The purpose of this study is to give a thorough and detailed account and analysis of the semantics of twelve Swedish dimensional adjectives: hög ‘high/tall', låg ‘low', bred ‘broad/wide', smal ‘narrow/thin', vid ‘broad', trång ‘narrow', tjock ‘thick', tunn ‘thin', djup ‘deep', grund ‘narrow', lång ‘long' and kort ‘short'. Focus has been placed on their spatial, non-metaphorical sense. The study was written within the framework of cognitive linguistics, where lexical definitions may be given in terms of prototypical and peripheral uses. Four sources of data have been considered: a corpus, consisting of contemporary fiction, an elicitation test, designed for the purpose, dictionary articles on the pertinent adjectives, and the author's own linguistic intuition as a native speaker. The methodology has involved categorisation of combinations of adjective and noun, based upon three major themes: orientation, function, and shape. In order to determine prototypical uses, precedence has been given to the outcome of the elicitation test over the corpus search. For both sources, frequency has played an important part. The ranking of senses as stated in the dictionary articles has also been considered. The results indicate that the dimensional adjectives differ quite markedly from each other, as opposed to a structural view where the adjectives traditionally have been regarded as forming a neat patchwork. Adjectives overlap each other for some uses (högt gräs ‘high grass', långt gräs ‘long grass' and even djupt gräs ‘deep grass'), while there are also situations in which no dimensional adjective can describe an object. Furthermore, adjectives forming pairs, such as djup – grund ‘deep – shallow', do not exhibit full antonymy, despite the fact that dimensional adjectives are traditionally cited as examples par excellence concerning antonymy.

The purpose of this study is to give a thorough and detailed account and analysis of the semantics of twelve Swedish dimensional adjectives: hög ’high/tall’, låg ’low’, bred ’broad/wide’, smal ’narrow’ vid ’broad’, trång ’narrow’, tjock ’thick’, tunn ’thin’, djup ’deep’, grund ’narrow’, lång ’long’ and kort ’short’. Focus has been placed on their spatial, non-metaphorical sense. The study was written within the framework of cognitive linguistics, where lexical definitions may be given in terms of prototypical and peripheral uses. Four sources of data have been considered: a corpus, consisting of contemporary fiction, an elicitation test, designed for the purpose, dictionary articles on the pertinent adjectives, and the author's own linguistic intuition as a native speaker. The methodology has involved categorisation of combinations of adjective and noun, based upon three major themes: orientation, function, and shape. In order to determine prototypical uses, precedence has been given to the outcome of the elicitation test over the corpus search. For both sources, frequency has played an important part. The ranking of senses as stated in the dictionary articles has also been considered. The results indicate that the dimensional adjectives differ quite markedly from each other, as opposed to a structural view where the adjectives traditionally have been regarded as forming a neat patchwork. Adjectives overlap each other for some uses (högt gräs ’high grass’, långt gräs ’long grass’ and even djupt gräs ’deep grass’), while there are also situations in which no dimensional adjective can describe an object. Furthermore, adjectives forming pairs, such as djup – grund ’deep – shallow’, do not exhibit full antonymy, despite the fact that dimensional adjectives are traditionally cited as examples par excellence concerning antonymy.

This study aims at examining in detail the linguistic characteristics of sentential idioms (‘idiomatische Sätze’, IS) in German, e.g. Das kannst du dir an den Hut stecken.; Du hast wohl Tomaten auf den Augen!; Da lachen ja die Hühner!. In theoretically and empirically investigating their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features and productive potential, it is shown that IS can only be described properly by looking at the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and by systematically investigating pattern formation. In this respect, the study goes far beyond traditional phraseological research. As a theoretical background, the study refers to research on phraseology, sentence types and sentence mood, linguistic evaluation, morphological productivity, and the frameworks of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. Empirical evidence comes from a large corpus of written German, a linguistic experiment on productivity, and introspective data. With respect to syntax, the study shows that IS are bound to one or a few different sentence types, varying according to the degree of restriction of their speech act potential. The complex semantics of IS is shown to consist not only of a literal and an idiomatic, but also of a third, mediating representational level. The idiomatic meaning of IS is described as evaluative meaning. Pragmatically, IS are dependent on special contextual environments to obtain a proper interpretation. A context model is developed which makes use of certain categories of evaluation. Moreover, a relevance-theoretic approach is sketched in order to explain which functional advantages IS might have compared to non-idiomatic utterances. With respect to productivity, ten different idiomatic patterns of construction are identified and described in detail. It is experimentally demonstrated that these patterns are productive to a greater or lesser degree dependent on their internal syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic features.

Written and oral material produced by a group of low-achieving learners of English from the 2-year lines of the Swedish upper secondary school was analysed from the perspective of grammatical correctness and communicative ability. The grammatical analysis focussed on the verb phrase and tests included both free production in speech and writing and elicitation tests. Communicative ability was assessed ‘ ‘objectively* ’ by identifying such parameters as fluency, copiousness and span, and “holistically” by using non-expert evaluators.The scores thus obtained were correlated. Grammatical correctness was correlated with communicative ability both in speech and in writing and writing proficiency was correlated with speech proficiency with respect to both grammatical correctness and communicative ability.Our findings are that there is a positive correlation between grammatical correctness and communicative ability. A remarkable finding is that the percentage of correct verb phrases correlates very weakly with communicative ability in written data. In oral data, the correlation is in fact slightly negative. The learner’s competence in grammar is reflected in both his written and oral performance. On the other hand, there is no correlation between communicative ability in writing and communicative ability in speech.The study shows that a working command of a set of syntactic rules is essential for communication. Errors are, however, an integral part of the learning process. The major part of errors are accounted for by the learner’s use of compensatory strategies. Among these low-achievers, communicative ability in conversation is distinct from writing ability. / digitalisering@umu