognizes.

One of the most famous, but highly

unsatisfactory answers to these problems has

been that of René Descartes (1596-1650):

substance dualism, which combines both a mind-

body dualism and a representationalism that

separates mind from world. Even though this

Cartesian starting point has been severely

criticized in the past 400 years, and ‘mind’ has

been reduced to ‘brain’ or replaced by

‘phenomenal consciousness’, the dualism has,

arguably, hardly been overcome. In recent years,

the so-called programme of Embedded

Embodied Cognition (EEC) in cognitive science

and philosophy has aimed to formulate a more

proper anti-Cartesian alternative by emphasizing

the intrinsic, constitutive and indispensable role

of the body and world in our cognition.

Importantly, some philosophers find a protagonist

of anti-Cartesian embodied cognition in the

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(1908-1961), who has often been championed as

the philosopher of the body.

A closer examination of Merleau-Ponty, however,

shows that his treatment of

Descartes is more subtle and rather different

than EEC-proponents assume. In my research I

combine an historical-exegetical investigation into

the constitutive role of Descartes’ thought in the

development of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the

relation between cognition, body and world, and

a critical investigation into the way the EEC-

programme relies on Merleau-Ponty, in the hope

of showing how a historically more accurate

understanding of Merleau-Ponty might contribute

to the contemporary debate.

At the conference, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s

first book La structure du comportement (1938,

published 1942), which was part of his

dissertation.

D

Lieke van Deinsen

Collecting Culture and the Culture of Collecting:

Forging Cultural History in Eighteenth-Century

Cabinets of Curiosities.

Collecting became extremely fashionable in early

eighteenth-century Europe, and especially so in

the Dutch Republic, where the trade routes of the

Dutch East India Company had brought

countless objects to the Republic only to fall in

the eager hands of numerous collectors. Building

on the achievements of the scientific revolutions

of the late seventeenth century, these collections

not only created interest in unknown and exotic

cultures, but at the same time fueled

Abstracts

debates on the domestic cultural heritage. In this

paper, I will investigate how popular early modern

collections played a role in the formation of

cultural traditions.

More specifically, I will focus on one of the most

popular literary collections of the eighteenth

century: the Panpoëticon Batavûm. In this

wooden cabinet, the portraits of more than two

hundred Dutch men and women of letters were

brought together as early as 1720. As it grew

over the years, this collection evoked numerous

reactions of contemporaries, inspiring them to

articulate their strongly affective reactions to

beholding this groundbreaking depiction of Dutch

literary history. As one contemporary stated,

then, this cabinet was not a sealed-off

‘mausoleum’ in which the literary heroes of the

past had been entombed; the Panpoëticon

Batavûm should rather be considered as an

open, active and – above all – tangible memory

which served the burgeoning formation of a

Dutch literary canon.

Ezra Delahaye

The power of the powerless: the Bartleby case

Melville’s novella Bartleby, the Scrivener serves

as a philosophical playground. Many

philosophers have commented on it and they

emphasize a variety of different aspects. For the

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben Bartleby is a

truly political figure. Bartleby makes the order of

things inoperative by his utter refusal to take any

action. Agamben understands Bartleby’s

inactivity in terms of the Aristotelian division

between potentiality and act. Bartleby makes all

actuality inoperative, thereby restoring

potentiality.

On the political stage Bartleby’s inoperativity

inverts power-relationships. What is powerful is

made powerless. The authority, the one who has

the power can do nothing against Bartleby.

Power is bound up with actuality. The one in

power is always the one who determines what is

actual. Think of any regime, they remain in power

by marginalizing their opposition. They take away

their actuality. By refusing this logic, Bartleby

opens a way to potentialize the actual and give

power back to the marginalized.

In this paper I will analyse Bartleby as a political

figure. I will show how Bartleby makes all

actuality inoperative and how this gives power

back to the powerless.

Maaike Derksen

Educating and civilising the Javanese: Catholic

mission schools in Java 1904-1942

The word "mission" speaks to many people's

imagination; men or women, who go to remote

and inhospitable areas with a cross in their hand

to convert heathens. The romance of this

missionary image was not the reality for many

Dutch Catholic missionaries in Java. Half of them

worked for the European colonists and the other

half worked in the mission under the Javanese.

Which in practise meant that the missionaries

were teachers in the schools for higher

indigenous education. In this paper I will discuss

the encounters that missionaries had in their

Javanese mission, especially in the schools. I will

do this by presenting a case study which is taken

from my PhD-project. It concerns two major

educational institutes for Javanese in

Central-Java, which were led by Dutch

missionaries.

