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Colour is essential to our perception of the world, regardless of the country we live in or what language we speak. Colour terms are part of all languages. Describing change of colour may be a way of underlining an emotion. Telling that a person turned green with envy, gives a more powerful picture of the person’s envy than just writing that he or she became very envious. Sometimes the change of colour is just a metaphor - no actual change of colour has occurred. In other cases describing a change of colour may be meant literally. Change of colour may be expressed in different ways in different languages. They may be expressed by using an auxiliary verb, describing the change, preceding the colour, e.g. become green or turn red. They may also be expressed using a specific verb that expresses the change of colour, such as redden or whiten. This essay compares constructions describing changes to the colours red and green in Russian and Swedish. It focuses on the following issues: Which are the most common causes of colour change in the two languages? How prevalent is the use of colour change as a metaphor? Which are the expressions most commonly used expressing change of colour to red and to green? How common are constructions using an auxiliary verb as opposed to specific verbs describing colour change? The analysis is corpus based, drawing on material partly from the Russian Nacional’nyj korpus russkogo jazyka, partly from the Swedish corpus Språkbanken. A difficulty is that the material in the two corpuses differs considerably as to age as well as to style. Thus, only conclusions based on very clear differences between the languages can be considered reliable. Some conclusions: Metaphorical use of colour change occurs in both languages and is common particularly for change of colour to green. The frequency of the causes for colour change differs considerably between the languages, regardless of whether the change of colour is meant metaphorically or literally. In Swedish, practically the only cause for metaphoric change of colour to green is envy. This metaphor is present also in Russian, but is far less frequent. Instead, different expressions of anger, to a varying degree, dominate. In the Russian material, time is the dominating cause of literal change of colour to green. The Swedish material, holding only few cases of literal change of colour to green, shows no example of this. In the Swedish material, the dominating cause of change of colour to red is shame. This is also an important cause in the Russian material. However, here different expressions of joy, dominate. The use of specific verbs describing colour change is significantly more common in Russian than in Swedish.

Traditionellt har studier inom historisk lingvistik gjorts på skrivna källor men numera finns det även inspelat material av bra kvalitet som är tillräckligt gammal för att visa olikheter från dagens språk. Den här uppsatsen presenterar en fonetisk och fonematisk analys av en variant av ladinska, cazet, gjord utifrån inspelningar från 60-talet som sedan jämfördes med nutida ljudmaterial. Syftet var att se om språket hade genomgått ljudförändringar vilket visade sig vara fallet. Några av dessa var syntagmatiska det vill säga utan konsekvenser för det fonologiska systemet medan andra var paradigmatiska och påverkade det fonologiska systemet och även morfologin. I vissa fall visade den allofoniska variationen i 60-talets språk spår av äldre ljudförändringar och i andra fall förutsåg den utvecklingar som inträffade senare. Några ljudförändringar kunde tolkas som naturliga i och med att de är kända för att inträffa medan andra verkar ha orsakats av italienskans inflytande. Den här uppsasten vill tillägga en pusselbit i beskrivningen av ljudförändringar inom romanska språken samt visa hur ljudmaterial kan utnyttjas för att göra diakroniska studier i verklig tid.

Politeness theory, developed by Brown and Levinson, has been applied to literature in linguistic research for in-depth analysis of discourse, whether written or spoken. Based on my understanding of politeness and the different politeness strategies suggested in the literature, this paper analyzes the different strategies mostly used by the main characters of the televised version of the novel North and South (1855), written by Elizabeth Gaskell, by focusing on some parts of the conversations in the televised version (2004), in terms of gender, social class and situation. The result shows that the film characters mostly resort to on-record and positive politeness strategies, while negative politeness and off-record strategies are less used in the conversations, which supports the story ambition to bridge gender and social gaps. The analysis demonstrates that much of our understanding of character motives in a novel/film relies on the way politeness strategies credibly reflect our experience and how strategies in interaction commonly work as theoretically described.

