| 1. |
- Pettersson, Theresia, 1979-
(författare)
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Stockholms stads tänkeböcker : Funktionell texthistoria 1476-1626
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to shed light on language variation and language change in judicial protocols from the municipal court in Stockholm during the period 1476−1626. These documents provide a unique insight into late medieval and early modern use of written vernacular. The main material consists of 700 courtroom notes from seven different periods of time, a hundred documents from each year: 1476, 1499, 1525, 1550, 1575, 1600, and 1626. The study draws theoretically on functional linguistics; more specifically, it utilizes Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, Ulf Teleman’s (1985) theoretical model of language change, as well as dialogism.The results are presented in four analytical chapters. In the first of these, the aim is to systemize the somewhat heterogeneous material, and the corpus is divided in two different ways: one due to judicial content (‘categories of matter’), and one due to textual structure (‘discourse levels’). These systemizations also serve as a methodological foundation for the lexicogrammatical analysis in the following chapters. A main result is that multi-party cases over time develop a functional need for new communication strategies, while unilateral cases already from the beginning seem to bear a more deep-rooted textual stability. In addition, there is a significant increase of discourse level 3, representing communicative events outside the courtroom, in multi-party cases found in texts from 1600 and 1626. In the two following chapters, lexicogrammatical resources of ‘personal reference’ and ‘time and tense’ are analysed. The texts realize different patterns of anaphora, where individuation explains much of the variation: texts with high degree of individuation (criminal cases) materialize a high degree of pronouns, whereas texts regarding property issues materialize low individuation with few pronouns and many full NPs. Regarding the use of tense, the past tense is the most common tense. Still, the study shows an diachronic increase in the use of present tense. The last analytical chapter examines the use of three lexical features: judicial pronouns; word pairs; and nominalizations. The results show that judicial pronouns and word pairs typically occur in registrations matters; nominalizations occur throughout the genre. In the last chapter, the results and implications of the thesis are summated and discussed.The results point towards a pragmatic use of the written language. Although the lexicogrammatical resources are the same during the period, the usages vary. Hence, linguistic variation and change are highly motivated by an intercommunion of contextual factors such as a more solid administrative literacy, a changing litigation, and an increase of legal demands for linguistic precision and documentation. It is argued that the language variety in the genre can be understood as instantiations of different registers.
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| 2. |
- Tykesson-Bergman, Ingela
(författare)
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Samtal i butik : Språklig interaktion melllan biträden och kunder
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
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| 3. |
- Larsson, Nils
(författare)
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Ett möte mellan två skrivkulturer : Några högstadieungdomars syn på och bruk av skrift vid skol- respektive privatskrivande
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this study is to shed light on and describe a number of secondary school students’ writing practices and their attitudes towards these practices.The material used in the study comes from a secondary school in a suburb of Stockholm where most of the students are bilingual. The entire study comprises five different smaller studies: a questionnaire, a number of interviews, classroom observations, observations of one particular boy’s writing practices and studies of the same boy’s texts.The results of these smaller studies show that a form of encounter between two different writing cultures probably takes place in school. These two writing cultures are, on the one hand, one that is concerned with the students’ school work and, on the other, one that constitutes the private writing culture in which young people indulge when they are not occupied with school work. The study shows that there are obvious differences between these two cultures when it comes to students’ attitudes to writing. Their attitudes to private writing are far more positive than to school writing. A further finding of the study is that there are evident differences between the attitudes of girls and boys to writing, although these are most obvious in the students’ school writing. In private writing the differences are smaller, although some boys claim not to write at all in private, even though they send a great many text messages.One possible implication of the study is that school writing would probably benefit from a widening of the concept of writing to become amore communicative form of writing.
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| 4. |
- Wesslén, Karin, 1953-
(författare)
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Att skriva, tala och tänka samhällskunskap : En studie av gymnasisters lärandeprocess
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study is based on the presumption that language is fundamental to the construction of knowledge. In addition, linguistic demands are incorporated in the policy documents of the upper secondary education of Sweden; students shall, during their education, be given the opportunity to appropriate certain linguistic tools. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how teachers and students in upper secondary education manage and utilize the discourse of social science in both speech and writing. More specifically, two classes are studied during three terms. The teachers’ ability to organize and support the students vocally and in written is examined, so are the effects of the teaching on students’ writing. The origin of the study is constituted by a sociocultural stance provided by Vygotskij, Bakhtin and Halliday. A combination of a functional perspective on language and a cognitive is probed, where the study is comparative in nature consisting of an experimental class and a control class. The importance of language for the creation of knowledge has been communicated to the teachers of the experimental class, with provided complementary subject didactic literature. This literature offers support for teachers to augment the use of explicit teaching and enhance student awareness of how conceptual structures mould social science. Qualitative analyses are performed on the basis of teacher-student dialogue and written tasks by a group of selected students. The analytical tools object language – metalanguage, linguistic operations and knowledge structures are developed for the purpose of processing data, and have been combined with the tools activity analysis, subject-related concepts and text activity. The results from the analyses display no difference in the handling of the discourse of social science between the experimental class and the control class. The teachers of the experimental class, like the teacher of the control class, are primarily utilizing object language where knowledge structures are visible, as opposed to a combination of object language – metalanguage. Furthermore, they exhibit diminutive use of dialogue in their teaching. The students of both classes, on their hand, demonstrate an equal progress in textual development. This study concludes that the experimental class has not been provided with sufficiently explicit support to advance in the structuring of knowledge and in level of reasoning. A more efficient support to teachers to manage these analytical tools would, in all probability, give them, and through this the students, an increasingly profound insight into structuring of text activities, the meaning and signalling of linguistic operations, the construction of subject-related concepts and, most importantly, how these three tools are interrelated.
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