Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur historieläroböcker på gymnasiet skildrar Västerlandet jämfört med övriga världen. Läroböckerna är en viktig kunskapsförmedlare i skolan, särskilt i ämnet historia. En kritisk lingvistisk metod har använts för att studera relationen mellan Västerlandet och den övriga världen i historieläroböcker och upptäcka perspektiv och ideologiska budskap som inte är uppenbara från början. Resultatet visar att de icke västerländska samhällena får väldigt liten plats i historieböckerna vilket gör att många centrala världshistoriska skeenden inte berättas och boken blir då delvis eurocentrisk genom att de centrala världshistoriska ögonblicken för det mesta tillskrivs Västerlandet. Eurocentrisismen upprätthåller Västerlandets hegemoni genom att förfalska en historia som påpekar västs skiljaktigheter mot Österlandet. De undersökta historieläroböckerna kan sägas upprätthålla Västerlandets hegemoni genom att undvika att skildra historia om Österlandet. Läroböckerna tillskriver även felaktigt världshistoriska ögonblick till Västerlandet vilket forskare menar är typiskt för en eurocentrisk historieberättelse. Exempelvis den industriella revolutionen i Storbritannien, jordbruksrevolutionen i Europa under medeltiden och upptäckten av och resandet runt Afrika är något som enbart hänförs till Västerlandet istället för att även Österlandets betydelse påpekas. De undersökta läroböckerna förmedlar inte en mångsidig historia vilket försvårar skolans arbete med olikheter och mångfald. Historieundervisningen behöver något eller någon som kan problematisera och komplettera innehållet i böckerna för att ge en mer korrekt och mångsidig bild av historien.   Vid en jämförelse av resultaten av analysen av de undersökta läroböckerna med tidigare forskning ger denna studie ändå stöd åt tesen att historieläroböckerna i mindre utsträckning än tidigare är eurocentriska och att läroböckerna långsamt anpassas till modern forskning, åtminstone när det gäller eurocentrism.

<p>With the advent of corpora documenting learner English, a new and interesting field of research has become available. Learner corpora provide a new type of data which can inform thinking both in second language acquisition research and in foreign language teaching research. Analyses of learner corpora normally report on features which are typically ‘overused’ and ‘underused’, when contrasted to comparable native speaker corpora, in addition to those which are ‘misused’ by the learners. Ringbom (1998) conducted a study in which he identified one common aspect of non-native speaker corpora: the high frequency of general nouns, such as people and thing.</p><p>The aim of this paper was to test Ringbom’s findings and attempt to identify how English as a second language learners’ usage of these particular nouns in written production differ from that of native speakers by conducting a corpus comparison of comparable learner and native speaker corpora. The results of this study clearly support Ringbom’s findings; additionally, it was found that the learners’ written production does not appear vaguer and ‘non-native like’ merely because they overuse the general nouns people and thing, but it also seems as if the learners use these nouns in a more restricted range of meanings whereas the natives’ usage is more diversified. Moreover, this study has identified some of the issues that teachers of English as a second language should be aware of when helping their students to avoid using the general nouns people and thing in a non-native like manner.</p>

Denna uppsats belyser på vilka sätt etnocentrism och kommersialism kommer till uttryck i analyserat resejournalistiskt undersökningsmaterial. Med hjälp av metoden kritisk lingvistik har utvalda svenska textreportage analyserats för att finna underliggande värderingar som kommersialism och etnocentrism bidragit till. Varje textanalys kompletteras med en mindre bildanalys. Studien är komparativ och jämförelser sker dels mellan dagstidning och magasin, dels över en tidsperiod av 20 år. Frågeställningar som besvaras är vilka uttryck finns för etnocentrism respektive kommersialism i de utvalda reportagen samt finns skillnader i tendenser mellan dagspress och magasin och hur har det utvecklats över tid. Undersökningsmaterialet består av reportage med tillhörande bilder från 1993, 2003 och 2013 från DN, SvD, Vagabond och RES. Av resultaten går att dra slutsatsen att etnocentriska uttryck och föreställningar ökar när kommersialiseringen ökar. Det studerade materialet visar hur etnocentrism och kommersialism inom svensk resejournalistik kan agera i symbios.