In this paper I will make two main arguments.

Firstly: In the Catholic mission under the

Javanese, encounters were organised along lines

of gender, ethnicity, class and religion.

Furthermore, in these encounters, local

(Javanese) cultural intermediaries played a vital

role. Not only in meeting a Javanese flock but

also in converting and educating them. Secondly:

I will show the practises of a gendered ideology

in these encounters, arguing that the

missionaries played a large part in the export of

the European ideal of (Christian) femininity and

masculinity to the colonies.

F

Nienke Fortuin

Interpreting death from a cultural context

This paper presents a biocultural theory of

signification, that has been applied to the

interpretation of approaching death. Central to

this theoretical framework is the concept of

affordance. Gibson defined the affordances of the

environment as ‘what it offers the animal, what it

provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’.

Gibson defined the niche of an organism as ‘a

set of affordances’. However, the human niche

consists not only of natural affordances, but also

of cultural affordances. We view cultural

affordances as culturally supported beliefs and

norms, that influence perception, that are related

to certain intentions and that may result in certain

actions. We have applied our theory of

signification to the process of interpreting death.

Since death poses the ultimate existential threat,

human culture provides many cultural

affordances for interpreting death. A qualitative

analysis of 86 interviews with people confronted

with imminent death indicated 39 cultural

affordances for interpreting death, that were

classified in a religious, secular and spiritual

cultural niche. Interviewees primarily applied

affordances from the spiritual niche (60%). While

religious affordances were also common (30%),

secular affordances were applied less (10%).

Interviewees applied affordances from multiple

cultural niches, demonstrating the entrenchment

of individuals in multiple cultural niches.

G

Jordy Geerlings

Catholics in Leiden sociability (1750-1800)

Although both its economy and its university

were in decline during the 18th century, the city

of Leiden continued to receive significant

numbers of students from all over the known

world. The university thus boosted the religious

diversity of the local population, drawing students

and residents from Calvinist, dissenting

Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and even Russian

Orthodox backgrounds. It also continued to serve

as the main centre of education for the Dutch

Republic’s political and religious elite. These

unique conditions greatly boosted the

development of new forms of sociability from

1750 onwards, creating a wide range of scientific,

cultural and political societies as well as Masonic

lodges and associations for public welfare.

In spite of all this, Enlightenment-era sociability in

Leiden was not a

Abstracts

celebration of interconfessional collaboration

under the influence of Enlightenment ideals. Nor

did academic cosmopolitanism reign

unchallenged. Instead, a variety of exclusionary

practices existed, and the presence of religious

minority groups in organized sociability was not

by definition a sign of emancipation. This paper

explores the entry of Catholics into Leiden

sociability, with a special focus on how, why and

with what results they were able to join.

H

Ferdy Hubers

Emotional responses in reading groter als ‘bigger

as’: An fMRI study

In Dutch, sentences like Hij is kleiner als zijn

zusje ‘He is smaller as his little sister’ and Wat

maken hun een vreselijk lawaai! ‘Them are

making a terrible noise!’ are quite common in

daily language. According to prescriptive

grammar, however, these sentences are

incorrect. Instead of als ‘as,’ dan ‘than’ is

prescribed in comparatives of inequality and

instead of hun ‘them’, zij ‘they’ or ze

‘they.REDUCED’ should be used as the subject

of a sentence.

Many people, often highly-educated, claim that

for them these grammatical norm violations are

truly ungrammatical, since they are taught at

school that these constructions are not allowed.

Those people, therefore, often experience

negative emotions (e.g. repugnance) when

getting exposed to these constructions.

To investigate whether these negative emotions

are truly present in the processing of grammatical

norm violations I am currently conducting an

fMRI experiment. I will examine whether these

negative emotions cause any differences in

processing between grammar norm violations,

truly ungrammatical sentences, and grammatical

ones. I will also compare the processing of

grammatical norm violations with the processing

of sentences about socially unacceptable

situations to see whether overlap is present.

J

Guusje Jol & Wyke Stommel

‘How do you know?’ Questions about sources of

knowledge in police interviews with child

witnesses

In this presentation we will report of our

conversation analytic research into police

interviews with child witnesses. The child

witnesses are boys and girls in the age of 6-11

years old. In order to avoid suggestion and

pressure on the child, police officers have to

comply with rules written down in a manual.

