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Native deaf signers express epistemic modality by different means: mental-state words, clause- internal particles, signs indicating hypothesis, and nonmanually. The data for this study come from two unrelated sign languages, Danish Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language. In dialogues the signers use both calques of majority-language words and signs that appear to have emerged in the sign languages only. Based on the multifunctionality of some word forms, the origin of the epistemic modal particles may be traced back to tags, interjections, and lexical signs, a route motivated by interaction and also found in unrelated spoken languages. Furthermore, in both sign languages, the first-person pronoun can be used, without a verb, as an epistemic “anchor” of a proposition, a construction that seems specific to languages in the gestural-visual modality. Another modality-specific feature is the possibility of transferring the expression of a marker of epistemic uncertainty from one articulator to another.

Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur myndigheten Försvarsmaktens jämställdhetssatsning mellan åren 2015 och 2018 visuellt och språkligt kom till uttryck i två reklamkampanjer som lanserades under samma tidsperiod. Studien vill även ge ökad förståelse för hur bild och text samspelar i reklam som ämnar bidra till ökad jämställdhet. Utifrån studiens syfte lyder frågeställningarna: Hur framställs män respektive kvinnor i reklamkampanjerna? Hur kan framställningen av män respektive kvinnor relateras till handlingsplanen och Försvarsmaktens definition av jämställdhet? Hur samspelar text och bild i reklamkampanjerna för att påvisa jämställdhet? Materialet som studien bygger på består av totalt 12 reklambilder från reklamkampanjerna Vi låter Sverige vara ifred (2017–2018) och Många har många frågor (2018), sex bilder från vardera kampanj. Studien utgår från ett sociosemiotisk perspektiv och bygger teoretiskt främst på språkmodellen för systemisk-funktionell grammatik (SFG). Materialet undersöks genom metoden sociosemiotisk multimodal analys och fokuserar på den ideationella och den interpersonella metafunktionen i bild och språk. Resultatet av analysen visade att Försvarsmaktens jämställdhetssatsning kom till uttryck i reklamkampanjerna genom att framställa män och kvinnor som jämlikar. Kvinnor, och till viss del även män, förekommer i sammanhang och roller de inte vanligtvis syns i, vilket är uttryck för en icke-stereotyp framställning av könen. Kvinnor får ta plats både visuellt och språkligt i militära sammanhang som historiskt varit mansdominerade. Slutligen visade analysen att bilderna är det som starkast påvisar jämställdhet i reklamkampanjerna. Bilderna hjälper i flera fall mottagaren att förstå textens betydelse i reklambilderna.

The corona virus has spread steadily and led to consequences on a larger scale than anyone could have imagined, and it is not at all surprising that we want to find someone to hold responsible. Who is to blame for this terrible situation that we have to live through? By taking an ecolinguistic approach, primarily inspired by Arran Stibbe (2021), this study explores how human and non-human animals are being blamed for the corona crisis in a corpus based on 15 news articles. To demonstrate blame through linguistic portrayal, the data are processed through four different lenses: facticity, appraisal, erasure and salience. The study finds that both human and non-human animals in general are portrayed as being to blame for the corona crisis. However, bats are most frequently portrayed as the responsible entity and human blame is often downplayed by linguistic erasure. Ecolinguistics can convey how language establishes asymmetries between groups and uncover how those asymmetries have an effect upon a broader social context. With this in mind, the way the texts blame entities for the corona crisis has real-life consequences. Firstly, non-human animals risk being killed to reduce the spread of the virus based on shallow arguments and groundless evaluations. Secondly, human blame risks not being evaluated properly and therefore there is a risk that harmful human behaviour can continue.

Denna studie ämnar undersöka rollspråket, det vill säga sättet fiktiva karaktärer talar på, i den japanska översättningen av Pippi Långstrump och jämföra det med den svenska källtexten. Syftet med studien är att ta reda på om rollspråk förekommer, vilken kategori det tillhör samt hur rollspråket förändrar läsarens uppfattning av karaktärerna. Studien bygger på en analys som följer Satoshi Kinsuis teorier om rollspråk. Analysen visar att det finns nyansskillnader i karaktärernas språk men huruvida de ska räknas som rollspråk eller inte är en öppen fråga. This study intends to investigate the role language, which is the way fictional characters speak, in the Japanese translation of Pippi Longstocking and compare it to the Swedish source text. The purpose of this study is to find out if role language occurs, what category it belongs to and how the readers perception of the characters change due to the use of role language. The study is based on an analysis that follows Satoshi Kinsui's theories regarding role language. The analysis shows that there are nuances in the characters way of speaking but whether it could be valid as role language or not is an open question.

An analysis was made of the personal and non-personal post-Soviet political anecdotes. It is argued that post-Soviet political anecdotes have been created during 2000–2019. The starting point is that the Russian word анекдот carries particular, cultural information and does not have a systematic equivalent in Swedish ot English, i.e. it can not be directly translated to English as anecdote or joke or to Swedish as anekdot, skämt, or vits. This was demonstrated in a brief comparison with Swedish jokes and anecdotes. Using three text corpora with a total of 3,170 political anecdotes, I examined: (a) how events and politicians are described and how this can be decoded (corpus 1 and 3); (b) what topics are most common (corpus 2 and 3). A more in-depth analysis of cultural references, pragmatics, semantics and deixis was made of 33 selected anecdotes, which were considered to be representative for the genre. The analysis showed that the thematics tend to be recurring, that few new anecdotes are added, old anecdotes are repeated and that the genre has undergone considerable changes during the past two decades. Such a change is the abscense of post-Soviet anecdotes with significant critique against politicians or sensitive political topics, as compared to earlier anecdotes, and a simplification of the genre. This development is a possible result of that anecdotes are no longer told as often as during previous decades, as well as the new Russian law § 282 implemented as of spring 2019, which affects the creation and distribution of anecdotes. By extrapolation, the observed changes could lead to parts of the most common anecdotes becoming tematic jokes in the future.

