Avhandlingen kartlägger och analyserar i fyra empiriska artiklar hur elevsubjekt konstrueras i skolans vardag och vilken roll marknadens principer spelar i dessa konstruktioner. I synnerhet fokuseras vilka logiker som konstituerar gymnasievalets praktiker, samt hur dessa legitimeras, tolkas och utmanas. Resultatet visar att gymnasievalets praktiker delar upp både nuet och framtiden för eleverna, som valet mellan en uttalad utopi eller en underförstådd dystopi, där eleverna i hög grad själva görs ansvariga för att lyckas eller misslyckas med att förverkliga den utopi som iscensätts i valets praktiker. Denna uppdelning framstår för aktörerna till stor del som naturlig och apolitisk, vilket i sin tur legitimerar dess effekter i termer av exkludering, ojämlikhet och segregering, ofta på basis av social klass. Den marknadsstyrda skolans diskurser konstruerar och delar också upp eleverna som om de vore varor med olika värde. Begreppet fantasmatiska logiker kan förklara hur elever greppas av  marknadsliknande diskurser, samt hur de hanterar motsägelsefulla villkor. Exempelvis hur gymnasievalet för eleverna både innebär att förändras och bli vad man vill, samtidigt som man formas att bli mer av den man redan är, genom att välja att vara den man är. Elevernas problematisering och destabilisering av dominerande marknadslogiker i skolan förekommer i alla undersökta sammanhang, och beskrivs i avhandlingen som både genomskådanden och ifrågasättanden av hur skola och utbildning kopplas samman med marknadens logiker. Genom att genomskåda gymnasievalets förmenta neutralitet synliggör eleverna hur marknadsstyrningen av utbildning i allmänhet och iscensättningen av mässorna i synnerhet tycks ligga i skolornas, snarare än elevernas intresse. / The thesis explores and analyzes in four empirical articles how student subjects are constructed in everyday school life and what role market principles play in these constructions. In particular, it focuses on the logics that constitute upper secondary school choice practices, and how these are legitimized, interpreted and challenged. The results show that upper secondary school choice practices divide the present and the future of the students as the choice between an explicit utopia and an implied dystopia. Here, the students themselves are made responsible for their success or failure in realizing the utopia that is staged in school choice practices. This division generally appears to the actors as natural and apolitical, which in turn legitimizes its effects in terms of exclusion, inequality and segregation, often on the basis of social class. Furthermore, the market-driven school discourses construct and divide the students as if they were commodities of different value. The notion of fantasmatic logics can explain how students are gripped by market-driven discourses and how they handle contradictory conditions. For instance, it explains how, for students, school choice means they can transform and become who they want to be, while at the same time they can also become more of what they already are, by choosing to be who they are. Students, however, problematize and destabilize dominant market logics in the school in all examined contexts, which in the thesis is analyzed in terms of penetrations and destabilizations of how schools and education are linked to the market logics. By penetrating the presupposed neutrality of secondary school choice practice, the students expose how the market orientation of education in general and the staging of school fairs in particular appear to be in schools’, rather than students’, interest.

