The thesis studies the literacy practices of a group of young people in Närpes in southern Ostrobothnia, Finland with focus on SMS (Short Message Service), both in Standard Swedish and in dialect, but for the most part written in dialect. The aim of the investigation is to describe this writing as a social marker (young people against adults) and its function as an identity act. In addition the study investigates the orthographic norms and conventions that the young people use in their writing. The material consists of 520 SMS and such material as was collected through inquiries and interviews. In Närpes, as in many other Finland Swedish dialect areas, the dialect has got widened areas of usage and is well established and accepted in more domains than before. It is used in the new media and is thereby also gaining larger scope in public space. This also applies to writing SMS in dialect. The theoretical points of departure are taken from sociolinguistics and literacy research. A central concept is the new writing, i.e. writing in electronic media such as e.g. SMS and e-mail, which are somewhere between speech and writing. This has given speech and writing new forms with new preconditions, forms that the new media have “triggered” forth and that the language is adapting itself to. In the first investigative chapter (Ch. 3) eleven literacy practices divided into five groups are analysed: I electronic literacy practices (SMS, e-mail, chat), II hand-written slips of paper (reminder slips, purchase lists, slips to parents and friends respectively), III picture postcards and letters, IV diaries and V school assignments. The informants participate with one exception, group V, in all literacy practices in dialect to a greater or lesser extent. The second investigative chapter (Ch. 4) accounts for the dialect features, diphthongs and consonant combinations that were concretely investigated in the SMS material. The young people’s writing in dialect is functional and shows that the dialect is an important identity marker. The lack of shared conventions for spelling is not conceived of as a problem but allows everyone to create their own conventions, which in its turn has resulted in the tolerance level for variations in orthography being high. One group think that they write as it sounds, while another think that they do not follow any rules. The dialect is reserved for everyday matters, while Standard Swedish is used in more formal writing situations. The literacy practice may be the same, but the choice of language variety varies with the aim, content and length.

This thesis investigates verbal insults recorded in judicial protocols in the Swedish university townUppsaladuring the 1630s. The aim of the study is to analyze insults as linguistic formulations and social acts in Early Modern Swedish society. The methodology of the study is guided by speech act theory and ethnography of communication in order to examine the lexical realizations of insults and verbal action in different speech communities. From a total of 652 protocols in two series of records from the city court and the university council inUppsalain the 1630s, sections of text were excerpted that registered insults. The material under investigation comprises 179 cases that contained 276 insults. The descriptive meta-linguistic expressions for insults are rich as well as varied, and the performed insults are reported with or without invectives and as direct or indirect speech. Clear patterns emerged in the investigation by performing various semantic-, pragmatic-, and discourse-level analyses of the judicial records. Insults among city people were commonly interpreted as truth-conditional representative speech acts and thereby were viewed as false accusations of various kinds. In the academic world, however, the truth value of the insult was of minor importance. The speech act was regarded mainly as an expressive utterance of anger and frustration. Through a comparison of the city and university judicial records, it is shown that the patterns of insults reveal a general semantic process in which primarily concrete, objective meanings come to fulfill increasingly interpersonal and pragmatic speech functions.

This thesis investigates control infinitives and ECM-infinitives in the history of Swedish. Both constructions are non-finite, based on infinitives with or without complements, but share some properties and functions with finite subordinate clauses. Control infinitives (to-infinitives) are headed by the infinitive marker att (which in some cases may be omitted) and have invisible PRO-subjects (“controlled” by, i.e. co-referential with, the subject or object of the matrix), whereas ECM-infinitives are headed by overt subjects, distinguished by their “exceptional case marking” (ECM) from the matrix verb, and never contain the infinitive marker. According to the proposed analyses, conducted within the theoretical framework of generative grammar, control infinitives are CPs, taking the infinitive marker as a non-finite complementizer in C, but lack the TP of the I-domain, whereas ECM-infinitives have no C-layer but, nevertheless, a (sort of) TP. The historical investigation shows that control infinitives have developed more clause like properties over time. In Old Swedish (1220–1526), they only rarely contained e.g. negations or auxiliaries. It is not until the seventeenth century that these elements have come into use in the same way as in modern Swedish. This is accounted for by assuming that the control infinitive in Old Swedish was a recent innovation that did not initially make any use at all of the I-domain. The ECM-infinitives, on the other hand, are taken to have the same structure and function in Old Swedish as in Modern Swedish, as their use and properties have not changed significantly. In addition, the status of the infinitive marker has changed through the history of Swedish. Etymologically a preposition, it is here analysed as a verb phrase element in Early Old Swedish, not as a (non-finite) complementizer as in Modern Swedish. In early Modern Swedish (1526–1732), the preposition till is used in much the same function as att giving rise to two new infinitive markers: till att and till. This development of new infinitive markers is also accounted for in the thesis.

