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- Blückert, Ann, 1957-
(author)
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Juridiska – ett nytt språk? : En studie av juridikstudenters språkliga inskolning
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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.
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| 2. |
- Wenner, Lena, 1973-
(author)
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När lögnare blir lugnare : En sociofonetisk studie av sammanfallet mellan kort ö och kort u i uppländskan
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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.
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| 3. |
- Falk, Erik, 1962-
(author)
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Verbala förolämpningar i 1630-talets Uppsala : En historisk talaktsanalys
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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.
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