<p>Syftet med min uppsats är att studera attityder till svenska språket i Finland. Jag har intervjuat sju finskspråkiga gymnasieelever i södra Finland. Syftet med intervjuerna är primärt kvalitativt. Jag har velat bilda mig en uppfattning om vilka faktorer som påverkar de intervjuades attityder och även försöka förstå varför man har de attityder man har och vari de bottnar. Jag har även velat se hur ålder vid studiestarten i svenska påverkarattityderna. Därför har jag valt att intervjua både dem som har börjat studera svenska i lågstadiet och dem som börjat sina studier i högstadiet.</p><p>Resultatet visar att det finns flera faktorer som påverkar de intervjuades attityder. En faktor är kontakter med de svenskspråkiga och den vardagliga närvaron (eller frånvaron) av svenska språket. Undervisningens kvalitet och hurdan lärare man har i svenskämnet påverkar också. Även omgivningens attityder kan ha en viss påverkan. Bland mina informanter framstår den instrumentella funktionen som mest central i formandet av attityderna: informanterna läser svenska för att de tror sig ha nytta av det nu och i framtiden. Även den affektiva funktionen påverkar i vissa fall informanterna: en positiv attityd till svenska språket samt en stor vilja och motivation att lära sig det uttrycker en lust att känna tillhörighet till den andra gruppen (svenskspråkiga) utöver den egna (finskspråkiga). Flera informanter har åsikter om ålder vid studiestart i svenska och hur det kan påverka attityderna. Alla mina informanter har en positiv eller mer neutral attityd till svenska språket i sig och även de svenskspråkiga. Gällande åsikter om den obligatoriska undervisningen i svenska i Finland är åsikterna delade.</p>

The aim of this study is to examine the semantic architecture of the motif complex the four elements, i.e. fire, air, water and earth, in the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem A Mölna Elegy (1960). The poem belongs to the same polyphonic and quotative-allusive tradition as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. The four elements may be regarded both as four separate motifs and as constituting one semantically coherent motif complex. The latter reading has to do with the fact that the phrase the four elements is not itself present in the text. Thus, the thesis includes the assumption that this motif complex, heavily suggested by items in the text but still omitted, might function as a text matrix, from which a number of themes emerge such as life–death and time. The thesis has a theoretical anchoring in ideas about semantic frames (Barsalou) when discussing semantic relations between the different element-related words in the poem, and how these words may be linked to the concepts ‘fire’, ‘air’, water’ and ‘earth’ respectively. Traditional lexical relations such as hyponymy, antonymy and meronymy only catch the more obvious relations such as fire–glow, warm–cold and tree–branch, but are unable to explain pragmatically based relations between words linked to the same conceptual domain, such as sea–jetty, water–sink, fly–air and the like. To some extent, the thesis also draws upon Riffaterre’s theories about a poem’s matrix and how meaning arises in such texts. A major finding of the study is the heavy lexical presence of the four elements in the poem, expressed and suggested by a great number of semantically heterogeneous words. This semantic pattern is analysed in detail with the aid of semantic frame theory. A further discovery is that most of the element words imply dichotomies such as motion–repose, warmth–cold, light–dark or soft–hard. The elements have most of the dichotomies in common, which strongly suggests a union of all the four elements. Such a union is also suggested by several conspicuous compounds never earlier recorded in Swedish, such as glödstänk (‘glowspray’), vindstänk (‘windspray’), eldsus (‘fire sough’) and vågsus (‘wave sough’). The meetings of element are also described at the syntactic level as an explicit amalgamation of all four elements, which suggests a theme not earlier noticed. This theme may tentatively be called the cyclical amalgamation.

