<p>The purpose of this study is to investigate the distribution of medieval ballads as semiotics of intertextuality in modern Swedish literature, here represented by August Strindberg, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Kerstin Ekman and Katarina Frostenson. They are famous authors from different epochs, ranging from the period called “the modern breakthrough” in the 1880s until the postmodernism of the present time. My aim is to expose their attraction to medieval balladry, and their different ways of using form, language and style from this old poetry in poems, prose and plays, explicit as well as implicit.</p>

<p>Studier visar att allt fler studenter som träder in i högre studier har bristande kunskaper i akademiskt skrivande. Den här komparativa fallstudien undersöker hur läromedel i svenska på gymnasiet förbereder elever för ett akademiskt skrivande. Dessutom undersöks om det finns skillnader mellan de två läromedlen, som riktas till yrkesförberedande respektive studieförberedande gymnasieprogram.</p><p>Den här undersökningen visar att de två granskade läromedlen förbereder eller till viss del förbereder gymnasielever för ett akademiskt skrivande. Grundkomponenterna som har undersökts i läromedlen är: kritisk-analytisk kompetens, akademiska textkonventioner, offentligt språkbruk och träning i texttyper som kan sägas förbereda för ett akademiskt skrivande.</p><p>Resultatet av fallstudien visar att det finns skillnader mellan läromedel som är riktade till olika program. En skillnad mellan läromedlen är utformningen av arbetsuppgifter till eleverna. Läromedelförfattarna använder även olika språkbruk i de olika läromedlen, exempelvis används fackspråk och språkvetenskapliga termer i läromedlet för de studieförberedande programmen medan språkliga förenklingar och omskrivningar ges i läromedlet till de yrkesförberedande programmen.</p>

The subject of this study is language use in a special type of social activity: the exchange of goods, services and information in a commercial setting. The main aim is to gain an understanding of the work that shop assistants perform using language. In the analysis, the focus is on verbal routine work. One part of the analysis thus entails mapping the typical utterances and conversational sequences related to such activities. Another part involves investigating how much non-task-oriented interaction the various activities require or “tolerate”, for instance, in the form of “small talk”. A central theme in the study is the interactants’ conversational rights and obligations, from the perspective of politeness theory, especially Fraser’s theory of the conversational contract. The service encounters are categorised as activity types, according to Levinson’s activity theory. In the comparative parts of the study, the concept of pragmeme is used as a tool to examine different realisations of prototypical situated communicative acts. The empirical material consists of authentic conversations, analysed by methods borrowed from conversation analysis. The conversations were recorded at a supermarket checkout till, a deli counter with manual service and an information desk in a bookshop. It turned out that only a few of the customer conversations were without complications. At the supermarket till, for instance, only one out of four conversations was completely routine and unproblematic. Also presented is a diachronic investigation of the norms relating to service encounters that have been taking place in shops since the 1940s. The main sources here are manuals and study materials for shop employees, together with interviews and material gathered from role playing. In this part of the study, a number of features in the historical change process are described, for instance in the manner of addressing people and the use of politeness expressions.

The Viking Age rune-carvers and their readers used runes as a semiotic resource to convey and structure the messages on rune-stones. An analysis of the ways in which this resource is used together with other resources gives us a deeper insight into the relationship between writers and readers and into the written culture in which the rune-stones were produced. The present study treats runic carvings as multimodal texts in which different semiotic modes produce meaning by visual and verbal means. The roles played by runes in such texts are studied from three different perspectives. The empirical study in chapter 3 investigates how the verbal messages of the inscriptions interrelate with ornamental compositions. The most important convention found is that runic inscriptions usually start in the lower left part of the ornamental band in which they are inscribed. A second result is that there is a certain correlation between the visual and syntactic structure of runic texts. In chapter 4, Södermanlandic inscriptions employing more than one writing system are investigated. These carvings can be tied to a context of high social ambition in which at least two different, socially stratified discourses are expressed by means of the runes as a visual semiotic mode. Chapter 5 is devoted to non-lexical inscriptions, showing that such carvings are indeed runic texts despite their lack of verbal message. Different types of readers can use runic resources in different ways. Firstly, runes carry meaning independent of any verbal message, giving them significance even to illiterate readers. Secondly, literate readers can appreciate certain conventions of runic composition and, thirdly, one and the same runic text can be part of different discourses and hence be aimed at different kinds of readers. / <p>Disputationen sker på norska och svenska</p>

