The purpose of this study is to examine what contemporary corpora can reveal about the use of the two adjectives evil and wicked. These two synonyms have been analysed using corpus linguistics in order to acquire results about the differences between them regarding frequency of use, as well as their collocating nouns. The results have also been analysed with a focus on gender perspectives. The study has a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. The material investigated for this study consists of a corpus called The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The definitions of the two adjectives have also been searched within a few of the greater dictionaries. The findings reveal that the word evil is used to a greater extent by speakers and writers in different contexts in comparison to its synonym wicked. There are also significant differences between male and female nouns in adjective and noun collocations. The adjective evil is more frequently used to address male nouns, whereas its synonym wicked is more widely used as an attribute to female nouns. The differences are aligned with common gender stereotypes presented in previous studies and support the results regarding gender approaches in adjective and noun collocations.

This thesis explores the ideological role of metaphor in British governmental discourses on ¿social exclusion¿. A hybrid methodology, combining approaches from Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and cognitive theories of metaphor, is used to address how social exclusion and other metaphors are deployed to create an ideologically vested representation of society. The data consists of linguistic metaphors identified from a 400,000+ word machine-readable corpus of British governmental texts on social exclusion covering a ten year period (1997- 2007). From these surface level features of text, underlying systematic and conceptual metaphors are then inferred. The analysis reveals how the interrelation between social exclusion and a range of other metaphors creates a dichotomous representation of society in which social problems are discursively placed outside society, glossing inequalities within the included mainstream and placing the blame for exclusion on the cultural deficiencies of the excluded. The solution to the problem of exclusion is implicit within the logic of its conceptual structure and involves moving the excluded across the ¿boundary¿ to join the ¿insiders¿. The welfare state has a key role to play in this and is underpinned by a range of metaphors which anticipate movement on the part of the excluded away from a position of dependence on the state. This expectation of movement is itself metaphorically structured by the notion of a social contract in which the socially excluded have a responsibility to try and include themselves in society in return for the right of (temporary) state support. Key systematic metaphors are explained by reference to a discourse-historical view of ideological change in processes of political party transformation. / BISA and CSV

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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.