<p> </p><p>Variationer i svensk verbböjning: En korpusundersökning (Fredrik Smeds, D-uppsats i Svenska språket, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, Avdelningen för språk 2008). I uppsatsen undersöks svensk verbböjningsvariation från första hälften av 1800-talet till våra dagar dels genom studier av facklitteratur, ordböcker och ordlistor från skilda tider, dels genom att studera korpusar med skönlitteratur och brev skrivna av August Strindberg, äldre och yngre romaner samt dagstidningar från 1965–2004. De äldre romanerna är skrivna från första halvan av 1800-talet till första halvan av 1900-talet, och de yngre runt 1980. Materialet tillhandahölls av Språkdata vid Göteborgs universitet och omfattar ca 126 miljoner ord. Efter datainsamlingen användes chi-2-testet, för att se om skillnaderna var statistiskt signifikanta. Många verb som varierar eller har varierat efter år 1800 har undersökts. Tidigare förändringar omnämns mer kortfattat. Variationerna är av skilda slag: mellan stark och svag böjning (<em>spridit </em>och <em>spritt</em>), mellan korta och långa former (<em>klär </em>och <em>kläder</em>), mellan former med och utan <em>j</em> (<em>stödjer </em>och <em>stöder</em>) samt övriga variationer (t.ex. mellan <em>tillbringade</em> och <em>tillbragte</em>).</p><p> </p>

Variationer i svensk verbböjning: En korpusundersökning (Fredrik Smeds, D-uppsats i Svenska språket, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, Avdelningen för språk 2008). I uppsatsen undersöks svensk verbböjningsvariation från första hälften av 1800-talet till våra dagar dels genom studier av facklitteratur, ordböcker och ordlistor från skilda tider, dels genom att studera korpusar med skönlitteratur och brev skrivna av August Strindberg, äldre och yngre romaner samt dagstidningar från 1965–2004. De äldre romanerna är skrivna från första halvan av 1800-talet till första halvan av 1900-talet, och de yngre runt 1980. Materialet tillhandahölls av Språkdata vid Göteborgs universitet och omfattar ca 126 miljoner ord. Efter datainsamlingen användes chi-2-testet, för att se om skillnaderna var statistiskt signifikanta. Många verb som varierar eller har varierat efter år 1800 har undersökts. Tidigare förändringar omnämns mer kortfattat. Variationerna är av skilda slag: mellan stark och svag böjning (spridit och spritt), mellan korta och långa former (klär och kläder), mellan former med och utan j (stödjer och stöder) samt övriga variationer (t.ex. mellan tillbringade och tillbragte).

Uppsatsen behandlar konstruktionsmönster vid de bitransitiva verben sända och giva i äldre forn­svenska, yngre fornsvenska och äldre nysvenska. I uppsatsen undersöks dels för­del­ningen mellan de fyra konstruktionsalternativen DAT-ACK, ACK-DAT, PP-ACK och ACK-PP för sända respektive giva under var och en av de undersökta perioderna, dels vilka se­mantiska och informationsstrukturella faktorer som ligger bakom valet av en viss kon­struk­tions­va­riant vid ett visst verb under en viss tidsperiod. Resultaten visar att för verbet sända fö­re­lig­g­er inga sig­nifikanta skillnader i för­delningen av konstruktionsalternativ mellan de tre tids­pe­ri­oderna. Verbet konstrueras med ACK-PP i över hälften av fallen under alla tidsperioderna, me­dan DAT-ACK genomgående står för ungefär en tredjedel av beläggen. Verbet giva upp­vi­s­ar däremot en signifikant minskad användning av ACK-DAT mellan yngre fornsvenska och äl­d­re nysvenska, medan bruket av ACK-PP ökar under samma period. Mellan äldre forn­sven­ska och yngre fornsvenska ökar bruket av DAT-ACK, medan ACK-PP blir ovanligare. Båda des­sa tendenser beror dock på en specifik användning av ACK-PP i Fornsvenska legendariet, och speg­lar förmodligen inte utvecklingen i språket som helhet. Vad gäller de informationsstruktu­r­ella fak­torerna påverkar dessa valet av konstruktionstyp i stort sett som väntat, i så måtto att kor­t­a­re, pronominella och definita led (dvs. informationsstrukturellt tematiska led) ofta pla­ce­ras fö­re längre, icke-pronominella och indefinita led (informationsstrukturellt rematiska). Ana­lysen av de semantiska variablerna visade att DAT-ACK vid båda verben gynnas av ani­ma­ta m/m-ar­gument (mottagare/mål) och abstrakta p/t-argument (patient/tema), medan ACK-PP å andra si­dan gynnas av inanimata m/m-argument och konkreta p/t-argument. Vid verbet sän­da kon­stru­eras DAT-ACK enbart med animata m/m-argument, medan verbet giva i äldre och yngre forn­svenska endast konstrueras med ACK-PP om m/m-argumentet är inanimat. En se­mantisk ut­vidgning av ACK-PP vid verbet giva uppstår emellertid i äldre nysvenska, där kon­struk­tions­varianten blir kompatibel även med animata m/m-argument. ACK-DAT är vid verbet gi­va vanligare när p/t-argumentet betecknar någonting konkret, vilket indikerar en se­man­tisk upp­delning inte bara mellan dubbelobjektsvariant och prepositionsvariant utan även mel­lan de bå­da dubbelobjektsvarianterna DAT-ACK och ACK-DAT.