One of the rules is that police officers have to ask

for the ‘reasons of knowledge’. It is thought that

specific questions are required to reveal ‘the

source of information and acquire insight in

causal relations’ (Dekens & Van der Sleen 2013:

92). A question that seems to be employed for

this task is ‘how do you know?’. Interactionally,

this question challenges the child’s preceding

answer, which is remarkable because police

officers are not supposed to show belief or

disbelief regarding the child’s answer.

We will show examples and we will discuss the

various kinds of occurrences and functions of

‘you do you know’-questions .

Dekens, K. & Sleen, J. van der (2013).

Handleiding Het kind als getuige. Amsterdam:

Stapel & De Koning.

Wendy Jacobs, Enny Das & Sanne Schagen

Reducing Self-Perceived Cognitive Problems

after Breast Cancer Treatment: The Role of

Stereotype Vulnerability

Being informed about side effects of medical

treatment can increase the occurrence of these

side effects. Previous research has documented

that negative expectations play a role, but

evidence regarding when and how these

information-effects come about is scarce. This

study uses insights from stereotype threat

literature to examine (a) the conditions under

which information-based side effects occur, (b)

the role of stereotypes, and (c) whether an

intervention can reduce these effects among

breast cancer patients.

In an online experiment, 175 women diagnosed

with breast cancer were randomly assigned to

one of three experimental conditions that

differentially informed them about treatment

related side effects: (a) ‘some patients treated

with chemotherapy experience memory- and

concentration problems’, (b) additional reassuring

information explaining that ‘there is still a group

of patients that scores well on memory tests’ or

(c) no reference to chemotherapy-related

cognitive problems. Main dependent measure

was frequency of self-perceived cognitive

problems (SPCP). Moderating (e.g., stereotype

vulnerability) and mediating processes (e.g.,

worry) were also examined.

Findings suggest that adverse effects of

treatment information are especially prominent

among patients vulnerable to stereotypes, and

that adding positive and reassuring information is

not sufficient to reduce stereotype threat effects.

Future studies should examine interventions that

have the potential to reduce these effects.

K

Isabel Kimmelfield

‘Byzantine History and Heritage in Tophane,

Istanbul: A New Approach to Studying the

Suburbs of Constantinople’

While the Historic Peninsula of Byzantine

Constantinople is a key tourist site in modern

Istanbul, in the former Constantinopolitan

suburbs few Byzantine remains are preserved or

investigated. Urbanisation and limited textual

sources further hinder research into these

regions, leaving historians with little

understanding of how the intramural city

interacted with and conceived of its suburban

regions.

This paper will present early findings from a PhD

project which seeks to construct a new method to

study Constantinopolitan suburbs through

evidence such as legends, liturgy, and imperial

ceremonial books, using these sources to

understand changing Byzantine

conceptualisations of these regions throughout

the city’s history. At the same time, it will consider

modern perceptions of these regions’ Byzantine

history and heritage as well as the future of such

heritage in a rapidly changing modern city.

Focussing specifically on the neighbourhood of

Tophane, this paper will demonstrate the

application of this methodology and the types of

results it yields. It will briefly discuss the

Abstracts

extension of this approach to other suburban

regions of Constantinople. Lastly it will consider

how their history and heritage does or does not

have a place in the modern neighbourhoods

today.

Gauwain van Kooten Niekerk

Forging meaning in the interaction between

viewer and film

You exit the cinema with an indefinable, but

inconvenient feeling. You have just seen a film

and feel there are many uncovered layers which

you can’t manage to peel. Being inconvenient is

perhaps the biggest possible compliment for a

film because it conveys a certain amount of

tension that can lead to meaning making. But we

avoid inconvenient films: ‘films are for relaxation,

not meditation!’

Films with great opportunity to forge personal

meaning do not reach large enough audiences,

and the meaning hooks in blockbusters are not

often enough found. I want to change that. Film

has the power to change people, it can cause

transformations in the personal narrative. When

does it? What mechanisms are at work? What

does crisis have to do with this?

I want to research the interaction between viewer

and film to discover how personal meaning is

forged in this interaction. What elements of the

film trigger this? What processes in the personal

narrative call for this? When does ‘meaning’ lead

to ‘transformation’?

These insights will be the basis of a manual for

conversations about films which maximises the

potential for personal meaning making in a way

that the conversations are both educational and

entertaining.

Huib Kouwenhoven

Register variation and communication strategy

use by Spanish users of English

Non-native speakers often use English as a

lingua franca (ELF), both in formal (e.g.

academic lectures) and informal (e.g.

international student parties) speech situations.

