Students in upper secondary school write in a number of different genres, and do this in school contexts as well as in their spare time. The study presented here is an overview of this activity and the genres concerned. The theoretical framework of the study is that of genre theory whereby genre is understood as a socially situated concept. The study is based on 2 000 texts gathered from students on different study programmes all over Sweden in the school year of 1996-97. The texts were written in different situations. The most important distinction made here is between test texts (i.e. texts from national tests) and self-chosen texts, which may come from schoolwriting or spare-time writing. The texts are categorized according to genre. This text inventory shows a repertoire of 33 different genres in the text material. A small number of genres, such as story, book-review and expository essay dominate the school writing. The test genres differ from this pattern in that they clearly imitate texts with a genuine communicative intent. The most frequent genres are studied further and each of them is demonstrated by an interpretative reading. This reading shows that the genres differ considerably with respect to genre character and stability of text structure. A quantitative study of text length and variation in vocabulary further shows that texts written by two categories of students, those on vocationally oriented programmes and those on programmes preparing for higher education, differ significantly. Reference cohesion is studied in a smaller sample of the texts. This lexico-semantic mechanism of cohesion proves to exhibit an interrelation with variation in vocabulary as well as with text type. One particular cohesive tie, inference, shows different patterns in texts written by the two categories of students mentioned above.

This thesis will argue that the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdæla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts also demonstrate that Queenship grew fragile after the spread of Christianity, and women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe.

<p>On the annexation of Jämtland by Sweden in 1645, Danish clergymen were allowed to remain on condition that they officiated in the Swedish language.</p><p>This dissertation investigates the changes in the written language of one of these Danish clergymen and is based on the parish register kept by the Rev. Olof Bertilsson between 1636 and 1668. The premise for this study is that individual variations and alterations in written language do not occur arbitrarily, but display systematisation and express social consensus. The analytical basis for this approach is derived from Alexander Zheltukhin’s work on orthographic code theory and employs concepts used in sociolinguistics, but also borrows ideas from theories of mixed languages and second-language learning.</p><p>Between 1636 and 1646 Olof Bertilsson displays a highly stable orthographic code with few variations. Following his attendance at the Riksdag (the Swedish Parlament) in Stockholm in 1647, a distinct change is evident in his orthography. Changes occur quite early in the spelling of some place-names, personal names and important and frequent ecclesiastical terms.</p><p>A decisive factor in determining when and how change occurs is his access to examples of Swedish texts. In the last decade of his life, an influx of Swedish clergy, increased contacts with Swedish officials and help from young clergymen with a Swedish education, contribute to a predominance of Swedish forms in Olof Bertilsson’s individual orthographic code.</p>

<p>In this dissertation, I examine the correspondence of an upper middle-class family from the early part of the nineteenth century. My aim is to answer questions about correspondence and letter-writing as an everyday event and as a social activity. My principal theoretical framework has been ethnograpy of communication. </p><p>My main source is the Eurén-Snellman manuscript collection at Uppsala University Library (UUB, G65). The central figure of this collection is Axel Eurén (1803−1879), who was a clergyman in Dalarna and also a member of the Swedish parliament. The material expands over three generations and includes Axel, his mother, his sister, his wife and Axel’s and his wife Sophie’s three children. In each generation the letter-writing is reciprocal in nearly all relations.</p><p>By creating a database of the 2,267 letters that remain from the family correspondence and by extracting meta-commentary about letter-writing I have studied how the family organized their correspondence. From the total collection I have chosen 293 letters during the period 1825−1858. These letters constitute a digitalized corpus that consists of approximately 160,000 words. With this corpus as my principal source, I have examined two different aspects of language use: a structural analysis of each writer’s total sum of letters and a study on address. </p><p>Certain findings confirm that letter-writing was based on routine. Traits of orality appear less often in the latter part of the material, a result that is in line with earlier investigations.The dimension of formal−informal language has been interesting to examine in relation to gender. Whereas the women’s writing at a lexico-grammatical level is more informal and natural in style, their need to portray themselves in a virtuous Christian manner seems at the same time to promote a certain kind of formality in expression. The opposite seems to be true for the men. </p>