The subject of this study is perspective in police reports. The overall aim is to introduce new tools for analysing perspective in written narratives. The material consists of reports based on different accounts of the same conflict from a number of people (the suspect, the injured part and witnesses), that is, different versions of the same sequence of events. The study begins with a theoretical discussion of perspective in literary texts and of some characteristics of the police reports examined. Two tools are developed to analyse linguistic means for identifying perspective. The first analytical tool can be placed within the framework of cognitive semantics. Analysis here concerns seeing space differently and having different limits in one’s way of experiencing the sequence of events. This conceptualisation of the focaliser (the person whose perspective is reported) is realised in the text through certain spatial expressions associated with the concept of centre. To analyse the centres chosen, the image schema centre–periphery is used in examining instances of the adverbs fram and bort and their derivations. The second analytical tool can be placed within the theoretical framework of dramaturgy. Analysis here concerns perceiving the dramatic development of events differently, that is, dramatic patterns in the different versions of the conflict and which character is given the most active role in it. The differences can be seen in the focaliser’s choice of events and how aggression is consciously or unconsciously described in terms of how different characters cause the conflict to escalate. The hypothesis being tested is whether the suspect’s perspective is discernible in the report of the suspect’s account. The hypothesis is confirmed. The study shows that the tools introduced work successfully in the analysis of perspective. Both analyses yield results, which in both cases can be validated.

<p>Abstract</p><p>The aim of this study is to describe similarities and differences in the inscriptions of runestones in</p><p>today's county of Kronoberg, the former county of Värend and, in addition, a part of the former</p><p>county of Sunnerbo. The study is based on 27 remaining runestones which are analysed through</p><p>choice of words and runes, orthography and decorations.</p><p>The section of choice of words and runes are categorised and based on the choice of choosing</p><p>one particular word over another and of choosing one particular rune over another. Orthography is</p><p>based on the spelling of five particular words; efter, sten, reste, hjälpe and och. Monophtongisation</p><p>is discussed and analysed. The section of decorations has two subsections; 1) crucifixes and</p><p>”suns”, and 2) other forms of decoration.</p><p>The study showed that the runestones had some significant numbers of similarities and</p><p>differences. The study also showed that the option of choosing one word, or rune, over another was</p><p>probably a conscious choice made by the runic inscriber himself. The spelling of the five words</p><p>revealed a limited number of spelling choices, and that monophtongisation had occurred in some</p><p>words. The majority of the runestones had some form of decoration, usually a crucifix, which were</p><p>categorised. However, attribution could only be made in a few cases, due to the limited amount of</p><p>criteria used.</p><p>Keywords: crucifixes, decorations, Kronoberg, monophtongisation, runes, runestones, Sunnerbo,</p><p>Värend</p>

The aim of this dissertation is twofold. On one hand, I describe the use of tense in the second language of the deaf – written Swedish. There is no previous description of this. On the other hand, I operationalize the transitivity model (Hopper &amp; Thompson 1980) and test its scope. I test in part whether transitivity as it is described by Hopper &amp; Thompson (1980) can be used to explain the use of tense by the deaf in my study. The reason why I connect transitivity with the use of tense is that I would like to see whether a transitivity analysis of a text can replace classification into foreground and background. If so, a transitivity analysis should be a sufficient method for testing the discourse hypothesis, which maintains that second language learners use their emerging verb morphology to signal foreground and background rather than tense. The material I use for both these aims consists of a total of 129 essays written by deaf high school students. The results show that the percentage of clauses with an appropriate choice of tense in all three subsets of material is high. One interesting trend that could be discerned with regard to use of tense is that when informants use a tense that is appropriate for the genre, their command of that tense is better than when it is used in a genre for which it is less appropriate. Calculations testing the hypothesis of co-variance between the components in the transitivity model show in general that such co-variance exists. Nonetheless, the degree of this varies and is far from total. Taken together, the calculations made in this investigation provide support for the claim that these nine components co-vary with one another. The results also show that there is no correlation between the components and the use of tense. Judging from the results, the value of the different components (positive or negative) appears to have no importance in determining whether the choice of tense is appropriate or not. Nor is there any significant difference in the subsets of material for my investigation of whether the number of positive values that a clause has is relevant in classifying the choice of tense as appropriate.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-288).

