Filtyp
All words in Swedish have a particular melody. There are two tonal patterns that are observed in different prosodic and morphological contexts – accent 1 and accent 2. The tone of accent 1 is the default melody in Swedish and is said to be of intonational nature. The melody of accent 2, on the other hand, only occurs in presence of certain suffixes in the word, hence, accent 2 is claimed to be a p
“Choice blindness” (CB) refers to a certain tendency to accept a choice that is presented to us as if it were our own, even when we have never made it. In the last decade, CB has been treated as a research tool in a series of experiments in different domains and modalities (e.g. Johansson et al. 2005, 2008; Hall et al. 2010, 2013; Sagana et. al 2014; Cochran et al. 2016) in order to study the rela
Audiovisual content is heavily prevalent in many modern societies. Film, in particular, is a favourite form of entertainment to many. Film is by nature both multimodal and polysemiotic, employing the modalities of visual and auditive as well as the semiotic systems of language, gesture, depiction and music. Some audiences do not have immediate access to content using either the auditive or visual
Empathy is our ability to experience and understand the mental states of others. In movement perception, and in particular in dance spectatorship, it has been argued that we experience observed movements through our own bodies: kinesthetic empathy. However, it has been unclear what exactly kinesthetic empathy encompasses on an experiential level as dance spectatorship research has been dominated b
In this thesis the aim is to investigate linguistic strategies of blame avoidance in two parliamentary debates about LSS (The Swedish Act concerning Support for Persons with Certain Functional Impairments). Focus lies upon how representatives from the government parties use linguistic strategies to avoid being made responsible for the many cases of decreased and withdrawn assistance. This is analy
Previous studies of the Chinese imperative have treated syntax and prosody separately, have not considered gestures, and have looked at sentences in isolation and not in discourse. This study therefore investigated how the relationship between grammatical components, intonation (perceived stress), and gesture are co-organized and interact in the 把 bǎ ‘Ba’ construction (i.e., BA) of Chinese imperat
When in need to tell stories we often find ourselves using not only our words but also accompanying gestures, as well as pictures. However, what if we were to use only gestures to narrate? Would the stories we tell be clear enough to understand? The thesis investigates the potentials and limitations of pantomime, which consists mostly of gesture, for storytelling. Concretely, through a unique two-
This thesis examines the nature and purpose of the Greek sciences ἀριθμητική, λογιστική and γεωμετρία in the texts of Plato. The statements of some other ancient authors are also mentioned, and the relevant modern research is consulted. ἀριθμός is at any instance, as Klein has already noted, ‘a definite number of definite objects’. In Plato’s philosophical ἀριθμητική, ἀριθμός seems to always consi
Gesture has been acknowledged as a pivotal part of delivery in political rhetoric for millennia. Typically, politicians are seen as adhering to a style of gesturing encouraging pragmatic gestures, namely those that operate on the level of discourse such as providing emphasis, while being discouraged from using representational gestures, namely those depicting the content of speech iconically, as t
This thesis investigates the semiotic foundations of recurrent gestures through a cross-cultural study of the Two-Handed-Alternation-Sagittal (2HAS) gesture in Japanese and Swedish. Drawing on the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM)––a cognitive-semiotic model of meaning-making––the study explores how recurrent gestures emerge from the dynamic interplay between embodiment and sedimentation.
Previous research has shown that some bilinguals report feeling as though they have two different personalities in their different languages. For some this experience is stable, for others situational or linked to life stages, while many claim never to have felt it. Despite extensive research, there is no consensus on the topic, including on what exactly is meant by “personality” in the context. S
This thesis explores how bilingual and trilingual children aged 7–11 develop their English pronunciation in an international school where English is the main language of learning and play. Recordings from a storytelling task were rated for accent and comprehensibility, and background data from parental questionnaires provided detailed language profiles. Analyzing these data, it examines (a) whethe
Drawing on concepts from cognitive semiotics and phenomenology, this thesis investigates how Japanese ideophones are perceived by non-speakers of Japanese, aiming to clarify key concepts such as iconicity, cross-modality/unimodality and the ultimately the nature of language as a semiotic system. Three research questions guided the study: (1) What is the relation between primary and secondary iconi
Political discourse has been and remains a central topic of scholarly inquiry due to its role in shaping public opinion, ideologies, and social interactions. It constitutes a highly polysemiotic form of communication in which hand expressions play a central role in the organisation and interpretation of interactions. This thesis investigates hand expressions in televised political discourse from
This thesis investigates the empathic relation between the audience, as the experiencing subject, and narrative characters of a fictional story, by introducing the concept of narrative empathy. A part from elaborating this concept, the thesis seeks to empirically investigate how two different media, film and novel, modulate this relationship and which narrative categories (perspective, direct spee
Bilingual language processing is complex, and it is yet to be explored in its full extent. Previous research suggests that bilinguals’ first- and second-language mental lexicons are interconnected, but the nature and extent of this relationship remain a matter of debate. One of the best indicators of this highly dynamic relationship between the two languages is code-switching. Although from the sp
The present study extends the scope of the grammatical aspect approach to motion event cognition research by investigating how Croatian speakers of English encode and conceptualise motion events. Even though both Croatian and English have a grammatical category of aspect, the findings suggest that intratypological variation plays an important role in how participants construed goal-oriented motion
The present study explored the conceptualization of duration within Croatian-English bilinguals. Two established psychophysical tasks of duration reproduction were implemented to this extent, namely, modified versions of Casasanto’s (2005) growing lines and filling containers task. Participants were either tested with Croatian linguistic prompts or English linguistic prompts. The results showed th
In a study by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay from 1969 it was found that there are 11 basic color terms and 7 stages of color evolution. Since then, there have been many follow-up studies within the field to confirm or deny this finding. Some have argued against only including 11 terms in the category of basic while others have criticized the criteria they used for basicness. Some have proposed that