The dissertation Litteracitet genom interaktion [‘Literacy through Interaction’] spotlights how literacy interaction can work in the primary school’s multilinguistic environments. It investigates conversations that occur in and around teaching about writing. The study material was collected from three different schools from year zero to year three, and special focus is given to what I call literacy chains. These chains are connected by the fact that they all concern a writing assignment that every pupil must complete, which in my material involves the text types narrative, factual text and poem. During the teaching sequences that unfold, there is an interplay of literary events in connection with speech, writing and various artefacts. My main object of inquiry is the interaction that occurs in these literacy chains. The dissertation demonstrates that the teachers’ lessons with the class as a whole lead to fixed conversational patterns, with pupils asked questions that require specific responses. The conversations tend to form either a so-called IRE pattern, where the reader’s initiative for a question demands a given answer in response which is then evaluated by the teacher, or a list pattern, with the pupils filling in answers. In situations involving the whole class, persistent, determined pupils are needed to break into the teacher’s monologue. When persistence wins out, from the pupil’s perspective, pupils can contribute new aspects to these conversations. In small groups and in one-on-one conversations, there are more pupil initiatives, since conversational patterns are not as fixed or predetermined. One key finding is that multilinguistic resources are sometimes made use of even though the schoolwork is usually based on a single-language conversational norm. Yet it is clear that multilingualism is a useful resource regardless of the teacher’s language background. On several occasions, we encounter participants who together construct a multilinguistic environment where languages are interwoven. All three literacy chains provide pupils with clear templates for writing, which determine what the pupils are supposed to do. The writing template in the poem chain serves as support for their writing but is not a straitjacket. This can be compared to the template for the factual text, which includes a copy of the model text. The written language norm of writing properly is communicated in great detail by the teachers to the pupils. Writing properly is not just having good, legible handwriting, but in school the writing norms to be applied in writing assignments are made relevant. On a more general level, the study illustrates that material resources vary in the schools, from green chalkboards to classroom resources that include laptops. However, schoolwork is predicated on paper-based writing. There is built-in stress, since schoolwork is governed by time, with a schedule that determines learning activities down to the minute, with them ending at a precise time. There is a race against time. / Avhandlingen belyser hur litteracitetsinteraktion kan gå till i grundskolans flerspråkiga miljöer. Det handlar om samtal som uppstår i och kring skrivundervisning. Undersökningsmaterialet är insamlat från tre olika skolor inom skolår F-3, och i det materialet är det särskilt det som jag kallar litteracitetskedjor som uppmärksammas. Kedjorna hålls samman av att de berör en gemensam skrivuppgift, som i mitt material handlar om texttyperna berättelse, faktatext och dikt. I de undervisningsförlopp som uppstår samsas litteracitetshändelser knutna till tal, skrift och olika artefakter. Mitt huvudsakliga analysobjekt är interaktionen som uppstår inom litteracitetskedjorna. Avhandlingen visar att lärarnas genomgångar i helklass leder till fasta samtalsmönster genom att de ställer frågor till eleverna som kräver bestämda svar. Samtalen tenderar att bygga antingen på s.k. IRE-mönster, där läsarens frågeinitiativ pockar på ett givet svar som respons, vilket sedan evalueras av läraren, eller på ett listmönster, där elever fyller i svar. I helklassituationer krävs det envisa och målmedvetna elever för att bryta igenom lärarmonologen. Genom att trägen vinner, ur elevperspektiv, kan eleverna bidra med nya aspekter till samtalen. I smågrupper och samtal en mot en förekommer fler elevinitiativ, eftersom samtalsmönstren inte är så fasta och förutbestämda. Ett viktigt resultat är att flerspråkiga resurser ibland tas i bruk, även om skolarbetet oftast bygger på en enspråkig samtalsnorm. Men det är tydligt att flerspråkighet är en användbar resurs oavsett lärarens språkbakgrund. Vi möter vid några tillfällen deltagare som tillsammans konstruerar en flerspråkig miljö där språken flätas ihop. Alla tre litteracitetskedjorna erbjuder elever tydliga skrivmallar, vilket reglerar vad eleverna ska göra. Skrivmallen i diktkedjan fungerar som ett stöd för skrivandet, men ingen tvångströja. Att jämföra med faktatexten där det sker en avskrift av modelltexten. Skriftspråksnormen att skriva fint förmedlas nogsamt av lärarna till eleverna. Skriva fint är inte bara att ha en fin och läsduglig handstil, utan i skolan relevantgörs de normer för skrift som ska tillämpas i skrivuppgifter. På ett mer allmänt plan illustrerar undersökningen att materiella resurser varierar i skolorna från den gröna krittavlan till klassuppsättningar med laptoppar. Skolan stöder sig dock på en pappersbaserad skriftlighet. Det finns en inbyggd stress, för skolarbete är reglerat av tid. Skolan regleras av ett minutbundet tidsschema och de lärande aktiviteterna klipps av utifrån exakta klockslag. Det pågår en kapplöpning med tiden.

