This qualitative study aims to investigate how gender is reflected through language in the two superhero movies Wonder Woman and Man of Steel. Emphasis is put on five linguistic markers that have been found to differ between female and male speakers. These markers are: amount of speech, interruptions, questions, minimal responses and hedges. The analysis investigates the transcribed “cross-sex” conversation between the superhero and his or her companion in each movie. The findings reveal that even though it is difficult to detect any clear patterns, there are correlations with previous research regarding the markers amount of speech, interruptions and questions. These correlations show that the conversations to some extent reflect results from earlier studies concluding that men speak and interrupt more, whereas women ask more questions. No notable difference was detected regarding the use of hedges and minimal responses. Although some time has passed between the publication of several studies regarding these five linguistic markers and the selected movies, the results show correlation between the findings on men- and women’s language use.

The qualitative case study has been conducted in a segregated preschool where the majority of all children had a common mother tongue and Swedish as a second language. The purpose was to study preschool staff's conceptions of mother tongue and Swedish as a second language. The issues concern the con-ditions for language development in mother tongue and Swedish as a second language and how the practical work is applied. Previous research indicates that mother tongue and Swedish as a second language is a complex problem area with contradictions. Therefore, it was interesting to find out what pre-school staff think about the matter in question. A semi-structured interview has been used as a data collection method. The analysis work was based on a phe-nomenographic strategy for identifying categories of the studied material. The identified categories that emerged are security, the mother tongue, time, moti-vation, visualizing, languaging and dividing. The main conclusion is that the mother tongue in general is seen as a means of achieving Swedish as a second language and that the Swedish language thus gets a higher priority and status.

<p>This paper argues that there is a finiteness distinction in Hdi and that the notion is of value for a description of the language. The definition of finiteness suitable for the language has been suggested to be the one given by Anderson (2007) combined with Bisang (2007). The finite clauses are argued to be the pragmatically independent ones while the non-finite clauses are argued to be the pragmatically dependent. However, no morphological reductions were found in the non-finite clauses relative to the finite ones. What is more, negation in Hdi shows a nontypical behaviour regarding finiteness properties as there are aspectual distinctions made for dependent clauses that are not made for independent. Verbless clauses and imperatives may be viewed as finite and non-finite depending on their capacity to licence independent predication or, alternatively, they may be viewed as not displaying finiteness properties at all. The latter is argued to be preferred in order to avoid a redundant definition of finiteness.</p>

<p>Since time immemorial, various governments in China have attempted to promulgate writing reforms and speech reforms in order to unite the nation, mostly for political gain. The aim of this paper is to discover and analyze some language issues in the People’s Republic of China, specifically attitudes and comments on spoken usage of Putonghua (also called Modern Standard Chinese), Shanghai dialect, Cantonese and English by researching China Daily’s online newspaper article archive. A few valid articles could be retrieved and they uncovered that Putonghua, Shanghai dialect and Cantonese are all considered prestigious in different regions of the country; furthermore, English is gaining support rapidly, especially in corporate China.</p>

<p>In this paper, relative clauses in King Alfred’s Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care were examined using relative frequency as a tool to determine whether or not certain factors influenced the choice of relativization strategy. These factors include antecedent case, antecedent gender, antecedent number, distance, animacy, noun phrase type, case of relativized NP, and syntactic function.</p><p>The method involved gathering together all the occurrences of relative clauses using the Old English corpus and a Modern English translation. This process was not unproblematic as the correct translation from Old English to modern English sometimes was left to the discretion of the translator. Some clauses that were initially thought to be relative clauses were, in fact, not relative clauses. The components of each of the clauses were then examined and categorized after any problematic examples were discarded. Relative frequencies for each of the categories were calculated and chi-square tests were performed to check the reliability of the results.</p><p>The results of this paper were compared to another paper which did somewhat similar research to determine if the findings were consistent although that paper did not look at as many factors as this paper.</p>

<p>The aim of this study was to find a connection between changes in societies and changes in semantic prototypes by examining the prototypes of ‘fruit’ and ‘car’ among Slovenes that reached adulthood in Yugoslavia and Slovenes that that reached adulthood in the Republic of Slovenia and to compare those results with a control group of native English speakers. The results of the study suggests that in some aspects, the prototypes of ‘fruit’ and ‘car’ amongyounger Slovenes have moved closer to what they are in cultures that have a long history of capitalism and consumerism. The opinions about how good an example of a ‘fruit’ a banana is, is the best example of this. Younger Slovenes and the control group see it as a very good example, while older Slovenes rated it lower. The older Slovenes were also slightly more accepting of a very small car model being a good example of a ‘car’, than both younger Slovenes and the control group were.</p>

