This is a study of the kinship terminology used for one’s parents and their siblings in the languages in the greater Hindu Kush area (GHK). GHK stretches over the mountainous borderlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, China and India and homes a range of various languages from six different genera, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, Turkic, Tibeto-Burman, and the language isolate Burushaski. The study is based on questionnaires from native speakers of 55 language varieties collected in 2015-2017. The main distinction is one between descriptive and merging systems. The descriptive system have separate terms for all six relations and are found in the outer areas of GHK. The merging systems have terms that refer to two or more relations, and these are found in the center of the area. Within this center-area the languages are then further divided into six different terminologies depending on which relations are merged with one term. Semantic clusters can be observed, based on systematic and lexico-semantic parallels, both within and across family lines. The distribution is discussed from a historical, geographical and social point of view. / Language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush region. Vetenskapsrådet (421-2014-631)

Discussions on the concept of ”Klarspråk” and ”Lättläst” are major topics in Sweden at the moment with efforts towards increasing readability of government organization information in the project ”Begriplig Text”. In the field of natural language processing, a lot of efforts have gone into text simplification. This thesis examines the possibility of using hand crafted transfer and generation rules to increase the readability of text through monolingual machine translation. Transfer and generation rules were developed that handle Swedish grammatical structures including explicitivity and word order. The data used in this thesis consist of manually collected data sets from government organization websites and Uppsala University. The translation results were evaluated using manual evaluation and the automatic readability evaluation methods LIX, OVIX and nominal ratio (NR). Test results show that the developed rules can produce successful transformation on text although not significantly altering the automatic evaluation scores. The results from the manual evaluation show that a higher readability can be achieved with the developed rules although more tests on bigger data sets are needed in order to fully evaluate all rules developed in this thesis.

No description available.

I denna uppsats undersöks meningsbyggnad i elevtexter. Ett första syfte är att undersöka skrivutvecklingen under gymnasietiden vilket görs genom en jämförelse av meningsbyggnaden i texter skrivna inom ramen för Svenska 1 och Svenska 3. Ett andra syfte är att relatera meningsbyggnaden till texternas betyg. Undersökningsmaterialet består av 32 elevtexter från det nationella provet i svenska för årskurs 1 och 3 på gymnasienivå och dessa är jämnt fördelade på betygen E och A. Metoden är både kvantitativ och komparativ i sin utformning där variabler beräknas och jämförs i förhållande till årskurs och betyg. De variabler som undersöks är textlängd, antal grafiska meningar, grafisk meningslängd, antal syntaktiska meningar, syntaktisk meningslängd, andel sammanfallande grafiska och syntaktiska meningar, syntaktisk meningstyp, bisatsfrekvens, bisatstyp, fundamentslängd och fundamentstyp. Då materialet också innehåller speciella konstruktioner undersöks också meningsfragment, satsradningar, referat, citat och dubbla fundament i elevtexterna. Resultatet visar att undersökta meningsvariabler i förhållande till årskurs och betyg uppvisar flera olika tendenser. Vissa variabler, såsom grafisk och syntaktisk meningslängd, fundamentslängd och bisatsfrekvens, uppvisar inga tydliga utvecklingslinjer i förhållande till betyg och årskurs medan variabler såsom textlängd och fundamentstyp verkar kunna kopplas till elevers skrivutveckling. Samtidigt fastställs att samtliga konstruktioner av speciell karaktär, såsom förekomst av meningsfragment, satsradningar, citat, referat och dubbla fundament, kan kopplas till elevers skrivutveckling under gymnasiet. Även om undersökningen visar blygsamma tendenser på gruppnivå för vilka variabler som verkar spela roll för skrivutveckling under gymnasiet kan det konstateras att det krävs kompletterande undersökningar av kvalitativ karaktär för att fullständigt få förståelse för hur elevers skriftspråk utvecklas under gymnasietiden.

No description available.

No description available.

Att låttexter, eller rocklyrik, har blivit något av vår tids poesi stod klart när Bob Dylan fick Nobelpriset i litteratur år 2016. I föreliggande studie undersöks låttexter som är skrivna av en av Sveriges främsta rockikoner, Joakim Thåström. Syftet med studien är att utreda vad som karaktäriserar språket och stilen i tre av hans låttexter, samt på vilket sätt stilfigurer används i texterna. För att besvara frågeställningarna undersöks låttexterna med hjälp av stilanalys. Materialet utgörs av låttexterna ”Körkarlen”, ”Old Point Bar” och ”Centralmassivet” från albumet Centralmassivet (2017). Resultatet visar att det finns stora likheter mellan de tre analyserade texterna gällande språk, stil och stilfigurer. Stilen är vardaglig, verbal och personlig men kryddad med språkliga stilmarkörer som ger låttexterna en mer poetisk och skönlitterär stil. Dessa stilmarkörer är framförallt upprepningar och målande beskrivningar i form av förbiflimrande bildfragment och platser, samt stilfigurer som metaforer, liknelser och allusioner.