This study aims to examine how meaning and value is created in IKEA’s internal and external means of communication. I want to see if the values expressed in the internal and external communication tangent. I will additionally inspect how IKEA present themselves depending on whether the recipients are internal coworkers or external customers. The last thing to be inspected is the internal and external “ideal reader”, which is translated from the Swedish term “modelläsare” (Björkvall 2003). Furthermore, the objective of the study is to contribute to the field of linguistic research. This is done by exposing how values are used to shape different versions of the identity of organizations internally and externally. The internal documents consist of a vision and a “värdegrund”, in English called “fundamental values”, and the external communication entails three images from the advertising campaign “Where life happens”. I analyzed the material through the ideational metafunction belonging to the theory of systemic functional grammar and through a sociosemiotic multimodal analysis. The result reveals that nearly all of the expressed values occur both internally and externally. An example of prominent values is togetherness, inclusiveness and openness. However, the way in which IKEA present themselves towards internal and external target audiences varies markedly, as does the constructed ideal reader. The internal ideational representation of IKEA marks the coworker as part of the organization. At the same time multiple demands describing how the coworker should act and think greatly constricts and controls the internal audience. The external recipients, however, are free to be of a varying kind. IKEA expresses how the external target audience includes everyone. As a result, there are no expectations of who the external ideal reader should be, with one exception. The internal and external ideal readers are both part of a community, as contrasting to being portrayed as solitary.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how people of varying ages, generations and genders use a selection of Swedish words that occurs in the Finnish language that is spoken in Sweden. The informants examined are originated from Finland or has at least one parent from Finland and speaks Finnish. In order to answer the aim and research questions for this study a quantitative method has been used and a survey with 277 replies has been accomplished. The result of the study shows that the Sweden Finns are using the investigated Sweden Finnish words. Some variations occurred due to age, generation and gender but despite these variations the words are overall used to a greater degree in relative to the investigated aspects.

This paper treats the relationship between form and meaning in conditional constructions in Damascus Arabic (DA). More specifically, it treats two, main formal categories of DA conditional constructions: the conditional marker and the verb morphology and, further, how these are related to various degrees of conditional hypotheticality. Apart from the introductory section (Introduction, Aim, Method and Classification of DA), the paper consists of three larger sections: Section 2 gives a basic, theoretical background of crosslinguistic conditional constructions as well as what previous scholars have said about the crosslinguistic relationship between conditional form and meaning. It is found that many of these scholars tend to describe form, but neglect deeper discussions of meaning. This section also provides a general background of the verbal system in DA and the primary TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood) categories of DA verb forms. The main analysis of this thesis is found in section 3. In this section, I first suggest a method of analysis called ‘the hypotheticality continuum’ which is then employed in the following sub-sections, following Comrie (1986). Thereafter, attention is first paid to DA protasis markers and how the choice of marker is related to hypotheticality. Thirdly, I deal with verb morphology and how the choice of verb form together with a given protasis marker contributes to creating even more fine-grained distinctions of hypotheticality in DA conditional constructions. Lastly, a presentation of results and final discussion in section 4 conclude the paper.

The aim of this study is to create and evaluate a grammar for a visual language, which is to be used in the medical domain. The grammar was created with gestalt laws in mind. The grammar must also fit, in part, with the ontology of the clinical terminology SNOMED CT. Evaluation was conducted with think aloud tests and with complementary semi-structured interviews. The participants overall believed that a complementary visual language for patient journals would be useful, and the majority understood the logic behind the grammar. Most complaints were about some of the pictograms in the icons of the grammar, which were unclear, and some requested a clear time axis to be included. Another suggestionwas to add pop-up boxes with more detailed information. This is only the first step in a big project and there is potential for many improvements - future development of this visual language should be done in iterations by teams of complementing competencies.