In the North Scandinavian area of investigation, which is in focus in this dissertation, seal-hunting has been an important means of livelihood from prehistoric times up to the present. The Swedish-speaking seal-hunters' conceptual system for seal during the 20th century is analysed here. The analysis is mainly based on oral recorded interviews with hunters from the coastal areas around the Gulf of Bothnia – from Norrbotten and Västerbotten in Sweden, and Österbotten in Finland. A cognitive perspective is applied in the analysis, in which focus is on the hunters' knowledge of the seal with the purpose of investigating the construction of the hunters' conceptual system for seal. The dissertation's theoretical starting-point is taken in cognitive linguistics and cognitive anthropology. The investigated vocabulary contains 150 different words for seal. The analysis also includes the cultural and ecological context of the hunt. The hunters' conceptual system for seal is characterised by breadth and variation. There is regional variation in the construction of the conceptual system in the investigated area. In addition to that there is also variation with regard to different hunting seasons, something which is apparent both in the vocabulary and in the structure of the conceptual system. The summer and autumn hunt was not particularly complicated and there was consequently no need for categorising the seal. During this season a limited conceptual system with more general terms was used, which included all seals that were hunted at that time. The late winter and early summer hunt, on the other hand, required an immense amount of knowledge, for example with regard to ecology. In that connection the hunters used an extended conceptual system for seal. The analysis of the conceptual system of the late winter and early summer hunt is based on three different scenarios in which the categories for seal direct the actions of the hunters – in locating the seals in the ice environment, in the hunters' actions during the hunt and in the utilisation of the seal as a resource. A number of categories for seal which were used during the late winter and early spring hunt are the same in the whole area of investigation and can be said to constitute a cognitive and communicative basic level. / digitalisering@umu

This dissertation concerns oral language tests from a grammatical perspective. Tests today are usually assessed based on a communicative approach to language, so it is interesting to see how great a significance the level of grammatical development of test takers has for their communicative competence in general. The data in the investigation consist of recorded test conversations from a Swedish national language proficiency test, Tisus (test in Swedish for university and university college studies). The general aim of the study is to investigate whether there is a difference between the test takers who passed and those who failed in terms of their level of grammatical development. This is investigated in one main study and two smaller follow-up studies. The theoretical basis for this work is comprised of theories on second language learning and theories on language testing. For the grammatical analysis, Pienemann’s processability theory (PT) is applied. This theory posits that learners acquire certain morpho-syntactic structures in a particular order, something that produces a hierarchy consisting of five levels. In the main study, a quantitative analysis is made of the test takers’ level of grammatical development relative to their TISUS results. The results show a clear correlation between grammatical level and test results. There also seems to be a kind of watershed at level 4, given that most of the test takers who passed have command of this level in the PT hierarchy, whereas those who failed, as a rule, only make it to level 3. The first follow-up study is more qualitative in nature and is focused on the test takers who deviate from the general pattern of results in the main study: those who failed despite their high grammatical level and those who passed despite their low grammatical level. One result of this follow-up study is that, in these cases, it appears communicative competence was critical. Being able to orient oneself to the special conversational situation represented by the test conversation is considered to be particularly important. In a second follow-up study, the problems of applying PT to morphology and syntax are examined. The results of the dissertation suggest that there is a correlation between grammatical competence and communicative competence in general. This means that the grammatical levels in the PT hierarchy may constitute a useful basis of analysis in oral assessments, as a complement to other assessment tools.

Eftersom svensklärare i hög utsträckning förlitar sig på läromedel i formandet av grammatik-undervisningen bör dess innehåll och struktur ha betydelse för vilka kunskaper som lärs ut. Syftet med föreliggande undersökning är därför att analysera och problematisera hur läromedel för gymnasiets högskoleförberedande kurs Svenska 2 strukturerar de avsnitt som behandlar grammatik. Undersökningens empiriska material består av fem läromedel för gymnasiekursen Svenska 2, vilka analyseras utifrån kvalitativa textanalyser. Undersökningens resultat påvisar att läromedlen präglas av antingen en funktionell grammatik, där grammatiken ses som ett normativt verktyg för skrivandet, eller som en statisk och oproblematiserad begreppskunskap. Vidare påvisas även att många av undersökningens läromedel har brister och är långtifrån alltid helt i överensstämmelse med ämnesplanens mål. Det finns även en betydande skillnad mellan den skolgrammatik som presenteras i undersökningens läromedel och den som språkvetenskapen framhåller. Detta talar för att det är högst centralt att ifrågasätta läromedlens legitimerande funktion. Det som slutligen konstateras är att läromedlen bör komma bort från den traditionella grammatikbeskrivningen, så att lärare kan välja läromedel vars grammatikavsnitt liknar språkvetenskapens. / Because Swedish teachers rely heavily on teaching materials in the form of grammar education, the content and structure thereof should be important for which knowledge is taught. The purpose of the present study is to analyse and problematise how teaching materials for the college preparatory course Swedish 2 structure the sections dealing with grammar. The empirical material of the study consists of five teaching materials for the upper secondary school subject Swedish 2, which were analysed on the basis of qualitative text analyses. The results of the study showed that the teaching materials are characterised by either a functional grammar, where the grammar is seen as a normative tool for writing, or as a static and unproblematised conceptual knowledge. Furthermore, it is also shown that many of the study's teaching materials have shortcomings and are far from always completely in line with the curriculum’s objectives. There is also a significant difference between the school grammar presented in the study's teaching materials and the one that linguistics advocates. This suggests that it is highly central to question the legitimacy of the teaching materials. Finally, it is concluded that the teaching materials should be removed from the traditional grammar description so that teachers can choose teaching materials whose grammar sections are similar to linguistics.