This thesis deals with jokes and gender as social meaning. Here gender identity is regarded as one kind of social meaning. The gender identity of the individual is produced in interaction with other persons and is also conditioned by cultural codes. Of particular interest is how social identity is constituted by linguistic means. This is discussed using a model of indexicality, i.e. how linguistic features index one or more dimensions of the social context. Especially the indirect and constitutive relations between language and gender are discussed in terms of stances, acts and activities. In this context the speech act joking is seen as an example of a male gender constituent. A second theoretical angle consists of introducing some linguistic theories of humour and applying them to two empirical materials. The first material consists of audiovisual recordings of school pupils’ group discussions with no adult leader present. The pupils work with the same task, both in unisexual and mixed groups. The study focuses on describing how the speakers present suggestions of their own, and respond to the suggestions of others. The suggestions have lent themselves to being grouped into three categories: serious suggestions, playful suggestions, and joking suggestions. Identifying jokes in conversation can be difficult; thus four criteria for joke identification are applied: intention, structure, reaction and convention. Two types of structural criteria are used: semantic and rhetorical. The second material consists of a questionnaire administered to university students, which asks whom the informant apprehends as funny. A general tendency in the answers is that men only mention men, while women single out both women and men. Another tendency is that few women are found in the answers of the questions concerning the mass media, while women mention many funny women in the questions about their own everyday experiences. In this study it is argued that language use not only reflects our place in culture and society but also helps to constitute that place. Women and men encounter different cultural codes, and thus their performance of different speech acts also differs. This has an impact on the speakers’ social identity, one of which is gender identity.

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to study the dialogue between the Scandinavian drama and the Uruguayan theatre; how drama from Scandinavia has been received in the Río de la Plata during the last hundred years; how it has been adapted and activated to be meaningful to the audience; how it has been integrated within the Uruguayan theatre and society and how the play changes with that new dialogue. As this is the first study of Scandinavian plays in Uruguay a secondary purpose is to document what has been put on stage; fifty-three productions, ninety percent of which were plays by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. The study is organized in three parts: a) a historical and sociological description of the Uruguayan society and its theatre; b) a presentation of Scandinavian drama, staging of Scandinavian theatre and its reception during the twentieth century; c) a comparative analysis of the reception in its widest sense at different periods of eleven productions of two dramas by Ibsen and one by Strindberg. The work is thus part of a tradition of the history of reception. According to the hermeneutic method, the reading is done from the horizon of expectation at the time of the staging interwined with today’s perspective. I follow the Argentinean investigator of theatre Osvaldo Pellettieri’s definition of the concept “reception”: passive reception by the public; reproductive reception, reception including translation and criticism; productive reception, creative reception expressed as staging or as a text that is evidently influenced by another text. In studying the process from the source text of a play to the reception of a performance, the four steps that Patrice Pavis has pointed out have been followed: 1) the interidiomatic translation of the text, 2) the translation of the text into a manuscript as base for a production 3) the staging and 4) the performance as received by the public. More emphasis is put on the linguistic aspect of the reception and reconstruction than is generally the case in theatre research, as this study lies on the border between literature and theatre studies. Do the Scandinavian plays fall into the topics of the day, politically, socially, culturally and aesthetically? Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s dramatic production have drawn the attention of Uruguayan critics since 1894, four years before the public had the opportunity to see a play on stage in Montevideo. Their contents and dramatic aesthetics were evaluated and we can also see how their ideas are discussed and integrated in the social debate on womens’ rights and the economic consequences of divorce. In order to see where the critics put their emphasis, the following aspects were considered: the author, the plot and its actuality, the audience, the translation, the direction, the scenography, the acting, the scenery and the music. The emphasis and interest of the critics have changed during this period of a hundred year. At the turn of the century 1900 they focused on the plot, the protagonist and also put a lot of emphasis on the public’s reactions. A realistic interpretation was appreciated but its content was not related to the situation in the surrounding society. During the first half of last century we only find visiting companies from Europe playing the Scandinavian dramatists. At first they introduced Ibsen and later Strindberg to the public in Montevideo via performances made by European actors for a European public. The Montevidean public was sometimes amazed by the new theatrical form and stunned by the contents of the play, but, according to the critics, the spectators eventually accepted it all and thus widened their horizon. There is a great contrast in connection with the distribution of the critics' interests from the fifties onwards. The theme and its actuality were discussed, the author got a lot of space as did the director and the actors. The audience’s reaction was seldom commented upon, nor the scenography. Towards the end of the century the direction, the scenography and the scenery drew the critics’ attention on behalf of the actors, but the theme and its actuality preserved their interest. In the late forties the Uruguayan theatre had developed a theatre system. Scandinavian plays were now staged by native theatre groups and can be considered as integrated within the Uruguayan cultural and social system. We can see how the Scandinavian theatre performances accompanied theatre life in Montevideo; its rise during the fifties and sixties, its fall during the dictatorship of the seventies, its resurrection and its present condition, more free, more open and difficult to define in a few words. The last three chapters are a study of A doll’s House, An Enemy of the People and Creditors in Montevideo. It is a more detailed analysis of the translation of the texts, the transposition to the stage, how the performances relate to the cultural, social and political context and how they are received by the critics. A comparative study shows how the directors and the theatregroups have searched for different solutions to represent the plays. It shows great differences in the realization, differences that depend on the varying conditions of the groups; if they are part of the official theatre or an independent group, their political and aesthetical orientation, their intentions and artistic level and the social context in which the staging takes part.