Previous studies have documented native

speakers' adaptation of language to the speech

situation (register variation), but little is known

about non-native register variation. We

investigated non-native register variation in the

Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English (NCSE) at

a general discourse level (e.g. amount of

laughter, amount of overlapping speech), the

level of linguistic variables characteristic of

'involved' and 'informational' language (Biber,

1988) and in speakers' use of communication

strategies (e.g. paraphrases, approximations;

e.g. Dörnyei & Scott, 1997) that serve to

overcome linguistic difficulties.

Our results show that the Spanish speakers in

the NCSE show variation at all three levels. First,

the informal speech situation was more casual,

marked by more laughter and more overlapping

speech. Secondly, the informal recordings were

more interactive, whereas the language in the

formal recordings showed a higher information

density. Thirdly, in the formal setting, speakers

used more informative communication strategies

than in the informal setting. All in all, we conclude

from our findings that non-native speakers show

register variation.

Biber, D. (1988). Variation across Speech and

Writing. Cambridge University Press.

Dörnyei, Z., & Scott, M. L. (1997).

Communication strategies in a second language:

Definitions and taxonomies. Language learning,

47(1), 173-210.

L

Meta Links

Correlative Constructions in Earlier English

A special property of Verb-Second (V2)

languages is the ability to exploit the position

before the finite verb for discourse linking

properties. This characteristic is especially

utilised by correlative constructions of the so-

called then-then type as in (1).

Þa he þa to him cwom, þa wæs he forht geworden.

Then he then to him came, then was he fearful

become

‘When he then came to him, he had become fearful.’

(Bede_2:9.128.17.1222)

Example (1) – with the finite verb in second

position preceded by a discourse linking adverb –

is perfectly grammatical in Dutch, a V2 language,

but not in Present-day English, a non-V2

language, which has to use different outward

trappings to convey the same message.

Interestingly enough, structurally similar

constructions to that in example (1) were once

grammatical during the earlier stages of English

as can be seen in (2).

Toen hij haar John zag kussen, toen stortte hij

helemaal in.

Then he her John saw kiss, then broke he completely

down

‘When he saw her kissing John, he completely broke

down.’

This presentation will focus on the development

of correlative constructions in earlier English over

time (using the YCOE and PPCME2 corpora),

investigating how its discourse properties are

reflected in its correlative syntactic form. I will

concentrate especially on 1) the use of

conjunctions and their specific combination with

resumptive adverbs and 2) the use of the first

constituent position in the main clause.

M

Lisa Morano & Mirjam Ernestus

Learning reduced words in a foreign language

In casual speech, native speakers speak faster,

reduce words, and enunciate less well than in a

formal context, which makes it difficult for non-

natives to understand them. For example,

learners of French have less problem

understanding ministre when it is pronounced in

full than when it is reduced to [miz].

One of the reasons for this is that learners are

typically not exposed to these variants at school.

We are investigating how learners of French

understand reduced variants when they have

been equally exposed to both the full and the

reduced forms of a word. We focus on Dutch

students who studied French in high school for

maximally three years.

We taught 24 schwa words, such as semoule,

both in full form ([səmul]) and reduced form

([smul]) to 32 participants during two half-hour

sessions. After the second session, we tested

how well they recognized the variants of a word,

by asking them to indicate for 264 words whether

they are real words of

Abstracts

French. Of the taught schwa words, 90% and

87% of the full and reduced forms, respectively,

were recognized correctly, suggesting that mere

exposure to reduced forms during learning would

suffice to enhance learners' perception of such

forms.

Christa van Mourik

Poetics and catchwords

In my (second) thesis I explored the poetics and

posture of the Dutch art critic Jan Kalff (1873-

1954). He was one of the most productive

contributors to the Dutch weekly De Kroniek

(1895-1907) between 1895 and 1899, publishing

over 120 articles during this period.

For the analysis of Kalff’s poetics I worked with

catchwords. At first glance one might think this

method to be rather straight forward: one has to

select catchwords, find them in the corpus and

then use the passages one finds to describe – in

this case – Kalff’s poetics.

However, since working with catchwords as a

method in the humanities is barely described in

secondary literature, I had to overcome

numerous problems I came across when trying to

operationalize this method. Because I am

convinced that working with catchwords can be a

very helpful method in the humanities, especially

when exploring poetics, I will discuss some of the

problems I came across, focussing primarily on

the process of selecting catchwords.