Previous research shows how music presents gender in different ways depending on the genre, and that music can affect the listeners' behaviour. There is also research that shows how gender is constructed in different social arenas and through people's way of expressing themselves and communicating. The purpose of this study is to investigate how lyrics within Swedish reggae and hip hop can express and construct gender by analysing artists' lyrics from a gender perspective. Based on a social constructivist perspective characterized by gender theories by Yvonne Hirdman, Raewyn Connell, Judith Butler, Candace west and Don H. Zimmerman, the results of the text analysis can be investigated as a source of construction, reproduction and maintenance of gender and gender stereotypes. The study also takes a didactic perspective where a reflection describes how the results of the study can influence the teaching in the school. The result shows that Swedish hip hop and reggae can be a source of both construction and reproduction and maintenance of sex and gender. Lyrics within hip hop constructs an ideal image of men as successful in the music industry, independent and as a drug user while the image of women can be described as an object owned by the man and also compared to other physical objects, such as money and weapons. Lyrics within reggae constructs an ideal image of men as charming, the promotion of equality and cannabis smoking while women are portrayed as and communicates that the women should be powerful, beautiful and equal or superior to men.

This study analyzes the use of linguistic stereotypes in two fantasy role-playing games, Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and Dragon Age: Origins with a focus on phonology. It investigates how accent stereotypes are used and why they are important for characters in video games, for example regarding prestige and attractiveness. It analyzes each character from a character type perspective: hero, villain, comic-relief, mentor and lover. The results show that there are accent stereotypes in fantasy role-playing games and that they are, most likely, deliberately placed as such. It also shows that standard variations of English are mainly used for characters that serves a purpose to the story while non-standard variations are used for characters that serves no purpose to the game other than working as tools to enrich the world with a sense of life.

The translation of metaphors can cause problems for a translator since what is typical for a metaphor is that the intended meaning does not match its literal meaning, which can lead to misunderstandings. Apart from this, language differences and cultural differences can also cause problems. This essay deals with the translation of metaphors in a dog breed book from English to Swedish. The aim of the essay is to investigate which translation strategies that are used when translating metaphors and whether lexicalized and non-lexicalized source language metaphors require different translation strategies.  The source language metaphors were found by using the Metaphor Identification Procedure which in this study means determining the lexical units in the source text, deciding the meaning of each unit and then comparing with dictionaries to see whether the lexical unit has a more basic or contemporary meaning and if the meaning in this particular context can be understood based on the more basic or contemporary meaning. If so, the lexical unit was determined to be metaphorically used in this context. The source language metaphors were then classified according to whether they are lexicalized or non-lexicalized, based on Dickins (2005) classification. The study finds that the most common way of translating a source language metaphor is by paraphrasing it into a non-metaphorical expression followed by using the same or a similar target language metaphor. No clear indications of lexicalized and non-lexicalized metaphors requiring different translation strategies were found.

Syftet med denna studie var att se vilka attityder lärare i programgemensamma ämnen på gymnasiet intog till nyanlända elevers språkliga resurser och hur dessa attityder, enligt informanterna, yttrar sig i undervisningen. Dessa attityder delades upp i en treenighet av komponenter bestående av kognitiv, affektiv och konativ komponent. Studien utfördes på en större gymnasieskola i södra Sverige där 20 lärare i programgemensamma ämnen, både teoretiska och praktiska, deltog i en enkät, varpå sex lärare valdes ut för uppföljande intervjuer utifrån hur tydligt de tagit ställning i olika frågor i enkäten. Resultaten visar att lärarna tenderar att uppvisa en negativ attityd till nyanlända elevers språkliga resurser då det rör svenska språket som upplevs ligga på en otillräcklig nivå för undervisningen. Även för de nyanlända elevernas språkliga resurser i form av andra språk så som modersmålet uppvisade lärarna en negativ attityd då detta utnyttjades i undervisningssituationen i liten grad.

This research analyses some of the slang expressions with the meaning ‘to die’ found in Dictionary of Modern Slang with regard to metaphor and metonymy and whether they have been active when creating the identified slang expressions. It further examines the frequency of these expressions in a large language corpus, and identifies the processes involved in the most frequent expressions. The main findings show that the domain ‘departure’ is the most frequent domain for metaphorical conceptualizations of dying, which suggests that death, like life, can be viewed as a journey. One can speculate that this metaphorical mapping could go back to religious origin, where death is not seen as the end. Several of the expressions are still used within the English language, and the most frequent expressions in the corpus were metonymic in nature and have developed into idiomatic phrases, which are frozen in form.