Filtyp
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-
Emotional vocabulary enjoys a processing advantage, with the emotional salience of a word detected at 200 ms post-presentation or earlier, signalling selective attention to its affective properties. An individual’s affective state also impacts attention and, by extension, affects processing. This study investigates whether and how preferential processing of emotional valence is modulated by mood.
Musical meaning is multifaceted: both highly sensory and yet often abstract, able to cross cultural boundaries and yet embedded in specific traditions. For the most part it is not denotational (Monelle, 1991). Nevertheless, in “programmatic music”, musical themes are intended to refer to worldly objects and events on the basis of iconic (and indexical) grounds. Such non-arbitrariness of the sound-
This thesis investigates a possible influence of language on thought in the domain of motion event descriptions using a cognitive-semiotic framework. Previous studies (e.g., von Stutterheim et al., 2012) have claimed that speakers of languages who construe situations as temporally ongoing through morphological aspect tend to focus more on the action itself and less on other details such as possibl
One component in writing development is a more efficient use of syntactic tools. Later syntactic development, specifically that of the noun phrase, is an understudied area, notably so for Swedish. The demand for specified and concise information in an expository text, and the availability of more planning time in the written modality, are important factors contributing to more complex noun phrases
The present thesis investigates motion-emotion metaphors in Estonian and compares them cross-linguistically with Finnish, English and Swedish. Motion-emotion metaphors (e.g. I fell into depression) are expression types that denote affective responses, which imply conspicuous bodily changes, using motion verbs and other linguistic expressions that typically express actual motion. Metaphor has been
Which sources most influence the language spoken in Israel? Is it the same language as the Hebrew of its ancestral heritage? Which periods in history brought about the changes of contemporary lexicon? These are the questions addressed in the current essay, which presents the inspection of nouns appearing in a recent newspaper, and their categorization according to the different periods in the his
This thesis is concerned with the examination of the Swedish vowels /ɛ:/ and /ø:/ for qualitative differences between their pre-r allophones and the allophones occurring in other contexts. For this purpose, electromagnetic articulography and speech recordings were carried out on Swedish speakers from the two dialectal areas Malmö and Stockholm. Articulatory and acoustic analyses of the collected d
This thesis aims to examine the lexical and typological change found in the Western European language families of Germanic, Romance and Celtic over the last two millennia. The method used was to create one lexical and one typological database and the data was analysed according to etic grids. Tree models were generated from the results of the databases and the groups found in the tree models were
Adverbial verbs and interrogative verbs are two relatively rare and underexplored linguistic phenomena that are investigated in this typological study. Adverbial verbs are verbal constituents that possess the morphosyntactic properties of verbs but that encode manner and temporal information, instead of referring to states or events as verbs prototypically do. Interrogative verbs possess the morph
In this thesis, the importation, transformation and distribution of French popular music in Turkey during the 20th century have been investigated as a case study of cultural transfer. By using theories and methods within a cognitive semiotic framework, this study provides an overview of the phenomenon of French pop music remakes in Turkey by accounting for the initial situation of communication of
The present perceptual learning study was conducted in an attempt to investigate to which extent naïve listeners’ L1 prosodic background affected their learning performance of a lexical tone language and whether an auditory-image (AI) training paradigm curtailed the online-learning process of lexical tones. Thirty-three Mandarin-naïve Swedish-native listeners (NS listeners) and 33 Mandarin-naïve E
This thesis investigates how cross-linguistic phoneme distributions of 56 fundamental oppositional concepts can reveal semantic relationships by looking into the linguistic forms of 75 genetically and areally distributed languages. Based on proposals of semantic primes (Goddard 2002), reduced Swadesh lists (Holman et al. 2008), presumed ultraconservative words (Pagel et.al. 2013), attested basic a
In this thesis the question concerning possible influence of language on thinking was addressed by investigating constituent orders in non-verbal representations of motion events. Forty-nine participants, 25 native speakers of Swedish with the default order SVO (or Agent-Act-Patient), and Kurdish with SOV (Agent-Patient-Act) were recruited in Sweden and 24 in Iraqi Kurdistan to take part in an exp
This thesis considers any existing representations of tragic themes in Plutarch's Lives of Demetrius and Antony. There is a modern debate regarding the nature of the tragic, which is initially adressed. The proposed themes are treated from the perspective of Plutarch's literary and moral intentions, namely the presentation of negative examples.
This study examined the relative influence of L1 and L2 on the translation from L3 to L1 depending on the proficiency level of participants in the L3. Native speakers of Russian, matched for proficiency in English (L2), translated words from Swedish (L3) into Russian (L1). The words were Russian-Swedish, English-Swedish, English-Russian-Swedish cognates, and noncognates. Three groups participated