In Swedish dialects we find the terms ris,skäver and skärva referring to illnesses in children. The words are also parts of various compounds which refer to variants of the illnesses. The terms are linguistic expressions denoting two folk categories of illnesses, RIS and SKÄVER/SKÄRVA. These categories are investigated from a cognitive semantic perspective. The cognitive perspective argues that we organize our understanding of reality by using Idealized Cognitive Models (ICM) based on our physical, mental and emotional experiences of the world. The aim is twofold: to demonstrate the bases on which an experienced illness is placed in a certain category, and to show how a folk conception of illness is reflected in the word formation strategies. The word formation strategies emanate from notions of characteristic symptoms, and from notions of causes of illnesses. Both categories, RIS and SKÄVER/SKÄRVA, are based on a number of ICM's. The category RIS is a radial structure, which means that the category is held together although its members have no structural criteria in common. The category SKÄVER/SKÄRVA is a concentrating structure, meaning that all members share all structural criteria. There is a strong connection between word formation strategies and the structures of the categories. Terms related to symptoms refer to members of a category which are part of a radial structure, while terms related to causes refer to members of a category which are part of a concentrating structure. This can be explained by two of the basic assumptions of cognitive semantics: semantic content is structred and symbolized overtly on the surface form of a language and categories are conventional, based on cultural assumptions about the world. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis deals with the assessment of school texts by students in Swedish upper-secondary school or in the corresponding adult education and concentrates on what differs between the grades Pass and Fail. The 60 texts used in the survey come from the 1997 archives of the national test construction group. A questionnaire to teachers asks what criteria are most important when distinguishing between Pass and Fail. The five criteria pointed out are Holistic scoring, Relevant content, The connecting thought, Sentence structure and How the student has followed the instructions. The most salient result regarding grades is the difference between grades from the students’ own teachers and from the independent assessors. Ten texts have received a Fail from the student’s own teacher, but as many as 35 get an average Fail from three assessors. There is variation in assessment, but 18 Fail texts and 18 Pass texts get a unanimous grade. Quantitative analyses of the 60 texts show a definite correlation between grade and number of words. However, the Fail-groups among narrative, expository and argumentative texts contain both the shortest and the longest texts. School texts are longer now than thirty years ago, especially texts with low grades. Sentences and words have become shorter. Coherence is investigated by a method of reference cohesion. No clear difference between Pass and Fail texts can be found, but between types of essay topics. Also important is the organization of the text and its paragraphs, a factor which separates Fail and Pass texts. Various aspects of sentence structure show better results in the Pass texts. The thesis is concluded with a commentary on the demands of the last compulsory course in Swedish. The needed level is argued to be the ability to write for an unknown reader.

Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i två uppslagsord i Svenska Akademiens Ordlista 2006: bautasten och bauta-. Övergripande syfte är att beskriva och förklara lexikala förändringar hos ord bildade med bauta(-) i svenskan under perioden 1664–2006, med särskild hänsyn till dessa förändringars relation till ordens etableringsgrad. Materialet består av 838 belägg för ord bildade med baut- eller böt-, och därutöver undersöks 30 ordböcker. Ordet bautasten är ett isländskt lånord i svenskan. Undersökningen av fornvästnordiska ord visar att bautasteinn kan vara ’sten som är slagen ned i jorden’ eller ’sten rest över en fallen krigare’, två betydelser som kan sammanföras i betydelsen ’minnessten’. Denna betydelse framträder också tydligt i samtliga texter. Historiens höga status under stormaktstiden har haft stor betydelse för att ordet bautasten lånades in i svenskan år 1664. Språkstrukturella faktorer har sannolikt lett till att ordet har uppmärksammats och att det har kunnat användas i svenskan. Under perioden 1664–1790 har etableringsgraden hos bautasten inte har varit hög, men vissa tecken tyder på att den höjs under perioden. Fram till ca 1900 stiger etableringsgraden hos bautasten, men den avtar sedan fram till 1973. I avhandlingen antas att ordets växlande etableringsgrad har varit beroende av synen på historien. I början av 1970-talet stiger etableringsgraden åter hos bautasten och 1985 finns första belägget för bauta- som förstärkande förled, vilket med stor sannolikhet har sin orsak att söka hos den stora populariteten hos och spridningen av seriealbumet Asterix. Förleden bauta- har visat sig vara mycket användbar som förstärkande förled. I materialet finns 3 ord bildade med bauta(-) som inte är etablerade i språksamfundet. / The starting point for the dissertation is two entry words in Svenska Akademiens Ordlista (SAOL 13, 2006): bautasten and bauta-. The overall purpose is to describe and explain lexical changes in words created with bauta(-) in the Swedish language during 1664–2006, placing particular em¬phasis on these changes in relation to the degree of establish¬ment. The material consists of 838 pieces of evidence of words created with baut- or böt- and, in addition, 30 dictionaries are exam¬ined. The word bautasten (‘menhir’, ‘standing stone’) is an Icelandic loan word in the Swedish lan¬guage. The examination of Old West Norse words shows that bautasteinn can be ’sten som är slagen ned i jorden’ (‘stone beaten into the ground’) or ’sten rest över en fallen krigare’ (‘stone erected over a fallen warrior’), two meanings which can be brought together in the meaning ’minnessten’ (‘memorial monument’). This meaning also clearly appears in all texts. The high status of history during the Swedish Age of Greatness was significant for the inclu¬sion of the word bautasten into the Swedish language in 1664. Language-structural factors have likely lead to the word being noticed as well as made it possible to use in the Swedish language. During 1664–1790, the degree of establishment of bautasten was not high, but there are indi¬cations that it increased during the period. Until about 1900, the degree of estab¬lish¬ment of bautasten increased, but then it decreased up until 1973. In the disserta¬tion it is assumed that the varying degree of establishment has been dependent on the view of history. In the beginning of the 1970s, the degree of establishment of bautasten increased once again and in 1985, the first instance of bauta- as an augmentative prefix appears, which most likely can be attributed to the great popularity and wide spread of the cartoon magazine Asterix. The prefix bauta- has proven to be very usable as an augmentative. There are 3 words created with bauta(-) in the material that are not established in the language community

This dissertation deals with 199 gender related proverbs that were collected in northern Sweden and were used in an agrarian environment, approximately between the beginning of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The conceptions of gender which these proverbs convey also belong to the same time range and place. The aim of this dissertation is to find out which conceptions of gender that is conveyed by proverbs in an older agrarian environment in northern Sweden. In order to achieve this aim the following question is examined: What conceptions are found in the proverb material of the cultural category woman, the cultural category man and of the relationship between these categories? As a base for an interpretation of the proverbs, which are written in various Swedish dialects, a linguistic analysis is carried out. The interpretation is then formed through a concept that was developed by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1982); namely, base meaning. This concept relates to the shared meaning of a proverb by a group of people. The proverbs that include metaphors and similes are analyzed with a method that is developed from the cognitive linguistic theory of blending (Fauconnier &amp; Turner 1996, 1998). The proverb material is sorted in three analytical categories, and presented in separate chapters: Chapter four, The Marriage Market (Äktenskapsmarknaden), chapter five: The Household (Hushållet) and chapter six, Sexuality (Sexualiteten). These categories are in turn divided into sub categories. One example of a salient conceptions of gender that is found in the category The Marriage Market is that the man chooses a woman, not the other way around. One example of a central conception in the category The Household is that the man earns money and supply other resources and the woman takes care of these resources. The significance of the conceptions of male and female sexuality is that they convey the difficulty in controlling a virulent male sexuality. The gender conceptions are analysed as part of a system of gender hegemony and a cultural model of the successful household is suggested based on the proverb material.