You just kind of write. Writing and writing contexts in the years 7 and 8 of the compulsory school. This thesis deals with writing and writing contexts in the latter part of the Swedish compulsory school and with the interrelationship between the individual and the context, between the pupil, the teacher, the instruction of writing in the short and long perspective and the school as organization and institution. The general aim of the study is to deepen the understanding of school writing and its conditions by describing, analysing and interpreting the writing instruction from the teachers’, the pupils’ and my own perspectives. Fieldwork for my ethnographic study was conducted in two parallel classes, 36 pupils in all, over three terms in which all texts written during Swedish lessons were gathered. The theoretical framework is the sociocultural approach based on research by Vygotsky and Bachtin. Six texts written by three pupils regarding structure, style and teacher’s written response and the instruction in connection with the writing are analysed. The instruction in the long perspective is analysed with regard to what extent it offered the pupils coherence in their studies. To analyse the instruction in an organizational and institutional view concepts from Berg’s studies on school cultures and Langer’s research on effective American schools are used. One major result is that the task, the receiver, the teacher’s response and the non-dialogic classrooms are factors with great impact on the pupils’ texts. Most tasks require that the pupil’s private, personal life and experiences are focused, e.g. in the many narrative texts, whereas discursive texts are not represented at all in the material. The instruction in the long perspective can in the main be characterised as catalogues, i.e. it does not lead to knowledge-in-action and is similar to Swedish as a proficiency subject. As to teacher response it is not possible to see any progression during the three terms but the same aspects are commented on in most texts in both classes and do not improve the texts. The culture and traditions of the school are important influencing factors in the teaching. One reason for this is the lack of in-service training of the teachers when the new steering system of the Swedish school was introduced in the middle of the 1990’s. When organizations undergo fundamental changes traditions seem to exercise greater influence on actors than otherwise. Time has great impact on school activities and three conflicting concepts of time are present at school: the pupil’s activity time, the teacher’s linear time and the institutional time. The work teams play a vital role for the teachers but the care of the pupils take most of their time. Pedagogic and didactic discussions are rare and subject matters have no forum at all. Many of the factors in the writing contexts are institutionally influenced and hence difficult to change but teachers and pupils are actors in school as organization and institution. This means that they can reproduce or transform the structures. In this there are developmental potentials.

This thesis describes certain areas in the grammar of the little-known Kuot language, spoken by some 1,500 people in New Ireland Province in Papua New Guinea. Kuot is an isolate, and is the only non-Austronesian (Papuan) language of that province. The analyses presented here are based on original data from 18 months of linguistic fieldwork. The first chapter provides an overview of Kuot grammar, and gives details of earlier mentions of the language, and of data collection and the fieldwork situation. The second chapter presents information about the prehistory and history of the area, the social system, kinship system and culture of Kuot speakers, as well as dialectal variation and prognosis of survival of the language. Chapter three treats Kuot phonology, with particular emphasis on the factors that govern allophonic variation, and on the expression of word stress and the functions of intonation. Word classes and the criteria used to define them are presented in Chapter four, which also contains a discussion of types of morphemes in Kuot. The last chapter describes in some detail the class of nouns in Kuot, their declensions, non-singular formation, and the properties of grammatical gender. Appendices give the full set of person-marking forms in Kuot, a transcription of a recorded text with interlinear glossing and translation, the Swadesh 100-word list for Kuot, and diagrams of kin relations and terminology / <p>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se</p>

The aim of this thesis is to acquire a deeper knowledge of Swedish social services’ written child welfare investigations. These investigations are conducted and documented by social workers at social welfare offices, and the investigations sometimes have a major impact on the lives of individuals. The research material consists of 50 written child welfare investigations, social workers’ answers to interviews and questionnaires and also steering documents regulating the child welfare practice of the social services, but the study focuses on the written investigations. Drawing on genre analysis theory and critical discourse analysis, patterns of linguistic features in the investigations are highlighted and considered as genre-specific features. Overall the investigations as written documents are considered both as discursive tools in a professional setting and as social authorities’ texts with great power in an asymmetrical power relation between authorities and individuals. This inherent duality implies different communicative purposes which are difficult to merge in the same document. The study includes a variety of empirical data and analytical tools deriving from genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and linguistic stylistics. In the study both quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined, creating methodological triangulation. The results show that all the investigations are alike in terms of communicative purposes, indicating that the concept of genre is rigid concerning the text sample. In other respects all the investigations are characterized by variation, in both linguistic and more content-oriented aspects. In some sections of the texts the language is formal and in others it is casual. This can be understood as a consequence of different purposes coexisting in the same text. The results also show that different text participants are constructed differently concerning responsibility for affecting other participants. The authorities’ impact through processes is often hidden in passive clauses. Another result indicates that pseudo-nominalization is a functional linguistic tool in the discourse, which might be a reason to reevaluate plain language recommendations regarding this grammatical construct. / Texter med tyngd