I detta arbete undersöks sökverktyget Ngram Viewer och dess ryska delkorpus, innehållande totalt drygt 67 miljarder ord från närmre 600 000 böcker, utgivna mellan 1607 och 2009. Arbetet består av tre huvudsakliga delar; en översiktligt jämförande undersökning av andra ryskspråkiga korpusar, därefter en mindre litteraturstudie av tidigare forskning genomförd med hjälp av den ryska delkorpusen i Ngram Viewer och slutligen egna tester och pilotundersökningar av densamma. Syftet med uppsatsen är framförallt att undersöka Ngram Viewers möjligheter och begränsningar i en större kontext av korpusforskning. Pilotstudierna i Ngram Viewer fokuserar framförallt på relationen mellan begreppen русский och российский (och därmed indirekt förhållandet mellan Русь och Россия‏), bland annat genom jämförelse med tidigare studier (Griščenko, 2013, 2014a). En av de viktigaste insikterna från arbetets första två delar är korpusens bristande funktioner vad gäller hantering av skrivtecken som avskaffades vid den ryska stavningsreformen 1917. Pilotundersökningarna i arbetets tredje del avgränsas därför främst till material från åren 1900–2008. Att de lingvistiska annotationerna i korpusen uteslutande är automatiskt genererade samt att man inte har direkt tillgång till korpusens källmaterial utgör också viktiga faktorer som begränsar Ngram Viewers användningsområde. В этой работе изучается корпус и инструмент Google Books Ngram Viewer и как можно использовать корпус для исследования исторических изменений русского языка. Русский подкорпус Ngram Viewer содержит около 67 миллионов слов из почти 600 000 книг, изданных 1607–2009 гг. Исследование состоит из трех частей. В первой части сравнивается Ngram Viewer с другими корпусами русского языка. Во второй части предлагается обзор научной литературы относительно Ngram Viewer, и его русского подкорпуса. В третьей части приводятся собственные пилотажные исследования с помощью Ngram Viewer. Прежде всего, рассматривается использование слов русский и российский, в частности, по сравнению с исследованиями Грищенко 2013 и 2014а. Мы пришли к выводу, что Ngram Viewer в первую очередь может быть использован как инструмент количественного анализа русского языка 20-ого и 21-ого веков. По техническим причинам корпус оказался менее полезным для изучения более древних текстов (до орфографической реформы 1917 г.).

In gesture studies character viewpoint and observer viewpoint (McNeill 1992) characterize co-speech gestures depending on whether the gesturer’s hand and body imitate a referent’s hand and body or the hand represents a referent in its entirety. In sign languages, handling handshapes and entity handshapes are used in depicting predicates. Narratives in Danish Sign Language (DTS) elicited to make signers describe an event from either the agent’s or the patient’s perspective demonstrate that discourse perspective is expressed by which referent, the agent or the patient, the signers represent at their own locus. This is reflected in the orientation and movement direction of the manual articulator, not by the type of representation in the articulator. Signers may also imitate the gaze direction of the referent represented at their locus or have eye contact with the addressees. When they represent a referent by their own locus and simultaneously have eye contact with the addressee, the construction mixes referent perspective and narrator perspective. This description accords with an understanding of linguistic perspective as grounded in bodily perspective within a physical scene (Sweetser 2012) and relates the deictic and attitudinal means for expressing perspective in sign languages to the way perspective is expressed in spoken languages.

Meetings are important arenas where institutional roles and relationships are acted out. Conversation analysis, a data-driven qualitative methodology utilized to study naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, was used in this study to uncover the mechanisms behind meeting talk. In a meeting shared understanding is essential and must be done in an economical manner. One interactional device to reach common agreement are formulations that summarize what has been said or draw out its relevant implication. In this essay, a sub-class of formulations, pre-closing formulations, are in focus. They serve to close the current topic and move on to the next. The aim of this thesis was to find out what kind of interactional devices are used in pre-closure formulations. The findings from the analysis of data, from a cross-functional team meeting at Ericsson in Stockholm, show how a pre-closing formulation followed by silence from the participants is the basis for an agreement. Furthermore the chair can utilize a pre-closing formulation to emphasize the topic of discussion and to influence the sense-making and thus “do” leadership. With a pre-closing formulation the meeting participants can be prepared to be held accountable for the status in a project. However, a pre-closing must not lead to a closing of the topic, the findings show how meeting participants act to continue after the chair’s candidate pre-closing formulation.

Das digitale Spielen hat in den letzten Jahren stetig zugenommen und scheint heute ein selbstverständlicher Teil im alltäglichen Leben vieler Menschen zu sein. Eine deutliche Verbindung zwischen der digitalen Welt und der englischen Sprache ist zu beobachten, und man kann sich fragen, ob es immer so war. Ziel der Arbeit ist es, die Verwendung von Anglizismen in der digitalen Computerspiel- und Videospielwelt zu untersuchen, um herauszufinden, ob und inwiefern sich eine zunehmende Globalisierung in der Domäne des digitalen Spielens nachweisen lässt. Dazu wird der Sprachgebrauch ausgewählter Benutzer-Kommentare eines deutschen Spieleforums aus dem Jahr 2013 (teilweise auch vom Beginn des Jahres 2014) und der von 2004 untersucht. Die grundlegende Frage lautet: Wie unterscheidet sich der Gebrauch von Anglizismen in der digitalen Spielwelt, wenn man die Situation heute mit der von 2004 vergleicht?

This is a qualitative analysis that, based on systemic functional linguistics, or SFL, and genre theory, has aimed to study the genre pedagogical implications on written language as they occur in narrative stories and expositions whilst the model is introduced. Systemic functional linguistics is a linguistic theory that views the organisation of language as functional options for meaning; language is a set of resources to channel meaning through realisation. Genre theory elucidates the pragmatic and educational uses of SFL in the categorizing of language in configurations of meanings as they are set and understood in different cultures. The purpose of the survey is to do so with focus on successful and less successful writers by attempting to answer two primal issues: How is development of written language in reference to the introduction of the genre pedagogical model visible in the studied texts? How does genre pedagogical teaching influence successful and less successful writers as visible in their writing with a certain purpose? To answer these issues the survey is based on narratives and expositions written by high school students who have been divided into two groups according to the purpose of the survey. One text in each genre has been written by the students before and after lessons based on the genre pedagogical learning wheel explaining the relevant genres. Thereafter the texts have been analysed, both in accordance to the staging of the relevant genres, but also with an inductive focus on the variations of the texts. The results show that significant development of the texts, after the genre pedagogical lessons, is visible in both student groups in different ways. This demonstrates how the genre pedagogical approach to teaching language is a method that is able to lift students regardless of their prior merits.

