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This corpus-based study aims to better understand the difficulties for Swedish students regarding English pronouns and based on the result give recommendations for the teaching of English pronouns within a Swedish context. The study investigates Swedish students' usage of pronouns in English writing and the result is compared with Köhlmyr’s (2001) result.  The material is taken from the corpus ULEC (Uppsala Learner English Corpus) and consists of 18 048 words. There are 48 essays written by Swedish students in year six and 39 essays from students in year twelve. The youngest and the oldest students from ULEC are chosen to be able to make comparisons between the years. Error Analysis is the method for finding errors and analyzing them. The errors are first analyzed as addition, misinformation (also called substitution), misordering or blends and then as interlingual or intralingual. They are analyzed to better understand the reasons behind them.  The essays contain a total of 56 errors and most of them are analyzed as misinformation caused by interlingual transfer. The most erroneous pronouns are interpreted as the most problematic, which in year six are the reflexive pronouns and in year 12 genitive dependent pronouns. In both years there also occur errors of object pronouns. A similarity with the previous study by Köhlmyr is that the students have difficulties using existential there and instead use the subject pronoun it. A possible reason behind these errors could be the difference between Swedish and English grammar rules which lead to negative transfer. A recommendation for teaching is to focus more on explaining the genitive and reflexive pronouns. / Syftet med denna korpusbaserade studie är att bättre förstå svårigheterna för svenska elever gällande engelska pronomen och baserat på resultatet ge rekommendationer till undervisningen av engelska pronomen inom en svensk kontext. Studien undersöker svenska elevers användning av pronomen i engelsk skrift och jämför resultatet med Köhlmyrs (2001) resultat. Materialet är hämtat från korpuset ULEC (Uppsala Learner English Corpus) och består av 18 048 ord. Det är 48 uppsatser skrivna av svenska elever i årskurs sex och 39 uppsatser från elever i tredje året på gymnasiet. De yngsta och de äldsta eleverna från ULEC är utvalda för att kunna göra en jämförelse mellan åren. Felanalys är metoden för att hitta felen och analysera dem. Felen är först analyserade som tillägg, substitution, felordning eller blandning och sedan som interlinguala eller intralinguala. De är analyserade för att bättre förstå orsaken till att de uppstod. Uppsatserna innehåller 56 fel och de flesta av dem analyseras som substitution på grund av interlingual överföring. De mest felaktiga pronomenen tolkas som de mest problematiska, vilket i årkurs sex är reflexiva pronomen, och i år 12 genitiva pronomen. Inom båda åren förkommer även fel av objektpronomen. En likhet med den tidigare undersökningen av Köhlmyr (2001) är att eleverna i årskurs sex har svårt att använda existentiella there och i stället använder subjekt pronomenet it. En orsak bakom dessa fel kan vara skillnaden mellan svenska och engelska grammatikregler som leder till negativ överföring. En rekommendation för undervisning är att fokusera mer på att förklara possessiva och reflexiva pronomen.

Through a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this paper looks at the hidden ideological discourses surrounding sex offenders in the British media. Corpus linguistics provides an excellent framework to discover such discourse patterns and the critical discourse analysis framework helps contextualise the findings. The specific aim of the paper is to discover and compare the discourse patterns surrounding the specific nominals rapist* and paedophile* in order to see how the representations differ. The analysis uncovered that the representation of both offenders was sensationalised and full of negative and emotionally loaded words. Furthermore, it was discovered that two differing discourses were prominent for each nominal: An animalistic and bodily discourse for rapist* and a discourse of deviance and the mind for peadophile*. Lastly, it is argued that these misrepresentations are problematic as they misinform both the public and the regulation of offenders.

Overall patterns of language use variation across oral proficiency levels of 1,243 Japanese EFL learners and 20 native speakers of English using the linguistic features set from Biber (1988) were investigated in this study. The approach combined learner corpora, language processing techniques, visual inspection of descriptive statistics, and multivariate statistical analysis to identify characteristics of learner language use. The largest spoken learner corpus in Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology Japanese Learner English (NICT JLE) Corpus was used for the analysis. It consists of over one million running words of L2 spoken English with oral proficiency level information. The level of the material in the corpus is approximately equal to a Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) range of 356 to 921. It also includes data gathered from 20 native speakers who performed identical speaking tasks as the learners. The 58 linguistic features (e.g., grammatical features) were taken from the original list of 67 linguistic features in Biber (1988) to explore the variation of learner language. The following research questions were addressed. First, what linguistic features characterize different oral proficiency levels? Second, to what degree do the language features appearing in the spoken production of high proficiency learners match those of native speakers who perform the same task? Third, is the oral production of Japanese EFL learners rich enough to display the full range of features used by Biber? Grammatical features alone would not be enough to comprehensively distinguish oral proficiency levels, but the results of the study show that various types of grammatical features can be used to describe differences in the levels. First, frequency change patterns (i.e., a rising, a falling, a combination of rising, falling, and a plateauing) across the oral proficiency levels were shown through linguistic features from a wide range of categories: (a) part-of-speech (noun, pronoun it, first person pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, indefinite pronoun, possibility modal, adverb, causative adverb), (b) stance markers (emphatic, hedge, amplifier), (c) reduced forms (contraction, stranded preposition), (d) specialized verb class (private verb), complementation (infinitive), (e) coordination (phrasal coordination), (f) passive (agentless passive), and (g) possibly tense and aspect markers (past tense, perfect aspect). In addition, there is a noticeable gap between native and non-native speakers of English. There are six items that native speakers of English use more frequently than the most advanced learners (perfect aspect, place adverb, pronoun it, stranded preposition, synthetic negation, emphatic) and five items that native speakers use less frequently (past tense, first person pronoun, infinitive, possibility modal, analytic negation). Other linguistic features are used with similar frequency across the levels. What is clear is that the speaking tasks and the time allowed for provided ample opportunity for most of Biber’s features to be used across the levels. The results of this study show that various linguistic features can be used to distinguish different oral proficiency levels, and to distinguish the oral language use of native and non-native speakers of English. / Teaching & Learning