Denna studie undersökte modalpartiklarna ju och väl ur ett pragmatiskt och modalt perspektiv och hur de används i tal. Enligt Kamio (1997:5) har talare olika stor ”rätt till information” i ett samtal vilket är relevant för användningen av modalpartiklar, då de signalerar talarnas inställning och attityd till det som sägs. Syftet med denna studie var att kvantitativt undersöka modalpartiklarnas användning i samvarians med pronomen, tempus och typ av verb. Metoden för studien var en korpussökning. Datan bestod av en korpus, ”Samtal i Göteborg” (Löfström 1988), som innehöll inspelat och transkriberat tal. Resultaten visade att första person subjekt hade en hög samvarians med ju, samt att väl hade en hög samvarians med andra person subjekt. Modalpartiklarna användes även mer frekvent i presens än i preteritum. Vidare fanns en samvarians mellan modalpartiklar och privata samt allmänna verb, där distributionen av modalpartiklarna var större med allmänna verb. Resultaten talar för att användningen av modalpartiklar korrelerar med rätten till information i ett samtal och att distributionen av dem följer pragmatiska mönster. / This study investigates the Swedish modal particles ju and väl in speech from a pragmatic and modal perspective. According to Kamio (1997:5) there are "territories of information" in speech which is relevant for the use of modal particles, since they indicate the speakers' attitudes and stances towards what is said. The aim of the study was to quantitavely investigate the use of modal particles with pronouns, tense and verb type. The method of investigation was a corpus study and the data consisted of a Swedish speech corpus "Samtal i Göteborg" (Löfström 1988) which was made up by recorded and transcribed speech. The results from the study indicates that first person subject highly correlateswith ju, while väl correlates with second person subject. The modal particles were more frequently used in present tense than in past tense. Moreover, the results indicate that there is a covariance with modal particles and "public verbs" and "private verbs" where the distribution of the modal particles is larger with "public verbs". These results indicate that the use of modal particles correlates with the territories of information between speakers and that the distribution of the modal particles is in accordance with pragmatic patterns.

Political parties use different strategies to convince voters to vote for them, and with the technological evolution of our time short movie clips are used, now more than ever before, to accomplish these kinds of tasks. However, a political movie clip that separates itself from other political movie clips is Jimmie Åkesson – Snart är det val. This clip is not trying to persuade the voter to vote for the Sweden democrats because of their political plans, instead it tries to convince the voter of a threat that can destroy Sweden in the nearby future if the voter doesn’t vote for the Sweden democrats in the coming election. This essay seeks to investigate how Jimmie Åkesson – Snart är det val constructs this threat, how the threat becomes realistic and in what ways the threat is used in the movie clip to convince the Swedish voter to vote for the Sweden democrats. To investigate this the essay uses a semiotic analysis to dissemble the movie clip in order to understand how the threat is constructed. Furthermore, rhetorical perspectives such as identification, visualizing rhetoric, ethos, pathos, logos and figures of style are used to discuss how the threat becomes realistic and how it is used to win votes. The conclusion of the essay is that the movie clip constructs two different threats in two different realities by using semiotic resources such as fast shifting scenes, documenting images, music, sounds, environments, characters and a narrating voice in a projecting narrative. More specifically these resources create a true dark reality and a happy delusional reality. In these two realities, the two different threats are found. The first threat is the immigrants that are illustrated as an enemy that destroys Sweden and thus creates the true dark reality where the voters and the Sweden democrats also are illustrated. The other threat is other political parties in Sweden and the Swedish media because they are illustrated in the happy delusional reality and therefore can’t help the voter that is portrayed in the true dark reality. In that sense, the two threats are used to convince the voter to vote for the Sweden democrats because they are the only political party that is located in the true dark reality and therefore are the only ones that understand and can solve the problem that causes the true dark reality. Furthermore, these threats become more realistic by enforcing an emotion of fear for the true dark reality with semiotic resources and also by concretizing this reality with documenting images, characters and sounds. These threats also become more realistic because the semiotic resources create imagistic arguments that allows the mind to take shortcuts when conclusions are made.

The researcher has studied, in this paper, the effect of transfer on the Arabic and Portuguese learners’ using prepositions during their process of learning English as a second language. The prepositions that the study deals with are to and, for. The aim of the study is to show the influence of the learner’s first language on the target language. The study draws upon literary sources such as Littlewood’s book Foreign and Second Language Learning (Littlewood, 1984), as well as practical experiments which are divided into a multiple choice test and a translation test. Through the analysis of the results of these tests, the study shows the extent of influence of the first language on the process of learning a second language. The answers of the students are analyzed by comparing the rules of using prepositions in the learner’s first language and English. The participants in this study are students in ACS international school in Qatar. The study also includes interviews with two teachers. The interviews are done in order to provide additional information on the effect of the learner’s first language on learning a second language. The teachers express their views which was formed after many years of teaching experience.