Filtyp
In this thesis, I investigate the relation between assessed speaking proficiency and measured complexity and accuracy in twenty test-takers’ performance in the oral part of the Swedish certificate test Swedex B2. Accuracy and complexity have been measured in seven different ways; both global and local measures from the CAF (Complexity–Accuracy–Fluency) triad have been used. Also, each test-taker’s
This paper discusses the urban writing on Athenian walls as an imaginative medium of intercommunication occurring during the socioeconomic and political crisis era in Greece, over the last seven years. The street art activity on the city’s walls as a linguistic and imagery phenomenon could be approached as the main symbolic mode of public expression generated by the crisis. To investigate it field
This study investigates the acoustic characteristics and cross-dialectal variation of the diphthongs /ai au oi ui/ in the Nuckö, Ormsö, and Rickul varieties of Estonian Swedish, which have previously only been described impressionistically (Lagman, 1979; Danell, 1905-34). Eight acoustic measures, reflecting the F1 and F2 frequency values at the first (InF1 and InF2) and second (FinF1 and FinF2) vo
In this study, I demonstrate that identity-building is an important discursive strategy for President Barack Obama in the seven-year long debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The data for the study comes from a 6-million word corpus of speeches that were held by Obama between January 2009 and January 2016, all published by the White House. The speeches are classified according to genr
The present study investigates how native speakers of British English (n=12) and advanced Russian learners of English (n=24) handle two types of tense-aspect mismatches: present perfect mismatches, where the present perfect form does not match the preceding adverbial (e.g. *Last year, Kate has studied French…), and past simple mismatches, where the past simple form does not match the preceding adv
This qualitative study explores whether antithesis, as a didactic rhetorical tool, may enhance the likelihood of understanding complex biology-related information. Research shows that students lack the ability of communicating expert knowledge to laymen since they do not understand subject matter well enough themselves due to scientific language. Hence, scientific language use should be studied in
This thesis investigates word order patterns in spoken Basque for two dialects, Navarrese-Lapurdian and Gipuzkoan. The data for the analysis was elicited with stimuli pictures in an experiment in dialogue form. The 26 participants were from Hazparne (Lapurdi), Donostia, and Andoain (both Gipuzkoa). The data consists of transitive main clauses, both questions and declaratives with nominal subject a
In this study, I demonstrate that social hierarchy and power are important aspects for understanding the use of epistemic and evidential stance verbs in computer-mediated communication. The data for the study come from an online bulletin board about rhythmic gymnastics, where the construction of social roles is believed to play a role in the expression of stance. The members of the community are d
Unagi-sentences are, as defined in this thesis, sentences where there is a mismatch between the literal interpretation of the sentence and its meaning in context, often accompanying an apparent violation of selection restrictions of the predicate. This thesis argues that the phenomenon of unagi-sentences shows more variation than previously thought, as well as provides a much needed comparison of
Abstract not available
The Mandarin Chinese grammatical marker le has long been a major focus of grammatical research in Chinese linguistics, yet no definition of its semantics has been able to comprehensively account for the marker's full range of functions and uses. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to identify all major meanings expressed by each conventionally accepted le type in a sentence, and investi
This study examines the linguistic characteristics of the speech of female villains in Japanese fictional dialogue, with the aim of determining whether female villains employ a distinct role language or yakuwarigo, that is, a distinct speech style that indexes characterization based on social stereotypes. An original, small-scale corpus was constructed consisting of dialogue from female villains,
This master’s thesis deals with the distinct semantic weight carried by adverbials in German sentence constructions, where they can take on functions normally performed by verbs in other languages like English. While German mostly offers the same grammatical possibilities as English does to express certain types of semantic content verbally, the two languages differ when it comes to the preference
The language learning process by third age learners has recently become a field of interest for linguistic research. However, it has been studied mostly regarding psychological and cognitive considerations (stress, motivation, attention, memory, etc.), rather than according to language internal factors. The present study aims to provide a contribution by investigating the mastery of Italian gramma
The Greek physician Praxagoras from Kos was active around year 300 BC. He represents the transition between the Hippocratic and the Hellenistic periods in medicine. Praxagoras was the teacher of several renowned physicians active during the 3rd century BC. Although he wrote many books nothing of his writing has survived to our time. To learn about his teachings we must rely on fragments and testim
Models of the bilingual mental lexicon, such as the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) and the Modified Hierarchical Model (MHM), suggest an asymmetrical pattern in the mental lexicons among bilinguals between two languages, and the representations are multi-dimensional. This study sets out to understand how bilinguals process the mental lexicon of two languages for abstract words and corresponding
The emergence of the Internet language has profoundly impacted everyday communication in China. This study examines the integration of Chinese Internet neologisms into everyday language. Through analysis of Baidu Index data and a questionnaire survey, the study explores the extent to which these neologisms have become part of Internet users’ linguistic repertoire. The findings indicate the success
The study reported in the present paper aimed to determine the effect of prosodic cues on automatic word processing in the brain by comparing the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials (ERP) elicited by isolated words and pseudowords. More specifically, it attempted to explore the influence of changes in certain suprasegmental cues such as fundamental frequency and int
The recent addition of Modern Standard Chinese (MSC) as an elective language in Swedish elementary and high school ('Moderna Språk') has brought the teaching of MSC particle le to the fore. Le occurs either affixed to a verb (le1) or as a sentence-final particle (le2) and is a frequently used grammatical device in MSC with a great number of various functions. At the same time, coexistent a