Der Band versammelt ausgewählte Beiträge des IX.Nordisch-Baltischen Germanistentreffens, das vom14. bis 16. Juni 2012 im Konferenzhotel Solstrandin Os, ca. 30 Kilometer südlich von Bergen amBjørnafjord gelegen, stattfand. 19 Jahre nach demdritten Treffen des Nordischen Germanistenverbandesin Oslo 1993 lud der seit 2002 auch die baltischenGermanistiken repräsentierende Nordisch-BaltischeGermanistenverband mit dem NBGT 2012 zum zweitenMal nach Norwegen ein. Die Dokumentation bildetdie thematische Struktur der Konferenz ab und zeigtin vier Sektionen mit jeweils literatur-, sprach-, lehr-/lern- und kulturwissenschaftlichem Schwerpunkt diethematische, methodische und theoretische Vielfaltder nordisch-baltischen Germanistik auf.

People usually commence an argument in hope for persuading the other party. These arguments can be a part of their job or personal life, which may influence the life of people around them or sometimes in case of a political debate, can affect lives of millions of people. The situation can get more challenging if the argument is produced in a language other than someone's mother tongue and in this respect, language proficiency can be of great value to them. One of the most important goals of language teaching classes is to teach the students of foreign languages how to develop information processes in order to express themselves. In the present study, the performance of seven students who study English in a private language school in Iran, is analyzed in a debate on 'globalization'. These Farsi speaking learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) used some collaborative and individual strategies in the process of interactive argumentation. It can be said that this debate met the requirements of a 'pro et contra' (for and against) argument mentioned by Naess (2005). The views that are in favor of the debate's subject are mentioned as well as the views against it. It does not seem to have a conclusion and the views were not weighed against each other, they were merely introduced and both sides were indicated. This mainly took place due to of lack of time to consider all the aspects of the arguments. Therefore, it can be maintained that the result of this argumentation was 'globalization now and later'. According to Hirsch's 'minimal model of ideal interactive argumentation', this may seem to be a terrible situation, but in fact it is "a very realistic assumption to make about argumentation as an on-going interactive enterprise" (1987: 440).

In the present study I have conducted a linguistic investigation of the textbook series Spotlight 7, 8 and 9 (Natur & Kultur 2008-2010) which is used in grades 7-9. The purpose of the investigation is to examine what gender roles are presented in the material. The theoretical approach is Halliday’s (2004) Functional Grammar Theory. The second part of the study presents a discourse analysis of three selected texts from Spotlight 7, 8 and 9 where the texts as well as the related pictures are analysed. The results from the whole study are compared to the goals on gender equality stated in the National Curriculum and the Educational Act. The result of the study reveals that the gender roles presented in the teaching material are less stereotypic than hypothesized but that, in accordance with my hypotheses, males were represented to a higher extent than females and transgenders. This result suggests that the material only partly fulfills the demands on gender equality that is found in the National Curriculum and the Educational Act.

Where does a language come from? Every language has its own history and during the course of that history, it might change, evolve or even die. Why do languages borrow from each other? Borrowing seems to be true for every language that has contact with another, even for major cultural languages such as Greek. Every case though is unique in itself. From which languages can a language borrow? Speakers of a certain language borrow from the people that they come in contact with, face-to-face or otherwise. How do languages incorporate those borrowings? Lexical borrowings are responsible for as much as ninety percent of the Albanian vocabulary and due to globalization, this percentage is about to grow even more. With a great history of three thousand years behind it and being neighbor to the two great civilizations of the then known world, Ancient Greece and Rome, Albanian has borrowed more words than any other European language.Lexical borrowings are tightly connected to the history and culture of this nation. Depending on the presence of which foreign power ruled in the Albanian territories at which time, these borrowings have had as a primary source either Greek (Ancient, Middle or New), Latin or Turkish with a few minor interferences from Gothic and Slavic languages.Every language has its own reasons for borrowing from another language. There are two main reasons: prestige and need. Albanian is not an exception. Albanian has borrowed from Greek and Latin both on the basis of need and on the basis of prestige. The primary objective for this master thesis is the identification of the vast numbers of lexical borrowings in the Albanian language, which languages they primarily come from, why the Albanian language has borrowed so many words during the course of its history and how those borrowings are incorporated in the Albanian language.

Artiklen er en kritik af den danske lingvist Louis Hjelmslevs begreb om indholdsform, sådan som det bl.a. er blevet overtaget af den funktionelle lingvistik i Danmark (Peter Harder, Lars Heltoft m.fl.). Hjelmslevs begreb om indholdsform er tænkt som led i en sofistikeret udvidelse af Saussures oprindelige tegnbegreb, forstået som en solidarisk forbindelse mellem et udtryk og et meningsindhold. Med baggrund i en formalsemantisk forståelse af meningsbegrebet vises det i artiklen, hvordan Hjelmslevs begreb om indholdsform i virkeligheden kollapser og bringer Hjelmslevs tegnbegreb i nærheden af Saussures problematiske meningsbegreb. Dette taler for, at man bør forlade ethvert strukturalistisk meningsbegreb og i stedet operere ud fra et formalsemantisk begreb om mening.