This study provides a reconstruction of the development of the Germanic stress and syllabification system (as reflected in Gothic and Proto-Nordic) up to the completion of the quantity shift in Late Old Swedish. By means of current prosodic theory it is established that a domain of two moras wordinitially is present at all stages of development, in Gothic, Old English and Proto-Nordic as well as in Modem Swedish. It is argued that this domain is the linguistic instantiation of word minimality, referred to as the bimoraic condition. The bimoraic condition is interpreted over different prosodic categories - the prosodic word, the foot and finally the main-stress syllable - at different language stages. This development reflects the transition from a quantity system permitting light and overlong syllables to a system where the main-stress syllable is obligatorily heavy. Various prosodically conditioned changes and processes take place in the early Germanic dialects. New explanations are proposed for several of them in terms of prosodic theory. The vowel/glide alternation (Sievers’s law) in Gothic is derived from regular syllabification of the archiphonemes III and /U/. Syncope in Proto-Nordic (corresponding to high vowel deletion in Old English) is analysed as mora-deletion in metrically weak positions. Vowel shortening and nasal loss are also analyzed as mora-deletion following destressing under stress clash. The long-standing problem of delayed syncope (in Proto-Nordic) or absence of syncope (in Old English) in light stems is explained as a minimal word effect. The deletion rule in the so called second syncope period in Proto-Nordic is a case of vowel deletion (not mora-deletion). The patterning known as vowel balance is analyzed as the result of interaction between the general trend of reduction and the development of a particular balance prosody. In balance prosody one main-stress position (a unipositional foot) dominates two light syllables. This prosody is directly reflected as level stress on the surface. Rules that relate directly to the metrical configuration of balance are vowel strengthening (läsa &gt; läså ’to read’), and vowel levelling (läså &gt; låså). The latter rule is rendered as parametrized projection of features onto the stress unit, and the vowel patterns of vowel levelling are thereby given a principled description. Finally, the quantity shift in Old Swedish is discussed in detail. Balance - argued to be a Scandinavian innovation - is shown to be directly linked to the quantity shift. The loss of balance necessarily leads to the implementation of the quantity shift. Moreover, it is argued that the particular Central Scandinavian lengthening pattern involving both vowel and consonant lengthening (in roughly complementary contexts) is due to the (former) presence of balance. Finally, the theory predicts that the Modem Swedish quantity system emerging after the quantity shift depends on distinctive consonant quantity, rather than distinctive vowel quantity.

Preaspiration—the production of glottal friction at the juncture of a vowel and a consonant—appears to be typologically rare but is an areal linguistic feature of Northwestern Europe. This study contains a survey of the known geographical spread of preaspirated stops, their phonological distribution and phonetic expressions in some Nordic dialects. The study also suggests a reconstruction of the phonetics of the Proto-Nordic stop contrasts based on synchronic data as well as a more general framework of historical sound change. Following an introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 deals with the definition and typology of preaspiration presenting a global overview of the known geographical spread of preaspiration. The apparent rarity of preaspiration is considered. Proposed, perceptually based explanations of this rarity are evaluated. Chapter 3 offers a fairly detailed account of the known areal spread of preaspiration in Europe. Stop systems of several dialects in which preaspiration occurs are analysed in terms of voicing conditions. These analyses are based mainly on descriptions provided in the dialectological literature. Chapter 4 presents data on durational variation and other phonetic patterns of stop production in Central Standard Swedish, Tórshavn Faroese, Gräsö Swedish and Western Åland Swedish. The results reveal a greater degree of phonetic variation than has been assumed to date. In particular, speakers of Central Standard Swedish are shown to use preaspiration as a regular feature in their voiceless stop production. In Chapter 5, finally, the results of the data analysis are used in an attempt to reconstruct the phonetic expression of stop contrasts in Proto-Nordic. It is argued that Proto-Nordic stop production was largely similar to the stop production of today’s Central Standard Swedish. As regards phonological structure, however, the Proto-Nordic stop contrasts appear to have been largely preserved in all dialects considered. This conclusion is found to be compatible with an expansion/contraction (E/C) model of historical sound change. / <p>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se</p>