The study reported in this thesis investigates the source language of lexical transfer in multilingual learners using a mixed methods approach. Previous research has shown that the source language of crosslinguistic influence can be related to factors such as proficiency, recency/exposure, psychotypology, the L2 status, and item-specific transferability. The present study employed a mixed methods approach in order to best serve the particularities of each of the five factors under investigation. Multinomial logistic regression was emloyed to test the predictive power of the first four factors, thereby addressing the issue of confounding variables found in previous studies. A more exploratory qualitative analysis was used to investigate item-specific transferability due to the lack of prior empirical studies focusing on this aspect. Both oral and written data were collected, offering an analysis of modal differences in direct comparison. The results show a significant effect of proficiency and exposure, but inconsistent patterns for psychotypology. Most importantly, in this study of lexical transfer, a significant L1 status effect was found, rather than an L2 status effect. In addition, the statistical model predicted the source language of transfer better in the spoken than in the written mode. Finally, learners were found to assess, as well as actively improve, an item’s transferability in relation to target language norms and constraints. All of these findings contribute to our understanding of lexical organization, activation, and access in the multilingual mind.

Elevers motivation samt kunskapsmässiga och framtida mål i spanska undersöks utifrån enkätsvar från 77 gymnasieelever i steg 3 och 4 samt intervjuer med två elever i steg 5. Arbetets teoretiska ramverk utgörs av tre motivationsteorier: self-determination theory (Deci &amp; Ryan, 1985) med begreppen inre och yttre motivation, the socio-educational model (Gardner, 2001) med begreppet integrativ motivation och L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2009) med begreppet ideal L2 self. Resultatet visar att cirka hälften av informanterna känner sig motiverade av att läsa spanska och det är främst på grund av yttre betingad motivation via meritpoäng och betyg. Dock har runt två tredjedelar som mål att resa till spansktalande länder och prata med målspråkstalare, som kan härledas till en integrativ motivation. Drygt hälften av informanterna tror att de kommer kunna bra spanska i framtiden, vilket indikerar en stark framtidsinriktad språklig självbild. / Students’ motivation, knowledge targets and future goals in Spanish are studied based on questionnaires completed by 77 students enrolled in stage 3 and stage 4, as well as interviews with two students in stage 5. The theoretical framework consists of three motivational theories: Self-determination theory (Deci &amp; Ryan, 1985) with the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, the socio-educational model (Gardner, 2001) with the concept of integrative motivation and L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2009) with the concept of ideal L2 self. The result shows that nearly half of the respondents feel motivated studying Spanish, mainly due to extrinsic motives, such as merit points and grades. Furthermore, about two-thirds aim to travel to Spanish-speaking countries and communicate with target language speakers, which is considered an integrative motivation. About half of the respondents believe that they will speak Spanish well in the future, which indicates a strong future-oriented self-image in their language study.

Föreliggande avhandling syftar till att utveckla läsningen och tolkningen av inskrifterna på de i dagsläget 46 kända vikingatida runblecken. Målet är att ge en så tydlig bild som möjligt av inskriftsgenren vikingatida runbleck. I detta syfte har upprepade fältundersökningar av runblecken genomförts med stereomikroskop. På grundval av på så vis etablerade nya läsningar föreslås nya tolkningar till de mest problematiska ställena i de tidigare tolkade runblecksinskrifterna. Nya tolkningsförslag ges även för runblecksinskrifter som tidigare har ansetts vara olexikaliska. Utöver nya läsningar och tolkningar resulterar denna studie i en kartläggning av relationen mellan runblecksinskrifternas innehåll och form å den enda sidan och runbleckens fyndmiljöer och utseende å den andra. / The aim of this dissertation is to represent as clearly as possible the genre of Viking-Age runic plates by developing readings and interpretations of the inscriptions on the 46 metal plates with runes from the Viking Age known today. Several investigations of the runic plates have been conducted with a stereomicroscope for this purpose. On the basis of the new readings thus established, new interpretations have been proposed for the most problematic sections of previously interpreted inscriptions. New interpretations are also offered for inscriptions on runic plates which have previously been considered non-lexical. As well as providing new readings and interpretations, this study has resulted in clarification of the relationship between the form and content of the inscriptions on the runic plates on the one hand and on their find circumstances and appearance on the other.