Sprogforskningen har en lang tradition i Danmark. For at give et billede af dens aktuelle rækkevidde har en gruppe lingvister fra Københavns Universitet samlet 70 korte artikler fra landets forskellige forskningsmiljøer, der præsenterer aktuelle resultater fra meget forskellige forskningsfelter inden for sprog. Der gives smagsprøver på grammatiske og syntaktiske problemstillinger, og der søges svar på fonetiske, sprogpædagogiske, sproghistoriske, pragmatiske og tekstanalytiske spørgsmål. Et antal artikler tager problematikken op omkring ordbøger, deres fremstilling og betydning, mens andre tager sociale problemer op i forbindelse med hvad sproget siger om den der taler, og hvilke holdninger mennesker har til forskellige sprog. Endelig beskæftiger en række artikler sig med sprogfilosofiske spørgsmål. Teksterne bygger på aktuel forskning og samlingen er tænkt som en relativt letlæst orientering om hvad der foregår i sprogforskningen i Danmark i dag.

This study deals with linguistic interference in abstracts of scientific papers translated fromPortuguese into English collected from the online scientific database SciELO. The aim of thisstudy is to analyze linguistic interference phenomena in 50 abstracts from the field ofhumanities, history, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. The types ofinterference discussed are syntactic/grammatical, lexical/semantic and pragmatic interference.This study is mainly qualitative. Therefore, the qualitative method was used, in order to findout what kinds of interference phenomena occur in the abstracts, analyze the possible reasonsfor their occurrence and present some suggestions to avoid the problems discussed. Besides, aquantitative analysis was carried out to interpret the results (figures and percentages) of thestudy. The analysis is aimed at providing some guidance for future translations. This studyconcluded that translations from a Romance language (in this case Portuguese) into aGermanic language (English) tend to be more objective and/or sometimes lose originalmeanings attributed in the source text. Another important finding was that abstracts from thehumanities, history and social sciences present more cases of interference phenomena than theones belonging to technology and natural sciences. These findings imply that many abstractswithin these areas have high probability to be subject to the phenomena discussed and,consequently, have parts of their original meaning lost or misinterpreted in the target texts.Keywords: abstracts, bilingualism, cross-linguistic influence, linguistic interference, linguistictransfer, non-native speakers of English, Portuguese-English interference, source text, targettext, translation. Study on linguistic interference

When crises develop, people are confronted with difficulties beyond those experienced in normal everyday activities. Due to the perceived threats inherent to such situations, familiar behaviors may prove ineffective, and such attempts can pose dangerous and unpredictable risks. Crises are extreme situations, occurring at the very edges of human experience. Oral communication in such situations cannot be casual; the seriousness of the situation demands exceptional communicative performance on the part of the participants. Therefore, certainties about everyday communication conventions are called into question. The following work examines conversations during which the participants were involved in an extreme situation. In this particular crisis, a politically motivated kidnapping, the personal involvement of the interlocutors is substantial. A clear and present fear of the situation escalating and the possibility of a failure to anticipate the resulting reactions from the other party(ies) characterize the communicative acts of those involved. Recorded telephone calls during the occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm by members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) on April 24, 1975 comprise the basis for this analysis. One of the occupiers speaks with various interlocutors located in an adjacent embassy building. These interlocutors are relatives of the hostages, the Swedish Minister of Justice, and a German official charged with leading the negotiations. In this study, the communicative processes of the crisis are reconstructed. In order to show how the interlocutors attempt to reach their goals in this tense situation with the resources available to them, as well as what they in fact achieve, ethnographic methods of analysis have been employed. This study shows how, despite strong conflicting interests and motives, a shared reality is built through the actions of the interlocutors. The interaction between two key figures in the early stages of the crisis can even be characterized as a form of coalition building. An explanation as to why this collaboration is not retained in the subsequent course of the events, however, leading to an escalation of the situation, is also presented. Furthermore, the following work sets forth qualities needed to interactively build a coalition in a precarious crisis situation, which has arisen between parties characterized by diametrically opposed aims.

http://evolution.dk

Udgivelsesdato: juni

Textual and communicative competence lies at the heart of the skills of a professional linguistic mediator in general. Such skills are particularly important in specialized writing, which requires deep conceptual and contextual knowledge. One of the main objectives of the activities undertaken at the Knowledge Communication Lab is to provide linguistic mediators, be they translators and writers of professional texts or subject matter experts entrusted with tasks of intra- or interdisciplinary communication, with conceptual models and operational software to facilitate the modelling and transmission of such 'deep' knowledge within interdisciplinary and intersectoral 'knowledge clusters'. This paper presents concepts and systems for multilingual terminological and textual knowledge codification, representation, validation, management and sharing structured around the notion of genre following Bergenkotter & Huckin 1995; Bhatia 1997, 2004; Dudley-Evans 1997 and Swales 1990, 1994. These systems operationalize the different stages of the 'virtuous knowledge cycle' proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) within a dynamic, multilingual specialized web-dictionary and a multilingual, genre-based corpus of medical texts genre hierarchies or systems (Bazerman 1994), in casu summaries of product resumees and patient package inserts. The knowledge cycle approach mirrors 'real life' working processes and allows repeat conversions of knowledge between its tacit and explicit forms, allowing knowledge to codify and spiral up from the individual to the collective level at corporate, 'community of practice' (Wenger 1998) and 'knowledge cluster' levels (Wenger 1998) through repeat validation processes and close systems monitoration. The paper reports the results of the implementation of these concepts and systems in general and the web-dictionary in particular within the Danish health care, pharmaceutical, medical device and translation sectors which technologically have been fused into one collective 'knowledge cluster' and it discusses the opportunities for research and business that spring from fusion of language and health technologies