In any human culture the telling of stories for representing past events is likely to have a centralplace. The aim of this dissertation is to describe storytelling among Swedish adolescents from astructural, interactional and functional perspective, and to demonstrate how the meaning of thestory is interactionally constructed. The material consists of a corpus of 258 stories taken from 30 hours of tape recordings of conversations between adolescents, aged 10-15, of both sexes, mostly in naturally occurring situations. The majority of the recordings were made in the late 80's and early 90's, while others datefrom 1974-1984. The study tries to combine the theoretical and methodological ideas of conversational analysis(CA) and sociolinguistic discourse analysis. The method is basically qualitative and the analysesare carried out through detailed scrutiny of pieces of recordings and transcriptions. The aspects ofstorytelling that arc studied include the way the stories are introduced and accounted for in the ongoing conversation, how they are designed by the teller in order to propose and make the listeneraccept a certain version of what happened, and how the listener through his contributions duringthe telling can accept, modify, reject and negotiate the meaning proposed by the teller. Another aspect studied is how the stories serve as means for self- and other-presentations. The results show that, both as tellers and listeners, Swedish adolescents make use of many different strategies to structure the telling and evaluate the story. These include verb tense, word orderand different kinds of discourse markers as well as highly emotional and dramatizing features suchas reported speech, onomatopoetic expressions and laughter. A very important evaluative deviceis the discourse marker ba. Dramatization is also found in many of the listener's contributions tothe telling. It is also shown that there are substantial differences between boys and girls, both in the use of (some of) these dramatizing features and in the way they construct and present themselves and others in the stories. This seems to be due to the fact that storytelling serves different functions in groups of boys and girls. Finally, it is argued that there are some indications of an ongoing change in the narrative style of Swedish adolescents.

