| 1. |
|
|
| 2. |
- Blückert, Ann, 1957-
(författare)
-
Juridiska – ett nytt språk? : En studie av juridikstudenters språkliga inskolning
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation considers the language socialization of law students. One message that the law students encounter is that legal Swedish is an entirely new language. The main aim is to investigate what linguistic norms are conveyed to the students through the teachers’ comments on the students’ texts and through various forms of writing instructions. The material consists of student texts with teacher comments and documentation on various phases of instruction with a focus on writing. Teacher comments on texts written during the first year of the law programme are analyzed and categorized. The analysis stems from two models. The first model is based on different text levels, like formal conventions of writing, sentence construction, text structure, word choice and style, and content. The second model distinguishes different linguistic norms based on three layers: The first layer consists of written language norms in general language practice, the second of academic language norms and the third of norms that are specific to the use of legal language. The results show that word choice and style is the most common category for the teachers’ comments in the first term of the law programme and content is the most common in the second term (with word choice and style the second most common). Formal conventions of writing, sentence structure and different types of grammatical constructions are some of the things the teachers criticize. Surprisingly few of the teachers’ comments concern more overarching aspects such as text structure or the aim and genre of the text. Comments are made on local features in the text, but rarely on more global features. The teaching practice that the writing of law students belongs to entails, among other things, that the students’ texts are assessed anonymously for the sake of fairness. This means that there is not much opportunity for a student to discuss the text with the teacher who commented on and assessed it. The construction of the teachers’ text comments is particularly important when dialogue between student and teacher on the text draft and final version is not an integral part of instruction. The teachers’ written comments are usually brief and do not allow much space for a consideration of linguistic norms and text patterns, which reduces the opportunities for the teachers and the law programme to contribute to a deeper linguistic awareness in the law students.
|
|
| 3. |
- Gröning, Inger, 1945-
(författare)
-
Språk, interaktion och lärande i mångfaldens skola
- 2006
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of an introductory summary and three studies focusing language, interaction, and learning in multilingual schools. The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of student learning in diverse schools. The first study of the thesis examines the field of cooperative learning with the aim of summarizing, in an overview, research that addresses small group activities in heterogeneous classrooms. The overview indicates that this research is dominated by input-output studies. Process-oriented studies of student interaction constitute a smaller part of research within this field.The two subsequent studies were carried out in three multilingual middle school classes in Sweden. The second study concentrates mainly on the second language learners of these classes with the aim of describing language and learning conditions in actual classrooms. A main finding of the study is that second language students fell behind their monolingual Swedish speaking peers in social studies and in other subjects across the curriculum. The study also shows that students form separate groups of Swedes and immigrants inside as well as outside the classroom.The third study investigates small group activities in the above mentioned classes. The aim of the study is to gain insight into students’ joint problem-solving processes and thereby provide a broader understanding of learning as socially and interactionally constituted. The data consists of video recordings of small group conversations from which language-related episodes were identified, transcribed and studied applying conversation analysis methods. The findings show that the students are able to scaffold each other effectively in co-constructing linguistic knowledge through social interaction. At the same time, negotiations of power and status are included in their problem-solving processes.
|
|
| 4. |
- Malmbjer, Anna
(författare)
-
Skilda världar : En språkvetenskaplig undersökning av gruppsamtal som undervisnings- och lärandeform inom högre utbildning
- 2007
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates the group work and group discussions of students. The general aim is to investigate what opportunities and limitations are presented by group discussion as a form of instruction and learning in higher education. An analysis is made of students’ work with the subject matter and the organization of their discussions as multi-party conversations. The material consists of three recorded group discussions between teacher students at the beginning of their studies who carry out identical or nearly identical tasks for the same course. Four different dimensions of the group discussions are analysed: the presuppositions and external conditions of the group discussions; group discussions as a communicative activity type; the content, coherence and topic progressions of the group discussions, and the categorisations and discursive structures in two frequent transepisodic themes. The results show that, even though the conditions for the three conversations are almost identical, the students interpret and carry out the tasks in different ways. To structure the multi-party conversations, the groups use communicative strategies and techniques from activity types that are familiar and similar, like informal conversations, interviews, seminars, lectures, and meetings. However, the choice of a more institutional form of interaction does not automatically result in an institutional approach to the subject. The groups usually apply an informal perspective to the subject matter and use informal language that does not seem to be sufficient in the educational context. The students are primarily focussed on reaching a shared understanding. This means that in most cases the students take an uncritical stance with each other, that is, they engage in what is known as cumulative talk. The results indicate the need for a more assertive participant in the groups in order for the group discussions to function as a learning situation. In order for there to be more critical discussion in group, students must be able to identify a disorienting dilemma that engages them and students must see shared scrutiny and exploration as a means to new knowledge and understanding.