Udgivelsesdato: august

O presente trabalho trata da língua galega. É principalmente um estudo sobre a história da língua galega, desde o nascimento do galego até o tempo contemporâneo. O estudo explica o surgimento do problema da falta de um consenso lingüístico quanto ao galego. Dependendo de quem é a pessoa a quem se pergunta, as respostas sobre o que é a língua galega, são sempre diferentes. Consultando diferentes dicionários e opiniões de lingüistas a língua que se fala na Galiza, pode classificar-se como: uma língua independente ibero-românica, um dialeto do português, uma língua ibero-românica fortemente “castelhanizada” etc. Isto deve-se às complexas relações políticas, que a Galiza teve com Portugal e com a Espanha. Relatando sobre os principais problemas em relação à questão da evolução lingüística da língua galega, apresento dois movimentos lingüísticos, o movimento reintegracionista e o isolacionismo. Eles mostram de maneira clara, que há diferentes alternativas possíveis de um desenvolvimento para a língua galega. A dificuldade de chegar a um consenso lingüístico quanto à língua galega, mostra o fato de existirem paralelamente diferentes normas ortográficas.

This work concerns the linguistic relativity hypothesis, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which, in its most general form claims that ‘lan-guage’ influences ‘thought’. Past studies into linguistic relativity have treated various aspects of both thought and language, but a growing body of literature has recently emerged, in this thesis referred to as neo-Whorfian, that empirically investigates thought and language from a cross-linguistic perspective and claims that the grammar or lexicon of a particular language influences the speakers’ non-linguistic thought. The present thesis examines the assumptions about language that underlie this claim and criticizes the neo-Whorfian arguments from the point of view that they are based on misleading notions of language. The critique focuses on the operationalization of thought, language, and culture as separate vari-ables in the neo-Whorfian empirical investigations. The neo-Whorfian stud-ies explore language primarily as ‘particular languages’ and investigate its role as a variable standing in a causal relation to the ‘thought’ variable. Tho-ught is separately examined in non-linguistic tests and found to ‘correlate’ with language. As a contrast to the neo-Whorfian view of language, a few examples of other approaches to language, referred to in the thesis as sociocultural appro-aches, are reviewed. This perspective on language places emphasis on prac-tice and communication rather than on particular languages, which are vie-wed as secondary representations. It is argued that from a sociocultural per-spective, language as an integrated practice cannot be separated from tho-ught and culture. The empirical findings in the neo-Whorfian studies need not be rejected, but they should be interpreted differently. The findings of linguistic and cognitive diversity reflect different communicational practices in which language cannot be separated from non-language.

This essay examines the persuasive side of language in a speech given by Senator Barack Obama on Super Tuesday in February 2008. It studies how Senator Obama utilizes language to convince and persuade his audience. This is done from an Aristotelian point of view, meaning that the study focuses foremost on how the senator’s word choices relate to Aristotle’s three means of persuasion, ethos, pathos and logos. Those basic guiding principles are relevant to use since Aristotle’s work on the subject of rhetoric is still today one of the most relevant works in that field. The analysis is basically performed through personal observations guided by previous studies, within the frame of Aristotelian rhetoric. The results show how Senator Obama enforces the three means of persuasion through language and how it can be considered persuasive. The study might add to rhetoric studies from a linguistic perspective since it reaches a better understanding of language used in the field of politics, where rhetoric is a prominent component.

No abstract.

Learning in school is in many respects done through language. However, it has been shown that the language of school assignments is seldom explicitly discussed in school. Writing tasks are furthermore assigned without clear guidelines for how certain lexical choices make one text more powerful than another. The present study is a contribution to a linguistic and pedagogical discussion of student writing. More specifically the focus is on the use of evaluative language in texts written by students in the school subject of Swedish in grades 5, 8 and 11. The major investigations of the study have been accommodated within the theoretical framework of Appraisal. An overview is given of the language resources in the student texts for constructing emotion, judging behavior in ethical terms and valuing objects aesthetically. Another question addressed is that of how attitudinal meaning is intensified, thus creating greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity associated with the feelings. The results show that manifestations of attitude are found in practically all texts in the study. However, variations are noted in relation to different genres, age, proficiency level, language background and gender. A contribution of the study in relation to the theoretical framework upon which it draws is an extension of the system of Attitude as well as an identification of different patterns in the use of attitudinal resources. These patterns are furthermore discussed in relation to how students talk about their own written production in terms of text movability. Results indicate that students with a high degree of text movability also use attitudinal resources to a large extent. It is argued that applying the linguistic tool of Appraisal can facilitate a discussion of how to make one aspect of the hidden curriculum more visible, namely, how to write with an Attitude.

When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use. The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase. It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers. Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.