<p>Under inriktningen Grundläggande färdigheter på lärarprogrammet väcktes ett intresse hos mig angående språklig medvetenhet och dess betydelse för barns läs- och skrivinlärning. I det här examensarbetet har det behandlats närmare med hjälp av en empirisk och teoretisk studie. Genom att koppla vad framstående forskare inom språklig medvetenhet anser om vad just språklig medvetenhet är, till hur verksamma pedagoger arbetar och upplever språklig medvetenhet i praktiken, ges en bild av begreppets innebörd och betydelse. Svårigheter, oklarheter och fördelar med begreppet språklig medvetenhet redovisas.</p><p>I examensarbetets teoretiska del framkommer olika definitioner och benämningar av begreppet språklig medvetenhet. Att begreppet är innehållsrikt och svårdefinierat tydliggörs ytterligare i den empiriska delen. Där har även pedagogerna svårt att definiera vad språklig medvetenhet är. Dock upplever pedagogerna att arbetet med språklig medvetenhet medför många vinster vilket även stärks av den teoretiska delen. I många nationella och internationella studier har det framkommit att medveten träning av språklig medvetenhet är av betydelse för barns läs- och skrivinlärning. I det här examensarbetet förtydligas det ytterligare.</p>

<p>The subject of this dissertation is Norwegian modal verbs, modal auxiliaries or, if one prefers, simply modals. The term modals will be employed in this dissertation, since this term, unlike the other two, is not inherently encumbered with theoretical assumptions about the categorical status of these linguistic elements.</p>

The subject of this dissertation is Norwegian modal verbs, modal auxiliaries or, if one prefers, simply modals. The term modals will be employed in this dissertation, since this term, unlike the other two, is not inherently encumbered with theoretical assumptions about the categorical status of these linguistic elements.

The present thesis discusses the history and meaning of the term and concept called grammaticalisation. Linguists usually ascribe the coinage of the term grammaticalisation to Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), who allegedly played a vital role in the history of grammaticalisation. It is also widely acknowledged that grammaticalisation was in some way 'revived' during the 1970s, and that Talmy Givón had an important role in this, as demonstrated by the popularity of the saying 'Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax' (taken from one of his articles). I show that Meillet wrote little about grammaticalisation and that he hardly ever used this word, and possibly did not mean for it to be viewed as a term / label. Moreover, the paper in question (Meillet, 1912) is basically a general introduction to a concept which he sees as a continuation of a notion with a long history. In addition, I prove that there are no clear links between Meillet and Givón’s work in the early 1970s. Despite the general acceptance that Meillet coined grammaticalisation, my thesis proves that it could have been coined more than once, and that it does not always mean the same thing to all users. I show that sometimes the term is accompanied by examples which others have used to illustrate lexicalisation, a term which some employ for a process that is seen as the opposite of grammaticalisation. I therefore advocate careful use of our definitions of terminology and concepts, and insist that we should define our notions, instead of letting examples do the work of illustration and definition. Finally, I question whether it is true that grammaticalisation is unidirectional. I research the history of the view that grammaticalisation is a unidirectional process. Grammatical relations can be expressed by different means – e.g. word order, content words becoming grammatical markers, or parts of words being given a function. I believe all these should be compared, in order to improve our knowledge of how languages change and why. I claim that they all represent sub-processes of a superordinate category which I have labelled supergrammaticalisation.

Two propositions connected by and have the same truth-value, irrespective of the order of the conjuncts. However, in a sentence like “I put my socks and shoes on” it becomes obvious that the order of the conjuncts affects the meaning of the sentence. This study concerns the contribution of pragmatics to and by implicit enrichment to and then or and thus. It includes three experiments that investigate and-enrichment in adults and children. Nine five-line stories concerning everyday events were used. After each story the participants were to respond “yes” or “no” to a statement which referred to two events that occurred in the story, conjoined with and. In the critical statement, the two events were presented in the inverse order to which they had occurred. The results show no general developmental effect but awareness of the task plays a critical role for and-enrichment production. Ten-year-olds enrich and to the same extent as adults when no efforts are made to mask the intention behind the task. However, when a more spontaneous response is captured by masking the purpose of the task children respond more logically. There are no clear evidence that and-enrichment is affected by the cognitive demands of the task.