Introduction Relatively few studies have focused on the wellbeing, experiences and needs of the siblings of children with a psychiatric diagnosis. However, the studies that have been conducted suggest that the impact of such circumstances on these siblings is significant. Studying narratives of diagnosed children or relatives has proven to be a successful approach to gain insights that could help improve care. Only a few attempts have been made to study narratives in psychiatry utilizing a machine learning approach. Method In this current study, 13 narratives of the experiences of siblings of children with a neurodevelopmental disorders were collected through largely unstructured interviews. The interviews were analyzed using the traditional qualitative, hermeneutic phenomenology method as well as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning method clustering words from documents into topics. One aim of this study was to evaluate the experiences of the siblings in order to find leads to improve care and support for these siblings. Furthermore, the outcomes of both analyses were compared to evaluate the role of machine learning in analyzing narratives. Results Qualitative analysis of the interviews led to the formulation of nine main themes: confrontation with conflicts, coping strategies siblings, need for rest and time for myself, need for support and attention from personal circle, wish for normality, influence on personal choices and possibilities for development, doing things together, recommendations and advices, ambivalence and loyalty. Using unsupervised machine learning (LDA) 24 topics were formed that mostly overlapped with the qualitative themes found. Both the qualitative analysis and the LDA analysis detected themes that were unique to the respective analysis. Conclusion The present study found that studying narratives of siblings of children with a neurodevelopmental disorder contributes to a better understanding of the subjects' experiences. Siblings cope with ambivalent feelings toward their brother or sister and this emotional conflict often leads to adapted behavior. Several coping strategies are developed to deal with the behavior of their brother or sister like seeking support or ignoring. Devoted support, time and attention from close relatives, especially parents, is needed. The LDA analysis didn't appear useful to distract meaning and context from the narratives, but it was proposed that machine learning could be a valuable and quick addition to the traditional qualitative methods by finding overlooked topics and giving a rudimental overview of topics in narratives.

Diagnosing mental disorders is complex due to the genetic, environmental and psychological contributors and the individual risk factors. Language markers for mental disorders can help to diagnose a person. Research thus far on language markers and the associated mental disorders has been done mainly with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. In order to improve on this research, we employed a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques using LIWC, spaCy, fastText and RobBERT to analyse Dutch psychiatric interview transcriptions with both rule-based and vector-based approaches. Our primary objective was to predict whether a patient had been diagnosed with a mental disorder, and if so, the specific mental disorder type. Furthermore, the second goal of this research was to find out which words are language markers for which mental disorder. LIWC in combination with the random forest classification algorithm performed best in predicting whether a person had a mental disorder or not (accuracy: 0.952; Cohen’s kappa: 0.889). SpaCy in combination with random forest predicted best which particular mental disorder a patient had been diagnosed with (accuracy: 0.429; Cohen’s kappa: 0.304).

Physiological signals (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) that were traditionally studied in neuroscientific laboratory research are currently being used in numerous real-life studies using wearable technology. Physiological signals obtained with wearables seem to offer great potential for continuous monitoring and providing biofeedback in clinical practice and healthcare research. The physiological data obtained from these signals has utility for both clinicians and researchers. Clinicians are typically interested in the day-to-day and moment-to-moment physiological reactivity of patients to real-life stressors, events, and situations or interested in the physiological reactivity to stimuli in therapy. Researchers typically apply signal analysis methods to the data by pre-processing the physiological signals, detecting artifacts, and extracting features, which can be a challenge considering the amount of data that needs to be processed. This paper describes the creation of a "Wearables" R package and a Shiny "E4 dashboard" application for an often-studied wearable, the Empatica E4. The package and Shiny application can be used to visualize the relationship between physiological signals and real-life stressors or stimuli, but can also be used to pre-process physiological data, detect artifacts, and extract relevant features for further analysis. In addition, the application has a batch process option to analyze large amounts of physiological data into ready-to-use data files. The software accommodates users with a downloadable report that provides opportunities for a careful investigation of physiological reactions in daily life. The application is freely available, thought to be easy to use, and thought to be easily extendible to other wearable devices. Future research should focus on the usability of the application and the validation of the algorithms.

Prescriptive grammar rules are taught in education, generally to ban the use of certain frequently encountered constructions in everyday language. This may lead to hypercorrection, meaning that the prescribed form in one construction is extended to another one in which it is in fact prohibited by prescriptive grammar. We discuss two such cases in Dutch: the hypercorrect use of the comparative particle dan 'than' in equative constructions, and the hypercorrect use of the accusative pronoun hen 'them' for a dative object. In two experiments, high school students of three educational levels were tested on their use of these hypercorrect forms (n(exp1) = 162, n(exp2) = 159). Our results indicate an overall large amount of hypercorrection across all levels of education, including preuniversity level students who otherwise perform better in constructions targeted by prescriptive grammar rules. We conclude that while teaching prescriptive grammar rules to high school students seems to increase their use of correct forms in certain constructions, this comes at a cost of hypercorrection in others.