When children encounter new subjects in school, they are also faced with new ways of using language. Learning science thus means learning the language of science, and writing is one of the ways this is accomplished. The present study investigates writing in natural sciences in grades 5 and 8 in Swedish schools. Major theoretical influences for these investigations are found within the socio-cultural, dialogical and social semiotic perspectives on language use. The study is based on texts written by 97 students, interviews around these texts and observations from 16 different classroom practices. Writing is seen as a situated practice; therefore analysis is carried out of the activities surrounding the texts. The student texts are analysed in terms of genre and in relation to their abstraction, density and use of expansions. This analysis shows among other things that the texts show increasing abstraction and density with increasing age, whereas the text structure and the use of expansions do not increase. It is also argued that a central point in school writing must be the students’ way of talking about their texts. Analysis of interviews with the students is thus carried out in terms of text movability. The results from this analysis indicate that students find it difficult to talk about their texts. They find it hard to express the main content of the text, as well as to discuss it’s function and potential readers. Previous studies argue that writing constitutes a potential for learning. In the material studied in this thesis, this potential learning tool is not used to any large extent. To be able to participate in natural sciences in higher levels, students need to take part in practices where the specialized language of natural science is used in writing as well as in speech.

The thesis examines local and global functions of code-switching and code-mixing in Chicano theater, i.e. in writing intended for performance. The data of this study consists of three published plays by Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga. Distinguishing between code-switching and code-mixing, the investigation explores local and global functions of these phenomena. Local functions of code-switching are functions that can be seen in the text and, as a consequence, can be regarded as meaningful for the audience of the plays. These functions are examined, focussing on five loci in which code-switching is frequent and has clear local functions. The loci are quotations, interjections, reiterations, ‘gaps’ and word/language play. Global functions of code-switching and code-mixing operate on a higher level and are not necessarily detected in the actual texts. These functions are discussed, focussing on two main areas, namely power relations (addressing questions of domination, resistance and empowerment) and identity construction (addressing questions of how identity can be reflected by use of language and how identity is constructed and reconstructed by means of language). The study suggests that code-switching fills creative, artistic and stylistic functions in the plays and that code-switching and code-mixing can serve as responses to domination in that they can be used to resist, challenge and ultimately transform power relations.

Under inriktningen Grundläggande färdigheter på lärarprogrammet väcktes ett intresse hos mig angående språklig medvetenhet och dess betydelse för barns läs- och skrivinlärning. I det här examensarbetet har det behandlats närmare med hjälp av en empirisk och teoretisk studie. Genom att koppla vad framstående forskare inom språklig medvetenhet anser om vad just språklig medvetenhet är, till hur verksamma pedagoger arbetar och upplever språklig medvetenhet i praktiken, ges en bild av begreppets innebörd och betydelse. Svårigheter, oklarheter och fördelar med begreppet språklig medvetenhet redovisas. I examensarbetets teoretiska del framkommer olika definitioner och benämningar av begreppet språklig medvetenhet. Att begreppet är innehållsrikt och svårdefinierat tydliggörs ytterligare i den empiriska delen. Där har även pedagogerna svårt att definiera vad språklig medvetenhet är. Dock upplever pedagogerna att arbetet med språklig medvetenhet medför många vinster vilket även stärks av den teoretiska delen. I många nationella och internationella studier har det framkommit att medveten träning av språklig medvetenhet är av betydelse för barns läs- och skrivinlärning. I det här examensarbetet förtydligas det ytterligare.

Two propositions connected by and have the same truth-value, irrespective of the order of the conjuncts. However, in a sentence like “I put my socks and shoes on” it becomes obvious that the order of the conjuncts affects the meaning of the sentence. This study concerns the contribution of pragmatics to and by implicit enrichment to and then or and thus. It includes three experiments that investigate and-enrichment in adults and children. Nine five-line stories concerning everyday events were used. After each story the participants were to respond “yes” or “no” to a statement which referred to two events that occurred in the story, conjoined with and. In the critical statement, the two events were presented in the inverse order to which they had occurred. The results show no general developmental effect but awareness of the task plays a critical role for and-enrichment production. Ten-year-olds enrich and to the same extent as adults when no efforts are made to mask the intention behind the task. However, when a more spontaneous response is captured by masking the purpose of the task children respond more logically. There are no clear evidence that and-enrichment is affected by the cognitive demands of the task.

This study deals with the testing and grading of Swedish school leaving students’ oral proficiency in English, and with certain aspects of these students’ linguistic competence. The analyses and results are based on material drawn from an assessment project carried out at Gothenburg University in 1993. The 29 students taking part in the project were interviewed three times by three different interviewers in tests comprising three tasks, similar in structure but different in content. The interviewers were of three categories: school teachers of English, university teachers of English and native speakers of English. The student production was graded on a five-point scale according to a set of rating criteria. The interviewers assigned generally positive but often differing grades to the student performance. The grades were influenced by the students’ ability to communicate and speak with flow, and by gaps in vocabulary and by occurrences of grammatical errors. The students’ use of discourse phenomena and compensatory strategies was also of importance to the grades assigned. Many students were considered to have acceptable intonation and rhythm, but nevertheless an evident Swedish accent. The linguistic features studied comprised the verbal group, vocabulary, discourse markers and pronunciation. Differences could be observed between the members of the interviewer categories regarding the grades they assigned to student production. The school teachers seem to have paid special attention to grammatical accuracy, and the native speakers appear to have had a notion of communicative competence where accuracy plays a less important role. Differences in the grades assigned could also be explained by the order in which the interviews were made, by some students’ hesitant delivery, by the positive or negative effect of various fillers in the students’ speech, and by the interviewing methods used by the interviewers in the tests.

