Zijn romans en kranten sinds 1950 eenvoudiger geworden?

Samenvatting

Did the language of Dutch novels and newspaper articles become less complex between the 1950s and the 2010s? Based on a corpus of 60 novels, published in three different decades, and 200 newspaper articles, published in two decades, an analysis of stylistic phenomena was conducted, using T-scan, a tool for automatic analysis of Dutch language. The analysis focused on four aspects of complexity: word and sentence complexity, cohesion and personalisation. This analysis showed that while the language of the newspaper articles did change on all levels between 1950 and 2000, the language of the novels did not change substantially. The language of the news articles is more complex than the language of the novels, across different decades. A further analysis of stylistic phenomena in novels revealed some interesting relations between language and content.