This thesis is about whether language affects thinking. It deals with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we speak influences the way we think. This hypothesis is investigated in the domain of caused motion (e.g., ‘The man rolled the tyre into the garage’), by looking at Spanish and Swedish, two languages that show striking differences in how motion events are encoded. The thesis consists of four studies. The first two focus on native speakers of Spanish and Swedish. Study I compares how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe the same set of caused motion events, directing the spotlight at how variable the descriptions are in each language. The results confirm earlier findings from semantic typology regarding the dominant ways of expressing the events in each language: Spanish behaves like a verb-framed language and Swedish like a satellite-framed language (Talmy, 2000). Going beyond previous findings, the study demonstrates—using the tools of entropy and Monte Carlo simulations—that there is markedly more variability in Spanish than in Swedish descriptions. Study II tests whether differences in how Spanish and Swedish speakers describe caused motion events are reflected in how they think about such events. Using a novel similarity arrangement task, it is found that Spanish and Swedish speakers partly differ in how they represent caused motion events if they can access language during the task. However, the differences disappear when the possibility to use language is momentarily blocked by an interference task. The last two studies focus on Swedish learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). Study III explores how Swedish learners (compared to native Spanish speakers) adapt their Spanish motion descriptions to recently encountered input. Using insights from the literature on structural priming, we find that Swedish learners initially expect to encounter in their L2, Spanish, those verb types that are typical in Swedish (manner verbs like ‘roll’) but that, with increasing proficiency, their expectations become increasingly attuned to the typical Spanish pattern of using path verbs (like ‘enter’).  These expectations are reflected in the way L2 learners adapt their own production to the Spanish input. Study IV asks whether recent linguistic experience in an L2 can affect how L2 learners think about motion events. It is found that encountering motion descriptions in the L2 that emphasize different types of information (path or manner) leads L2 speakers to perceive similarity along different dimensions in a subsequent similarity arrangement task. Taken together, the thesis argues that the study of the relation between language and thought affords more valuable insights when not posed as an either-or question (i.e., does language affect thought or not?). In this spirit, the thesis contributes to the wider aim of investigating the conditions under which language does or does not affect thought and explores what the different outcomes tell us about language, thought, and the intricate mechanisms that relate them. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

This dissertation contains a study of the multitext manuscript Codex Holmiensis D 3 based in Material Philology and its focus on the material conditions underlying manuscripts. The aim of the investigation is to describe D 3 in order to increase understanding of its material conditions including content and circumstance of copying, as well as its use and purpose. D 3 contains 14 text works in different genres, for example romances, chronicles, and edifying works. The paper manuscript in the format of a holster book has been dated through its watermarks to around 1487/1488. It was written for the noblewoman Elin Gustavsdotter (Sture). An older manuscript, Codex Holmiensis D 4a, has previously been identified as the exemplar of D 3. These manuscripts are very similar as regards language and content. However, it is shown here that D 4a could not have been the model for D 3 in the case of the romance Flores och Blanzeflor; nor can the manuscript as a whole be a copy of D 4a. There are few traces of use in D 3, but the first work, Herr Ivan Lejonriddaren, has several concluding texts before its final closing. These concluding texts suggest that parts of the work were being read while the rest was being copied. There are also dual quire signatures in this work, implying that the quires were in disarray, possibly because they were in use when the signatures were added. The purpose of D 3 was to educate and provide examples of good and bad behaviour for the nobility. Moreover, there is an owner-epilogue which also stresses courtly ideals and can be linked to the concept of exemplary behaviour. The contents can also be ordered thematically, with first a Carolingian connection, followed by one connected with Ireland and finally one focused on the Christian community. Codicological breaks divide the manuscript into two parts, which leads to the assumption of at least two common exemplars for D 3 and D 4a. An emphasis on the materiality of the manuscript reveals it to be not so much an unwieldy collection of unrelated text witnesses as a book created for a certain person and her time. / <p>Felaktigt ISBN i den tryckta versionen: 978-91-506-2618-6</p>