|
|
| 5. |
- Persson, Kristina, 1965-
(författare)
-
Svensk brevkultur på 1800-talet : Språklig och kommunikationsetnografisk analys av en familjebrevväxling
- 2005
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
|
|
| 8. |
- Wenner, Lena, 1973-
(författare)
-
När lögnare blir lugnare : En sociofonetisk studie av sammanfallet mellan kort ö och kort u i uppländskan
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The phenomenon of an ongoing sound change leads in some cases to the pronunciation of short ö becoming more like that of short u. This thesis examines the relationship between short ö and u in Uppland Swedish. The localities included in the investigation were Uppsala, Norrtälje, Östervåla and Gräsö. In particular, the thesis examines the effects of age, gender and social status on the acquisition of a pronunciation where the phonemes are produced in a similar way, and whether the change occurs earlier in some words than others. The informants on Gräsö appear to have the highest occurrence of the merger, while those in Norrtälje are best at keeping ö and u apart. In general, men have a smaller difference between ö and u than women. Three different age groups were analysed and the results show that the oldest informants have the largest difference between ö and u and the youngest informants have the smallest difference. There are no significant differences between the three social status groups, but there is a tendency for those with the lowest social status to be better at keeping the phonemes apart than those with the highest social status. 13 minimal (or near-minimal) pairs were analysed to investigate whether the phonetic context has an effect on the degree to which ö and u are becoming more similar. The study shows that the smallest phonetic difference is found for word pairs with r occurring in the preceding or following context. The largest phonetic distance was found in word pairs beginning with a vowel. The study also examined whether there is a relationship between production, perception and attitude to u-sounding ö in Uppsala. By combining the production test results with the informants’ categorisation of u and ö in the perception test, the study shows that the informants with a small phonetic distance in their own speech were better at categorising stimuli correctly than the speakers who had a larger phonetic distance between ö and u in their own speech.
|
|
| 9. |
- Bockgård, Gustav, 1975-
(författare)
-
Syntax som social resurs : En studie av samkonstruktionssekvensers form och funktion i svenska samtal
- 2004
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- One prerequisite in order for conversation to take place is cooperation between the participants. In other words, each person must adjust his or her behavior according to the actions of the other participants. One method that the speakers use in interaction is the co-construction of syntactic units. A speaker can complete or add on to a unit begun by another person. The subject of this dissertation is conversational sequences containing co-constructed units. The methods employed are drawn from the field known as interactional linguistics, which can be viewed as a subdiscipline of conversation analysis (CA) with influences from linguistics. The focus of interactional linguistics is the investigation of how linguistic forms interact with various social norms and structures and with the actions carried out during interaction. As a starting point for the analysis, a distinction between different categories of co-constructions is made. The various categories have quite different prototypical functions when they occur in an interactive situation. However, there are also certain functional qualities that cross the boundaries between categories. A very prominent pattern in the material is that speakers do not continue another person’s utterance in order to interrupt them or manipulate their words. Instead, the producer of the syntactic continuation strengthens solidarity between herself and the other speaker by helping, showing sympathy, indicating understanding, or agreeing with that person. “Sponging off” another speaker’s syntactic unit constitutes an excellent resource for initiating and maintaining various cooperative projects.
