<p>The aim of this study was to investigate if there is a connection between language and social identity in the perception of word meaning among second language learners in the same way as for native speakers, and if the sociolinguistic variable age is significant. This was done with an investigation of two generations of Swedish learners' perception of the meaning of the words 'respect', 'integrity' and 'communication'. The investigation showed that age is important to a certain extent regarding interpreting words and their meaning, but that it is not as important if the speaker has English as their mother tongue or as their second language.</p>

<p>The aim of this study was to look at English media football commentary and find out what metaphors are used and what purpose they serve. To this end, match reports of two Premier League matches in eight different English newspapers have been used. The metaphors found therein have been analysed and compared to current theories of metaphor forms and function. In these match reports both structural, ontological and orientational metaphors exist. They are drawn from a wide variety of source domains, although the domains of physical fight, military conflict and animal behaviour are particularly prominent. The function of metaphor in this context seems primarily to be to interpret facts in a way that make them palatable to the reader.</p>

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<p>Denna uppsats undersöker, med metoden samtalsanalys, två samtal på engelska mellan infödda talare av engelska och svenskar med engelska som sitt första främmandespråk. Fokus ligger på form och funktion för fenomenet allo-repetition i dessa två samtal, d.v.s. repetition av vad någon annan har sagt tidigare.</p><p>Inom samtalsforskning kring samtal på modersmålet har man funnit att repetitionen har många funktioner på såväl ett innehållsmässigt som ett socialt plan. Genom att använda sig av olika typer av repetitioner förhåller sig samtalaren till både ämnet och de andra samtalarna, samtidigt som koherens skapas. Också inom andraspråksforskningen har repetitionen som fenomen undersökts, och har där funnits anta vissa former beroende på om de används av inlärarna själva eller de mer språkligt kompetenta infödda talarna. I denna studie undersöks avancerade inlärare av engelska, d.v.s. inlärare med en god kunskap om målspråket. Repetitionens roll i dessa samtal granskas i förhållande till såväl repetitionens roll i samtalet på modersmålet som repetitionens roll i andraspråksinlärning.</p><p>I analysen framkom att det främst är de sociala motiven som utgör skäl för repetitionerna, och rollerna som infödd talare respektive inlärare förefaller inte ha någon relevans för användandet av repetitioner. Det förekommer inga direkta bevis för aktiv och medveten inlärning, men däremot kan man anta en potentiell inlärning i ett slags ”biprodukt” av den sociala verksamheten som samtalen utgör, då det t.ex. skapas syntaktiska strukturer, vilka upprepas av de olika deltagarna med mer eller mindre variation. Det kan vidare konstateras att repetitionerna används på ett mycket kontextbundet sätt, och att de två samtalens olika karaktär således delvis ger olika resultat vad beträffar repetitionerna.</p>

<p>The present study aims to investigate students’ English at a Swedish secondaryschool concerning their fluency. Hereby students who take part in SPRINT(språk- och innehållsintegrerad inlärning och undervisning) will be compared withstudents who do not take part in this project.The study focuses on oral fluency, which is measured in tone groups. It came outthat students that take part in SPRINT programs have a higher amount of tonegroups than students who do not take part in these programs. Therefore one cansay they are more fluent in the language than other students.</p>

<p><strong>Background and aim: </strong>According to the most recent curriculum for the Swedish upper secondary school1, the students should be able to differentiate between British and American English. Furthermore, they should be able to keep to one of the varieties, as this is a prerequisite of writing correct texts in English. In the present thesis, young Swedes’ awareness of grammatical differences between British and American standard English and which variety they use are investigated. The investigation is conducted by means of a questionnaire. The questionnaire was composed of three parts. The first part consisted of sentences written in English that the informants had to judge as written prevailingly in British or American English. In the second part, the informants had to translate sentences from Swedish to English, and then judge them as British or American. The third part of the questionnaire comprised questions concerned with language use and attitude, as well as questions on basic information such as the informants’ age, education and mother tongue.</p><p><strong>Results and conclusions:</strong> Nine informants fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The informants’ judgments of the sentences in English suggest that they are not entirely able to differentiate between British and American English. Moreover, their translations of the Swedish sentences indicate that the informants mix British and American English. Furthermore, they are not aware of which variety they use and the majority does not know whether they prefer British or American English. In addition, the findings could support the emergence of Euro-English, a Mid-Atlantic variety. </p>