R

Eveline Rutten

<title> A very short introduction to digital editing

for Humanities </title>

<p> Are you a real humanist? A humanist that

passed A-levels in five languages, but dispensed

with mathematics as soon as possible? Then you

are probably scared of these <hi>pointy

brackets</hi> inserted in my text. You don’t have

to! I will provide you with a short but illuminating

introduction to what these things mean, and what

you can actually do with them.</p>

<p> My current project focuses on fragmentary

texts of a Greek poet named Tyrtaeus. Because

the texts are preserved in many different sources

and in different stages of completeness, I wanted

a method which enables me to display the

fragments as separate as well as combining

them into one edited text. On my search through

different possibilities, I came across the TEI: the

Text Encoding Initiative. The TEI is an

international group of scholars which produces

guidelines for digital editing for Humanities. In

my short presentation, I will explain to you what

the TEI is, how their guidelines work, and how

you could make use of these in producing a

digital edition. </p>

S

Thomas Smits

Doing digital humanities: readers of 19th century

illustrated newspapers

In my Phd-project I focus on the simultaneous

and interconnected formation of national and

transnational identity, by researching seven

European illustrated newspapers between 1842

and 1870. I’m currently researching the colonial

and international readers of the Illustrated

London News, one of the most successful

publications of the nineteenth century. Large

open-access databases of digitalized nineteenth

century newspapers, like Delpher (Netherlands),

Trove (Australia), Paper Past (New Zealand),

Anno (Austria) and even the digital newspaper

collection of Bermuda, are a valuable resource

for this kind of research. By looking at articles

and advertisements, both by the ILN as by their

international representatives, I hope to shed light

on the colonial and international readers of this

publication.

In my contribution to the conference I want to

focus on methodological questions surrounding

these databases. How do they differ from one

another? How do their options and user-

interfaces influence historical research? What is

the most effective way to search trough OCR-

generated texts? How can we effectively combine

the ‘hits’ in large datasets with more traditional

historical methods like close reading? I hope to

both give and get input on working effectively

with these new kind of digital archives.

Floris Solleveld

What happened to the Republic of Letters?

What happened to the Republic of Letters?

Throughout the early modern period, an

imagined community of scholars and ‘men of

letters’ all over Europe was regularly invoked in

scholarly work and correspondence as audience,

judge, and substitute family. With the decline of

Latin and the rise of French and other

vernaculars as the language of culture, that

republic already began to compartmentalize; by

1750, according to Kasper Eskildsen, “to most

German and Scandinavian scholars the Republic

of Letters was nothing more than a comical relic

from a distant humanistic past”.

Two developments seem to coincide: while the

Republic of Letters dissolves, the ‘public sphere’

takes shape; the 19th century has intellectuals

where the 18th had gens de letters. The obvious

question is: to what extent is this a break or a

continuity? The hypothesis which I will present in

this paper is that the Republic of Letters diluted

rather than ended: with the increase of scholarly

production and specialization, it became too big

for everyone to still be one correspondent away.

Also, with the increase of the reading public, one

no longer writes for ‘the learned world’: one either

writes for fellow specialists or for the educated

public at large.

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, “How Germany Left

the Republic of Letters”, Journal of the History of

Ideas 65:3 (2004), pp. 421-432

T

Christel Theunissen

Medieval choir stalls on the move: solving an art

historical puzzle

Choir stalls were part of the church furniture in

medieval cathedrals, collegiate and cloister

churches. Most of the time the clergy were the

sole users of the stalls during the offices held in

the church. To give them some relief, during the

time whilst praying and singing, the seats were

provided with misericords. These are small

brackets underneath the seat which they could

lean on when the seat was upright. Hidden away,

the misericord was the ideal place for profane

woodcarvings.

Abstracts

Reformation, wars and secularization have

destroyed many medieval choir stalls which were

spread around Europe. And many more were

dismantled, moved and sold to other churches or

private collectors. This dissolution took mainly

place at the end of the eighteenth till late in the

nineteenth century. We find the remains of

ensembles scattered over different places and

countries in the world. Regularly, parts of choir

stalls show up at auctions where they are being

offered for sale again. The provenance of these

offered items is often unknown. They become

objects which are sold time and again, and have

lost their original context completely.

In this paper I will focus on a set of five

misericords which came onto the art market a

couple of years ago. Offered by a British auction

house the misericords are described as

originating from Spain. The exact provenance is

however not known. The quest for their origin will

lead through some European countries. With the

help of art historical methods, the results of this

research will be presented in this paper.