Cross-lingual transfer learning has been the driving force of low-resource natural language processing in recent years, relying on massively multilingual language models with hopes of solving the data scarcity issue for languages with a limited digital presence. However, this "one-size-fits-all" approach is not equally applicable to all low-resource languages, suggesting limitations of such models in cross-lingual transfer. Besides, known similarities and phylogenetic relationships between source and target languages are often overlooked. In this work, the emphasis is placed on Faroese, a low-resource North Germanic language with several closely related resource-rich sibling languages. The cross-lingual transfer potential from these strong Scandinavian source candidates, as well as from additional genetically related, geographically proximate, and syntactically similar source languages is studied in single-source and multi-source experiments, in terms of Faroese syntactic parsing and part-of-speech tagging. In addition, the effect of task-specific fine-tuning on monolingual, linguistically informed smaller multilingual, and massively multilingual pre-trained language models is explored. The results suggest Icelandic as a strong source candidate, however, only when fine-tuning a monolingual model. With multilingual models, task-specific fine-tuning in Norwegian and Swedish seems even more beneficial. Although they do not surpass fully Scandinavian fine-tuning, models trained on genetically related and syntactically similar languages produce good results. Additionally, the findings indicate that multilingual models outperform models pre-trained on a single language, and that even better results can be achieved using a smaller, linguistically informed model, compared to a massively multilingual one.

Faroese is known to lie grammatically between Icelandic and the Mainland Scandinavian languages and dialects. One example of this is that, on the one hand, Faroese is like Icelandic in having a basically intact morphological four case system. On the other hand case-marking in Faroese is linked to clause function to a greater degree than in Icelandic – but to a lesser degree than in the Mainland Scandinavian standard languages. In Scandinavian Linguistics, it has long been an axiom that in the longer term the aforementioned four case system will be reduced in all varieties of the Scandinavian languages. The present thesis investigates if, and if so how, this expected development manifests itself in Senior High School graduation essays in Faroese from the period 1940–1999. A quantitative study forms the core of the thesis. The choice between the dative and other cases is related to eight syntactic variables whose effect on the choice of case is compared using methods from the variationist framework, among others. The results are partly surprising: the dative did not reduce in frequency from the 1940s to 1990s. There certainly is a tendency, however not a statistically significant one, that the dative is more often replaced by another case in contexts where the norm is to use the dative. On the other hand it also seems to become more common for the dative to be used hypercorrectly. Furthermore, the development is not linear, in that around the middle of the investigation period, the dative is used far more according to norms than otherwise. As expected, clause function is an important variable, but by the end of the period under investigation the placement of the nominal phrase within the clause becomes a surprisingly strong factor. It also becomes more important if the phrase takes the form of a first/second-person pronominal or not. The results are theoretically interpreted in the light of, firstly, Generative Grammar, and secondly Construction Grammar. The modification of certain terms is discussed, such as lexical case in Generative Grammar or usage-based model in Construction Grammar. The conclusion is that the linguistic descriptive models of these theories can only partly cover the tendencies to change that are observed. Other parts of the results are best explained using aspects of sociolinguistics. The conclusion is that case studies on a micro-level are valuable in order to evaluate and develop theories of linguistic variation and change at a macro-level.

<p>This work consists of two parts: the theoretical and the experimental. In the theoretical part, some general and some language specific theories of tense, aspect and aktionsart are presented, and the temporal systems of Swedish and Polish are compared. </p><p>The theoretical part is not a mere review of the literature on the subject. The comparison of the descriptions of aspect and aktionsart by Slavic researchers with the universal theory of Smith (1991) and (1977) and with description of aktionsart in Swedish in Teleman et al. (1999) has allowed me for some important observations as to the nature of the long-lasting dispute about the differences between aspect and aktionsart.</p><p>The experimental part is a cross-sectional study on the role of the linguistic context on the acquisition of the pluperfect by Polish learners Swedish as a foreign language. The informants are university students studying Swedish as a foreign language. The language samples were collected by means of two types of tests: gap-filling and translation from Polish. </p><p>Twelve linguistic factors, each divided into two subgroups, were hypothesised to have affected the correct use of the pluperfect. All those hypotheses as to which of the subgroups may inhibit and which may facilitate the correct use of the pluperfect are grounded in linguistic theories, i.e. presented in the form of linguistically-based discussions as to what kind of effect, facilitative or inhibiting, each of the linguistic factors may have had, and why. </p><p>The effect of those factors upon the correct use of the pluperfect has been tested by means of a step-wise multiple regression which measured the simultaneous effect of each factor upon the correct use of the pluperfect. This method has confirmed the facilitative effect of the following six linguistic factors: intrasentential indication of topic time (subordinate clause), unbounded verb indicating topic time, agentive meaning of the target verb, specifying subordinate clause, statal pluperfect and location of the time of action of pluperfect clause outside the temporal frame of narrative plot.</p>