<p>In this essay a novel by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, <em>The Wind-up Bird Chronicle</em>, is examined through dreams as a psychoanalytical phenomenon or spectacle. The novel is a complex work but mainly circles around the main character Toru, a middle-aged man in modern Japan whose wife leaves him unexpectedly. The focus in this essay is on the dream symbols in this novel and how they have a narrative function, i.e., how the symbols can be tied to the main character Toru’s real life problems, more specifically, his problems with femininity. The psychoanalytical approaches used in this essay are Sigmund Freud’s and C G Jung’s theories on dreams. Material from another novel by Murakami, <em>Norwegian Wood</em>, which contains the same type of symbolic imagery as <em>The Wind-up Bird</em>, is also included.</p>

<p>An earlier corpus study on Swedish university students’ errors concerning the use of apostrophes when writing in English (overuse, omission and misplacement) is contrasted to a new corpus study of upper secondary pupils’ texts. The results turn out to be similar: omissions are numerous among the upper secondary pupils, but overuses negligible. The proportionally most common errors are omissions in genitive constructions. This is contrasted to the views of the classes’ teacher, who perceived contractions to be more problematic due to these errors being more numerous. The essay also briefly deals with the teaching and the future of the apostrophe.</p>

<p>The study is focused on the interactional strategies used by interviewees in radio discourse, which are face-saving, relationship-securing and cooperative strategies. The interviewees’ speech is analysed according to their use of the selected discourse operators, which are the hedge <em>you know</em>, the personal pronoun <em>you</em>, personal address as well as greeting questions, information-seeking, reassuring and tag-questions. The results turned out to be almost similar to previous research. The face-saving strategy is shown to be male-dominant, while the relationship-securing and the cooperative strategies proved to have female dominance. The results are contrasted and reviewed by using two different kinds of normalization. The normalization is done both according to the percentage of the selected items and the percentage of the space used for every selected item and strategy.</p>

<p><p>The languages of the world are constantly changing and slang intrudes the vocabulary of many people all over the world. But what is slang and where does it come from? Are there differences in the slang that men and women use? And what is the point of using slang? It seems that the slang that was used by previous generations has either gone out of use or has now become a part of accepted standard language; basically, the youth of today reject the slang that their parents used. This would indicate that it is not “cool” to use the same slang as one’s parents did and to avoid this, new slang is invented to replace old slang aiding the youth of today to be able to be shocking or amusing by speaking in a certain way.</p></p><p><p><p>In this essay the focus lies on the slang of British English and this is investigated by an analysis of a contemporary film and a TV-show to see how common the use of slang is in these kinds of medias. The intention is also too see if slang differs according to gender and in what different areas slang is used.</p><p>The film “Football factory” and the TV-show “Little Britain” were closely watched and all slang was noted down and categorized in terms of users and areas of use. To make this easier and to make sure not to lose any parts of the dialogues scripts were found on the internet and used as aids when analyzing. “Football factory” is a movie about British football hooligans which is a very male-dominated world. “Little Britain” is a TV-show consisting of many small sketches with very different characters of both genders but mostly played by male actors.</p></p><p><p>The results were somewhat surprising as the expectation was to find some slang in the chosen material but the amount of slang use exceeded the expectations. Slang seems to besomething that people use in many different areas of use, such as, when talking about sex,drugs or other things that might be taboo. It seems that slang is a big part of the language thatboth men and women use. However, in the material used for this study, young men were theones who used slang the most.</p></p></p>