V

Ruti Vardi

The conceptualisation of emotions in Biblical

Hebrew

Emotions in Biblical Hebrew (BH) are expressed

by emotion- and related terms, as well as

metaphors and idiomatic constructions. By

applying a corpus study to the examination of

affection and sadness, I aim to explore

underlying concepts that may drive the use of

linguistic constructions, and the relations

between these emotions and social order in the

Hebrew bible. In addition to the grammatical

forms used to express and narrate love-events in

BH, social-cultural aspects such as the social

identity/status of participants, the relationships

between them, and the context in which love-

events occur (e.g. kinship, deity), are thoroughly

examined and analysed. In my talk I will describe

the theoretical framework and the methodology

of the study and will present preliminary

observed patterns in, and implications of, the use

of love-constructions.

Lieke Verheijen

The Linguistics of Computer-Mediated

Communication – A Register Analysis of Dutch

Youngsters’ Written CMC

Recent decades have seen an explosive growth

in computer-mediated communication (CMC) as

a means of communication. Because the

language of CMC can deviate from standard

language conventions, many parents and

teachers fear that CMC degrades youngsters’

reading, writing, or spelling skills. Before studying

the actual impact of CMC on traditional literacy,

one has to establish in what ways CMC language

is different. Thus, I have conducted a corpus

study examining the register of Dutch youngsters’

written CMC, revealing the differences between

their informal ‘CMC language’ and their more

formal ‘school language’. My register analysis

includes linguistic features of three dimensions of

writing: orthography (‘textisms’: non-

conventionally spelled words), syntax (in terms of

reductions and complexity), and lexicon (e.g.

English borrowings, type-token ratio). A diverse

range of CMC modes is investigated, also using

data from SoNaR (‘STEVIN Nederlandstalig

Referentiecorpus’)—text messages,

chats, tweets, WhatsApp messages, and

Facebook posts. This yields linguistic profiles

characterizing the language of different CMC

modes. The extent to which CMC users deviate

from standard language depends on various

factors, including user characteristics. Therefore,

the influence of youngsters’ age on the linguistics

of their CMC writings is also explored, by

distinguishing between CMC by adolescents

versus by young adults.

W

Annemarie Weerman

You did what?! An examination of argument

quality manipulations in advertising research

Using strong arguments is important in the

persuasion process. However, not much is

known on what constitutes a strong argument. To

analyse this, a systematic literature review has

been conducted to collect material that

manipulates argument quality. Many researchers

have used strong and weak arguments to

examine different psychological processes and

this material is a potential goldmine for

information on the active ingredients of argument

quality.

Four databases were searched using the

keywords “argument quality”, “argument strength”

and “strong argument” and “weak argument”.

This search lead to a total of 213 studies

manipulating argument quality. Articles were

searched to obtain material, when it was not

reported, the authors were emailed with the

request to send us the material.

We started analysing a subset of material in the

domain of advertising, because these claims and

arguments are the most straightforward: It is

clear what the claim is and what the arguments

are and more importantly; these studies use

mainly pragmatic argumentation, manipulating

one of the key elements of argument quality:

desirability of the consequences. Analysing these

materials will provide insight into this concept and

will aid us in developing a coding system that can

be used for other materials as well.

Z

Koen van Zon

In Search of Purpose. The European Parliament

in search of alternative repertoires of legitimacy,

1950-1960

In analysing the political landscape of post-war

Western Europe, historians generally stress the

unprecedented stability of its democratic

regimes. They perceive the rise of a new political

order, founded on consensus and concord, often

achieved at the expense of parliaments.

Illustrative of the diminished role of parliaments in

European post-war politics was the parliament of

the newly founded European Community. It was

virtually powerless and its members were

appointed, not elected. Many of them realised

that if they were to improve the European

Parliament’s standing, they needed electoral

backing from a European electorate.

For all its imperfections, the new European

Parliament was a natural target of initiatives for

democratisation, with European elections as its

most tangible goal. In 1952 and again in 1958,

the European Parliament undertook attempts to

fulfil its purpose: becoming a true people’s

representative. The first European

Abstracts

elections weren’t organised until 1979, however.

With their plans, European parliamentarians not

only pioneered electoral democracy on a

supranational level, they also implicitly

challenged the technocratic discourse that had

up to then legitimized European integration. This

paper analyses the political rhetoric surrounding

the debates on European elections, asking what

ideas the involved parliamentarians had about

legitimacy in the European Community.