|
|
| 10. |
- Falk, Erik, 1962-
(författare)
-
Verbala förolämpningar i 1630-talets Uppsala : En historisk talaktsanalys
- 2011
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates verbal insults recorded in judicial protocols in the Swedish university townUppsaladuring the 1630s. The aim of the study is to analyze insults as linguistic formulations and social acts in Early Modern Swedish society. The methodology of the study is guided by speech act theory and ethnography of communication in order to examine the lexical realizations of insults and verbal action in different speech communities.From a total of 652 protocols in two series of records from the city court and the university council inUppsalain the 1630s, sections of text were excerpted that registered insults. The material under investigation comprises 179 cases that contained 276 insults. The descriptive meta-linguistic expressions for insults are rich as well as varied, and the performed insults are reported with or without invectives and as direct or indirect speech.Clear patterns emerged in the investigation by performing various semantic-, pragmatic-, and discourse-level analyses of the judicial records. Insults among city people were commonly interpreted as truth-conditional representative speech acts and thereby were viewed as false accusations of various kinds. In the academic world, however, the truth value of the insult was of minor importance. The speech act was regarded mainly as an expressive utterance of anger and frustration.Through a comparison of the city and university judicial records, it is shown that the patterns of insults reveal a general semantic process in which primarily concrete, objective meanings come to fulfill increasingly interpersonal and pragmatic speech functions.
|
|
| 11. |
- Hagberg-Persson, Barbro, 1950-
(författare)
-
Barns mångfaldiga språkresurser i mötet med skolan
- 2006
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates language proficiency in children aged 6–8 in their contact with school – both from an oral and written language perspective. The study is predicated on the current situation in Sweden, where school classes today have a more heterogeneous composition than ever before. This means that the focus of this study is not just on the age and sex of the children but also on their different language backgrounds. The aim of the dissertation is to map out the development of the oral and written proficiency of both monolingual and bilingual children at the beginning of school, individually and in groups. This study belongs in essence to the field of research known as qualitative school ethnography. Material for the study was gathered during a single school year in a school located in a mid-sized Swedish town. To examine the children’s language proficiency, three different analytical instruments were combined to produce more reliable results. The results show that the children’s Swedish proficiency varies in a similar way across the group of informants regardless of language background. With respect to the bilingual children’s proficiency in their mother tongue/first language, the results show that only one child had command in a language other than Swedish that was sufficient for his age. The study confirms that a monolingual norm prevails in the school that the study was carried out in, which means that it is no different than other Swedish schools for which previous studies mapped out language relations. The results also show that the children’s different language backgrounds do not affect the interaction pattern during small group activities; however, the age and sex of the children do. The results further show that the choice of small group activities and the formation of heterogeneous small groups allow the children the opportunity to solve tasks in which they can support each other and benefit from each other’s different competencies.
|
|
| 12. |
|
|
| 13. |
- Ohlsson, Maria
(författare)
-
Språkbruk, skämt och kön : Teoretiska modeller och sociolingvistiska tillämpningar
- 2003
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
|
|
| 14. |
- Strzelecka, Elzbieta, 1961-
(författare)
-
Svenska partikelverb med in, ut, upp och ner : En semantisk studie ur kognitivt perspektiv
- 2003
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation, the meanings of the Swedish particles in ‘in’, ut ‘out’, upp ‘up’ and ner ‘down’ are analysed when these words function as verbal particles and thereby, together with the verb, build phrasal verbs. The analysis, primarily based on cognitive semantics, includes semantically regular as well as lexicalised phrasal verbs, and seeks to explain the polysemy of the particles. The material consists of 884 different phrasal verbs, represented by 5,197 instances. The verbal particles are analysed in different contexts, including the domain of physical space as well as other domains. The starting point of the analysis is, in each case, the prototypical (spatial) meaning of the particle. The investigation shows that the varied, often disparate meanings of the verbal particles are motivated by image schemas and their transformations, and by metonymy and metaphorical usage. The meanings of the particles are linked to each other through family resemblance and make up a network. The verbal particles upp and in generally designate direction towards the centre and often have positive connotations, whereas the verbal particles ut and ner denote movement towards the periphery and have rather negative connotations. Vertical orientation appears to dominate the structuring of the domain of physical space in Swedish. For example, a movement in relation to a vertically orientated container (a container without a roof) is described using the vertical particles upp/ner and not the container particles in/ut. In a few special contexts, the particles examined indicate the speaker’s perspective.