The aim of this thesis is to shed light on language variation and language change in judicial protocols from the municipal court in Stockholm during the period 1476−1626. These documents provide a unique insight into late medieval and early modern use of written vernacular. The main material consists of 700 courtroom notes from seven different periods of time, a hundred documents from each year: 1476, 1499, 1525, 1550, 1575, 1600, and 1626. The study draws theoretically on functional linguistics; more specifically, it utilizes Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, Ulf Teleman’s (1985) theoretical model of language change, as well as dialogism. The results are presented in four analytical chapters. In the first of these, the aim is to systemize the somewhat heterogeneous material, and the corpus is divided in two different ways: one due to judicial content (‘categories of matter’), and one due to textual structure (‘discourse levels’). These systemizations also serve as a methodological foundation for the lexicogrammatical analysis in the following chapters. A main result is that multi-party cases over time develop a functional need for new communication strategies, while unilateral cases already from the beginning seem to bear a more deep-rooted textual stability. In addition, there is a significant increase of discourse level 3, representing communicative events outside the courtroom, in multi-party cases found in texts from 1600 and 1626. In the two following chapters, lexicogrammatical resources of ‘personal reference’ and ‘time and tense’ are analysed. The texts realize different patterns of anaphora, where individuation explains much of the variation: texts with high degree of individuation (criminal cases) materialize a high degree of pronouns, whereas texts regarding property issues materialize low individuation with few pronouns and many full NPs. Regarding the use of tense, the past tense is the most common tense. Still, the study shows an diachronic increase in the use of present tense. The last analytical chapter examines the use of three lexical features: judicial pronouns; word pairs; and nominalizations. The results show that judicial pronouns and word pairs typically occur in registrations matters; nominalizations occur throughout the genre. In the last chapter, the results and implications of the thesis are summated and discussed. The results point towards a pragmatic use of the written language. Although the lexicogrammatical resources are the same during the period, the usages vary. Hence, linguistic variation and change are highly motivated by an intercommunion of contextual factors such as a more solid administrative literacy, a changing litigation, and an increase of legal demands for linguistic precision and documentation. It is argued that the language variety in the genre can be understood as instantiations of different registers.

The study of early cross-linguistic diplomatic epistolography was first introduced in Brownlees' (2012) comparative study of Italian and English personal newsletters. Given the field’s young age and the strong need for both further research and the retrieving of new, untranscribed and unanalysed data, the present study set out to help move this field forward by examining, at both a textual superstructure and semantic macrostructural level, two sets of unchartered diplomatic newsletters which representatives at foreign courts despatched back to their respective home countries. The first set of original manuscripts comprises periodical newsletters which Baron Christer Bonde, the Swedish ambassador-extraordinary to England, wrote to Charles X, King of Sweden, between 1655-6, whereas the second set consists of letters sent in 1680 by John Robinson, England’s chargé d’affaires in Sweden, to Sir Leoline Jenkins, Secretary of State for the Northern Department of England. The analysis has shown that whereas the textual superstructures of the two diplomats’ correspondences remain similarly robust, the instantiating semantic macrostructures display not only stylistic and compositional, but also narrative, variation.