<p>Människor tillskriver varandra egenskaper. Detta sker omedvetet och systematiskt och syftar till att underlätta förståelsen av omvärlden. Syftet med detta arbete har varit att undersöka i vilken utsträckning det är möjligt att utifrån vald språkstil i ett e-postmeddelande bedöma en persons egenskaper, vilket i denna rapport benämnts en persons sociala styrka. En engelskspråkig undersökning har legat till grund för arbetet och tanken har - förutom ovanstående - varit att utröna hur väl ett experimentellt engelskspråkigt undersökningsresultat står sig under förhållandevis naturalistiska svenska förhållanden. Resultatet visar inte entydigt att språkstilen styr de egenskaper som författaren tillskrivs. Framräknade medelvärden ger en indikation på att kraftfullt formulerade meddelanden i större utsträckning bedömts som författade av personer besittande en hög social styrka, men endast ett fåtal av resultaten var statistiskt signifikanta. Bl.a. kan en viss skillnad i mäns och kvinnors bedömning skönjas, en skillnad som dock kan vara ett utslag av att grupperna storleksmässigt varit olika.</p>

<p>In everyday life women are exposed to sexist language. Terms and usages that exclude or discriminate women are referred to as sexist language. This takes into account that one presumes that maleness is the standard, the norm, and that femaleness is the non-standard, or the exception. The aim of this paper was to find whether gratuitous modifiers such as <em>girl, lady, female </em>and <em>woman </em>are used more frequently than the male markings and whether <em>girl </em>is used to a wider extent than <em>boy</em> to denote an adult. The aim includes two aspects of sexist language. Firstly, the aspect of calling women <em>girls</em> and men <em>men</em>, called non-parallel treatment. Secondly, the fact that it is more common for unmarked terms to refer to males while when referring to females a marked term is needed. As primary source for the study the Time Corpus was used, which is an online corpus containing over 100 million words and ranges from 1923-2007. The conclusion of this essay was that the female sex is more commonly marked and that <em>woman/women</em> are the most commonly used premodifiers. Gender markings most likely apply to occupations and labels which are thought of as either typically male or female. Furthermore, it was found that <em>girl </em>was used to a wider extent than <em>boy</em> to denote an adult. In addition, the results presented a possible change of trends where <em>girl</em> referred to a child to a larger extent in contemporary English.</p>

This is a study of pseudo-coordination in Swedish, a common phenomenon in Swedish and other Scandinavian languages, formally a regular verb (phrase) coordination [V1 CONJ V2] but with some special characteristics: the verb in V1 is a) taken from a restricted set of verbs; b) semantically weak; and c) typically contributes aspectual or modal properties to the construction as a whole. An example is Anton sitter och läser, lit. ‘A. sits and reads’, i.e. ‘Anton is reading’. Various criteria have been suggested to identify these constructions as a category distinct from other verb coordinations: single event interpretation; a single phrasal accent; different behaviour of object extraction and the scope of negation, etc. These criteria prove less useful when applied to authentic text, most importantly as they do not unambiguously tell pseudo-coordinations from other verb coordinations. In this thesis, it is suggested that it is the relation between the two verbs that is crucial. This hypothesis is tested in Study 1. In Study 1, 15310 verb coordinations in a tagged corpus (Parole) were investigated. 4281 of these had a potentially pseudo-coordinating verb in V1, and were classified for the relation between V1 and V2. Among the 3881 cases of actual pseudo-coordinations, the verb relations were BACKGROUND and GOAL DIRECTION. These relations were not found in regular coordinations with potentially pseudo-coordinating verbs in V1, which provides us with a criterion to identify pseudo-coordination in text. In Study 2, the relation criterion was applied to the verbs sitta ’sit’, ligga ’lie’, and stå ’stand’, studied in a corpus of news text (Press 97). Constructions were classified with respect to animacy of subject, type of V2 verbs, and relative frequency and position of adverbials. The V1 verbs were found to form a coherent category but also exhibited interesting differences, both from each other and from their uses outside pseudo-coordination, along all parameters investigated. / <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>

Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2004.