Characteristics of the Dutch Language in AX Semantics

Fundamentals

In Dutch, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.

Dutch has three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural.

Additionally, Dutch only has nominative case for nouns, but includes accusative and dative cases for personal pronouns.

grammatical name	values	examples
gender	masculine	de oude hond (the old dog)
	feminine	de oude vrouw (the old woman)
	neuter	het oude huis (the old house)
number	singular	groot huis (big house)
	plural	grote huizen (big houses)
cases (noun)	nominative	vrouw (woman)
cases (pronoun)	accusative	Ik heb hen gisteren gezien. (I've seen them yesterday.)
	dative	Hij heeft hun verraden. (He has betrayed them.)
adjectives (noun)	before noun	rode appel (red apple)
verb tenses	present	hij gaat (he goes)
	past	hij ging (he went)

The standard order of a noun phrase in Dutch is the following:

preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun

See for example:

over   deze    drie   populaire  boeken
about  these   three  popular    books[pl]
PREP   DET     NUM    ADJ        NOUN
"about these three popular books"

Lexicon

Nouns

For Dutch nouns, the lexicon needs to encode gender and determiner and preposition changes. The number x case forms of a noun should be added to the lexicon if they are not regular.

If a lexicon entry is missing, determiners, adjectives, numerals, and pronouns, which would need lexical information to inflect, are omitted.

Examples

The basic lexicon entry for huis (house) contains:

• gender: neuter
• inflection table for case and number:

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	huis	huizen

Note

If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Dutch with automatic handling of prepositions.

Adjectives

In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, case, and number can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "before noun";.

Verbs

The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects the wrong way, you should add it to the lexicon.

Container settings

Determiners

The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Dutch: definite, indefinite, demonstrative, relative, possessive, and quantifier (every).

Numerals

The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.

	cardinal	ordinal
text	negen dagen (nine days)	de negende dag (the ninth day)
digit	9 dagen (9 days)	de 9e dag (the 9th day)

For Dutch, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 100 on the platform, otherwise (above 100) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:

honderd auto's
(one hundred cars)
vs.
101 auto's
(101 cars)

Determiner switch

Determiners can be switched according to lexical information. If you set the determiner switch for a specific noun in the lexicon, it will automatically switch to another determiner when you add the determiner you intend to switch in the container. The container setting for Duitsland in the first example is: preposition="in", determiner is unset (blank), and case="nominative".

in Duitsland <no determiner>
(in Germany)

In the second example, the container settings stay the same for Filippijnen. However, the determiner automatically switches from none to definite, because the determiner switch is configured in the lexicon. As the result, the definite determiner de is added to Filippijnen.

in de Filippijnen <switch to definite determiner>
(in the Philippines)

Note

If the lexicon entry of a country includes a switch from none to definite, there is still a way to use the country without the article (e.g. just "Philippines"). The determiner will always remain none by setting determiner=none in the container. Only an unset determiner (blank) triggers the switch from none to another determiner.

Preposition switch

On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Duitsland (Germany) are: preposition="in" and case="nom".

in Duitsland
(in Germany)

For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Sylt), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="in", case="nom"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from in to op:

op Sylt
(on Sylt)

Language Variants

The AX NLG platform offers 2 variants of the Dutch language:

• Netherlands
• Belgium

The differences between these variants are mostly lexical.