Please be advised that this information was generated on 2017-01-07 and may be subject to change. This special issue is concerned with the expression of spatial meaning by morphological case. 1 Spatial meaning is generally considered to be basic to our thinking in general. In addition to philosophical arguments, this assumption has been made on the basis of the widespread use of spatial language for non-spatial purposes. In fact, it is one of the most frequently used sources in gram-maticalization patterns (Heine and Kuteva 2002). The most well-known examples are from the temporal domain, in which, for example, spatial 'in' is used for temporal meaning. (e.g., in the winter) or past tense is expressed by source markers (e.g., French je viens de manger 'I've just eaten', literally: 'I come from eating'). But there are many more examples of the grammaticaliza-tion of spatial language, such as the marking of possession, verbal arguments, purpose, and causality (cf. the contribution to this issue by Diana Forker). Morphological case has been studied for thousands of years starting with the ancient Greek and Roman tradition for the Western world and with Pa ˉn˚ini's grammar of Sanskrit for the Indian linguistic tradition (Butt 2006). Notwithstanding this long history, there is still no generally accepted view of case. Most people will agree with Blake's (1994: 1) definition of its core use, viz. a system of marking of dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads. However, what kind of marking counts as case marking and what kind of relationships should be distinguished are still hotly debated issues. Probably precisely because of its intangibility, morphological case is central to many theories of language. Our special issue on spatial case brings these two extremely interesting topics, spatial meaning and morphological case, together. However, spatial case is not only interesting for just being the intersection of space and case, its study may also shed new light on both domains of linguistic theorizing as we feel that they have been studied rather one-sidedly. Case can be used structurally, to mark argument structure, and nonstructurally, to mark semantic roles. Most work on case acknowledges this distinction between structural and nonstructural case, and then often continues to study only the former (cf. Butt 2006). Similarly, it is generally accepted that spatial meaning can be expressed by morphological case or more lexical markers like prepositions , after which most studies …

In this paper I argue that not everything that involves speakers or addressees falls under a person system of first, second and third person. Rather, there is an additional grammatical category of interlocutors with the speech-act roles speaker, addressee and outsider. With this knowledge we can make a split in phenomena: spatial deixis (here and there), for example, is a person phenomenon, while the vocative (John in That's great, John) is not a person phenomenon but an interlocutor phenomenon. Furthermore I present the theory that interlocutor phenomena are universal, while person phenomena may differ between languages.

In this paper we introduce Prag-raising, the phenomenon of pragmatic markers being in a matrix clause where they do not belong functionally. The phenomenon has some similarities with Neg-raising, but the differences are even more striking. In our analysis we point out the different role that subjectivity plays in Prag-raising and Neg-raising.

We argue that Dutch does not behave according to Kratzer’s theory of fake indexicality. The crucial observation is that Dutch allows English-style sloppy readings in non-agreeing only complements, but has a rich, German-style verbal and pronominal inflectional morphology.

Abstract We present new evidence against a grammatical distinction between second and third person in Sign Language of The Netherlands (NGT). More precisely, we show how pushing this distinction into the domain of pragmatics helps account for an otherwise puzzling fact about the NGT imperative: not only is it used to command your addressee, it can also express ‘non-addressee-oriented commands’.

Recently, it has been proposed that number on pronouns has minimal–augmented values instead of singular–plural values. This proposal leads to a split between nominal and pronominal number. I argue against this proposal as the pronominal paradigms of the world’s languages provide more evidence for a singular–plural analysis than for a minimal–augmented analysis.

In sentences, the two entities that enjoy a special status are the speaker of the utterance containing the sentence, and the hearer of this utterance. One can refer overtly to the speaker and the hearer in a sentence - pronouns like I and you can serve as the subject of a sentence, for example. But not only subjects can make reference to the speaker and the hearer; both of them also play an important role in the semantics of sentence mood (declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives) and evidentiality (direct evidence, hearsay, inference). In this paper we investigate the effects of having first person and second person subjects in combination with different types of sentence mood and evidentiality.

This paper discusses a cross-linguistic sample of spatial PPs in languages that both have adpositions and case. It is shown that the distribution of labor within these potentially complex PPs follows from two general principles only. According to the principle of Grammaticalization, less frequent meaning elements should never be expressed by more grammatical means than more frequent ones. According to the principle of Compositionality, the syntactic construction should reflect the order of semantic function application. The only viable spatial PP constructions according to these principles are those constructions in which the P simultaneously expresses configuration and directionality, and constructions in which the P expresses configuration and the case marker on the P directionality.

In this paper I will discuss Kemmer’s (1993) middle map, a semantic map covering semantic concepts like Reflexivity, Reciprocity and the Passive. Her claim is that those middle meanings serve as a bridge between the categories of Two-Participant events and One-Participant events, the semantic counterparts of transitive and intransitive verbs, respectively. However, in this paper it will be argued that there is no such bridging function; there is a direct connection between Two-Participant and One-Participant events.

In this paper we will compare the results of a German and a Dutch production experiment on argument linearization patterns (subject-before-object, object-before-subject and passive). We distinguish between several factors that have an effect on the outcome (agent vs. experiencer, dative vs. accusative, animate vs. inanimate) and conclude that SubjectFirst, AgentFirst, ExperiencerFirst and DativeFirst are all important principles, but AnimateFirst is not, surprisingly.

We discuss the R-form of scrambled pronominal P complements in Dutch and account for the restricted use of this construction using Optimality Theory. The fact that pronominal P complements that do not refer to humans scramble, and subsequently take up a spatial form is explained by the interaction of five constraints. According to ECONOMY and STAY, expressions should be economical and stick to basic word order; SCRAMBLE dictates pronominal constituents to appear more to the beginning of the sentence; PCASE says to mark the syntactic relationship between the preposition and its complement, and, finally, *RHUM expresses the inappropriateness of the combination of a human referent with a spatial form.