In this dissertation, I examine the correspondence of an upper middle-class family from the early part of the nineteenth century. My aim is to answer questions about correspondence and letter-writing as an everyday event and as a social activity. My principal theoretical framework has been ethnograpy of communication. My main source is the Eurén-Snellman manuscript collection at Uppsala University Library (UUB, G65). The central figure of this collection is Axel Eurén (1803−1879), who was a clergyman in Dalarna and also a member of the Swedish parliament. The material expands over three generations and includes Axel, his mother, his sister, his wife and Axel’s and his wife Sophie’s three children. In each generation the letter-writing is reciprocal in nearly all relations. By creating a database of the 2,267 letters that remain from the family correspondence and by extracting meta-commentary about letter-writing I have studied how the family organized their correspondence. From the total collection I have chosen 293 letters during the period 1825−1858. These letters constitute a digitalized corpus that consists of approximately 160,000 words. With this corpus as my principal source, I have examined two different aspects of language use: a structural analysis of each writer’s total sum of letters and a study on address. Certain findings confirm that letter-writing was based on routine. Traits of orality appear less often in the latter part of the material, a result that is in line with earlier investigations.The dimension of formal−informal language has been interesting to examine in relation to gender. Whereas the women’s writing at a lexico-grammatical level is more informal and natural in style, their need to portray themselves in a virtuous Christian manner seems at the same time to promote a certain kind of formality in expression. The opposite seems to be true for the men.

This thesis deals with what happens linguistically and interactionally in naturally occurring bilingual talk-in-interaction between Danes and Swedes. In the data – collected within the elderly care in a Danish municipality – three Swedish caregivers interact with Danish pensioners and colleagues. Previous research on inter-Scandinavian interaction has mostly been concerned with talk-in-interaction in arranged situations and/or situations where the participants do not interact regularly with other Scandinavians. The talk-in-interaction in the present data, however, has a clear activity context, and the participants are used to talking to people speaking the neighbour language. The aim of this study was to examine how comprehension, understanding and social affiliation were achieved and demonstrated across differences in language, age, nationality and institutional roles. The theoretical and methodological framework includes accommodation theory and conversation analysis. The linguistic aspects of the Swedish speakers’ accommodation to Danish were studied both in a detailed analysis of accommodation on five linguistic levels, and quantitatively in a study of five linguistic variables. One result was that the Swedish caregivers had individual ways of accommodating their language to Danish. The linguistic analyses also indicated that one reason for this accommodation was to make communication flow more efficiently. A CA-study of other-initiated repair showed that four factors in the interactional situation influenced understanding: context, physical distance and orientation, clearness of speech, and neighbour language and accommodation. It could, however, not be shown that the speakers’ use of different linguistic varieties caused a significant number of problems in understanding, or that the participants frequently oriented to such linguistic differences as part of the problem. Compliment sequences and their role in creating social affiliation were studied in another CA-study. They often played the role of introducing a new topic and leading the talk away from the practical chores at hand, thereby reducing the institutional aspect of the situation. The interactional ways of creating comprehension, understanding and social affiliation are likely to be at least as important as linguistic convergence in achieving these goals.

On the annexation of Jämtland by Sweden in 1645, Danish clergymen were allowed to remain on condition that they officiated in the Swedish language. This dissertation investigates the changes in the written language of one of these Danish clergymen and is based on the parish register kept by the Rev. Olof Bertilsson between 1636 and 1668. The premise for this study is that individual variations and alterations in written language do not occur arbitrarily, but display systematisation and express social consensus. The analytical basis for this approach is derived from Alexander Zheltukhin’s work on orthographic code theory and employs concepts used in sociolinguistics, but also borrows ideas from theories of mixed languages and second-language learning. Between 1636 and 1646 Olof Bertilsson displays a highly stable orthographic code with few variations. Following his attendance at the Riksdag (the Swedish Parlament) in Stockholm in 1647, a distinct change is evident in his orthography. Changes occur quite early in the spelling of some place-names, personal names and important and frequent ecclesiastical terms. A decisive factor in determining when and how change occurs is his access to examples of Swedish texts. In the last decade of his life, an influx of Swedish clergy, increased contacts with Swedish officials and help from young clergymen with a Swedish education, contribute to a predominance of Swedish forms in Olof Bertilsson’s individual orthographic code.