|
|
| 15. |
- Sörlin, Marie, 1974-
(författare)
-
Att ställa till en scen : Verbala konflikter i svensk dramadialog 1725–2000
- 2008
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with interactional patterns in verbal disputes as portrayed in the written dialogue of Swedish drama over three centuries. The overarching aim is to contribute to research into conflict talk in Swedish dialogue, but also to contribute to historical pragmatics and linguistic stylistics.The teoretical and methodological framework combines elements from conversation analysis and theories of communicative events (activity types). A corpus of 30 drama texts, written during the 18th century, the late 19th century, and the late 20th century, was examined for examples of conflict events that are lexically marked as such in the texts (by words such as argument, dispute, quarrel etc.).A total of 47 conflict events were identified in 21 of the 30 drama texts. The construction of the beginning of the three most significant types of conflict sequences found within 45 of the 47 events, totalling 111 sequences, is analysed in detail. The three sequence types concern differences in opinion (disagreement sequences), accusations (complaint sequences) and directives (rejection sequences).One result of the study is that complaint sequences are shown to be by far the most common conflict pattern in the data. Another result is that few differences are found regarding the construction of the sequences over three centuries. For the most part, it is the same sort of moves that are frequent no matter which period the data stem from. One conclusion is therefore that the conflict patterns in drama dialogue appear to be relatively stable over time.The study also deals with the dramatic functions of the conflict patterns (the events, sequence types or moves). Two functions are discussed, namely plot development and characterisation. While all conflict can further the process of characterisation, for example by showing the negotiation of differences in power between the characters, less than half of the events further the plot by having an effect on the disputants or other characters in the drama.
|
|
| 16. |
- Vigsö, Orla
(författare)
-
Valretorik i text och bild : En studie i 2002 års svenska valaffischer
- 2004
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Posters have been used in political communication for more than a century, and are still an important element in the election campaigns. However, few studies have been devoted to the way in which text and image work together in order to obtain the rhetorical goal of making voters vote for a specific party.In this study, election posters in the 2002 general election in Sweden from all parties represented in the Swedish parliament are analysed. The context of this specific sample of political communication is described through a sociological approach inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, and through theories of political marketing. The model for analysis of the posters combine semiotics and rhetoric in order to present a model capable of analysing both text and image, and the way in which they are used in order to influence and persuade voters.The conclusions are that Swedish parties favour textual messages and not visual elements, and that when visual elements are used, these are mostly portraits of candidates. So apparently, the predominance of visual elements in advertising does not show in election posters. Neither can one claim that personalisation is a predominant element, as the total percentage of posters depicting candidates is quite low. The tendency towards negative campaigning seen in earlier elections is not present in the 2002 posters, and the rhetoric is mostly epideictic and thus aimed at keeping already convinced voters rather than attracting new ones. This might indicate that the posters have lost their role as means of attracting new voters and have become more of an “internal” affair, telling the party’s voters, in a way which presupposes shared points of view, that the party is there to be voted for as always. The posters thus fulfil a symbolic function of binding together adherents rather than attracting newcomers.
|
|
| 17. |
- Walder, Renate, 1958-
(författare)
-
Fokus på föra : Om svenska funktionsverbsfrasers semantik och valens, med särskild utgångspunkt i verbet föra
- 2004
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Functional verb structures, e.g. to have a break, to take into account, consist of a functional verb and an abstract noun (in a nominal phrase, NP, or a prepositional phrase, PP). The purpose of this thesis is to test whether three of the most central claims about these structures apply to Swedish functional verb structures with the verb föra. According to the first claim, the functional verb has lost most of its “original” meaning. In order to test this claim, a semantic analysis of the verb föra is presented. The analysis is based on the network model of meaning. It is suggested that the functional verb doesn’t “lose” meaning, but rather that meaning is partially suppressed as a result of restrictions governing domain-mapping within a metaphor. According to the second claim, nouns in functional verb structures do not take attributes. It is to be expected that this claim will be proven wrong because nouns in functional verb structures are predicates that have arguments and these appear as attributes on the syntactic level. In order to test the second claim, a corpus of functional verb structures with the verb föra has been collected. The valency of all the nouns in the functional verb structures within the corpus has been analysed. The analysis shows that most of these nouns have arguments that appear as attributes.The third claim states that the noun in a functional verb structure cannot change from singular to plural or from indefinite to definite form. This claim seems to apply only to functional verb structures with PP. It is suggested that the reason why functional verb structures with NP and PP differ in this respect lies in the way these different structures express aktionsart. The only way for a functional verb structure with NP to change aktionsart from unbounded to bounded is by changing the form of the NP. Functional verb structures with PP always express bounded aktionsart. The form of the PP has no impact on the aktionsart of the structure, there is therefore no need for the PP to change its form.
|
|