Gesture is always mentioned in descriptions of compensatory behaviour in second language discourse, yet it has never been adequately integrated into any theory of Communication Strategies (CSs). This study suggests a method for achieving such an integration. By combining a cognitive theory of speech-associated gestures with a process-oriented framework for CSs, gesture and speech can be seen as reflections of similar underlying processes with different output modes. This approach allows oral and gestural CSs to be classified and analysed within a unified framework. The respective fields are presented in introductory surveys, and a review is provided of studies dealing specifically with compensatory gesture–in aphasia as well as in first and second language acquisition. The experimental part of this work consists of two studies. The production study examines the gestures exploited strategically by Swedish learners of French and French learners of Swedish. The subjects retold a cartoon story in their foreign language to native speakers in conversational narratives. To enable comparisons between learners and proficiency conditions both at individual and group level, subjects performed the task in both their first and their second language. The results show that, contrary to expectations in both fields, strategic gestures do not replace speech, but complement it. Moreover, although strategic gestures are used to solve lexical problems by depicting referential features, most learner gestures instead serve either to maintain visual co-reference at discourse level, or to provide metalinguistic comments on the communicative act itself. These latter functions have hitherto been ignored in CS research. Both similarities and differences can be found between oral and gestural CSs regarding the effect of proficiency, culture, task, and success. The influence of individual communicative style and strategic communicative competence is also discussed. Finally, native listeners’ gestural behaviour is shown to be related to the co-operative effort invested by them to ensure continued interaction, which in turn depends on the proficiency levels of the non-native narrators. The evaluation study investigates native speakers’ assessments of subjects’ gestures, and the effect of gestures on evaluations of proficiency. Native speakers rank all subjects as showing normal or reduced gesture rates and ranges–irrespective of proficiency condition. The influence of gestures on proficiency assessments is modest, but tends to be positive. The results concerning the effectiveness of gestural strategies are inconclusive, however. When exposed to auditory learner data only, listeners believe gestures would improve comprehension, but when learner gestures can be seen, they are not regarded as helpful. This study stresses the need to further examine the effect of strategic behaviour on assessments, and the perception of gestures in interaction. An integrated theory of Communication Strategies has to consider that gestures operate in two ways: as local measures of communicative ‘first-aid’, and as global communication enhancement for speakers and listeners alike. A probabilistic framework is outlined, where variability in performance as well as psycholinguistic and interactional aspects of gesture use are taken into account. Gester betraktas ofta populärt som det mest typiska sättet för språkinlärare att lösa kommunikativa problem. Trots det har gester sällan studerats inom ramen för teorier som rör bruket eller inlärningen av andraspråk. Den här studien avser att redogöra för hur andraspråksinlärare använder spontana eller koverbala gester som kommunikationsstrategier. Gester klassificeras och analyseras som likvärdiga med muntliga lösningar på kommunikativa problem inom en teoretisk ram som kombinerar en processinriktad teori för kommunikationsstrategier med en kognitiv teori för gestproduktion. Två empiriska studier presenteras. Produktionsstudien undersöker svenska inlärare av franska och franska inlärare av svenska och deras strategiska användning av gester. Resultaten, som är baserade på analyser av individuellt beteende såväl som av grupper, motsäger både populära föreställningar och teoretiskt grundade förväntningar. Inlärare ersätter inte tal med gester, utan kompletterar istället sin muntliga produktion med gester. Gester används inte heller enbart mimetiskt för att lösa lexikala problem, utan mera abstrakta gester utnyttjas för att upprättahålla sammanhang och koreferens, samt för att kommentera själva kommunikationssituationen. I analysen diskuteras det inflytande som språknivå, kulturell tillhörighet och kommunikativ kompetens utövar på gestbruket, och muntliga och gestuella kommunikationsstrategier jämförs därvid. Den andra studien undersöker infödda lyssnares bedömning av inlärarnas gester, samt även den effekt dessa gester har på bedömningen av inlärarnas språkliga kunskapsnivå. En avgörande faktor som berörs är inlärarnas individuella kommunikativa stil. Gester fungerar således som kommunikativ kompensation på flera nivåer. För att gester skall kunna inlemmas i existerande teorier om kommunikationsstrategier, behöver dessa expanderas till att omfatta både kognitiva och sociala faktorer.

The syntax of human language is a recursive, generative system. Both of these properties are ubiquitous in the natural world. In fact, sentences, trees, and brains share the property of hierarchical structure (i.e., tree-structure) as a fundamental principle. Aspects of syntax are subject to general constraints on structure which in themselves have no meaning. In contrast, the way we use and manipulate these structures (usually) are meaningful. Another parallel between trees and brains is that they both have bark, in the brain called cortex. I argue that the activation in the "bark" of the brain depends on the nature of the syntactic tree, that is, structural properties of any given sentence. I present results from two neuroimaging studies on sentence comprehension which also provide support for a much more distributed implementation of language in the brain than is usually assumed, especially in neuropsychology textbooks. In particular, comprehension phenomena at the interface between syntax and pragmatics (i.e., between form and function) engage Broca’s area (often called the speech area), whereas purely structural differences in syntactic form engage motor and premotor cortex. Language is a complex system of subsystems (or modules) implemented in the brain as distributed and overlapping networks.