The present project investigates the impact of the grammaticalised progressive on event conceptualisation in English and Persian. It applies the Heidelberg-Paris framework using single event descriptions for analysis at the sentence level and story re-narrations at the discourse level. The empirical data test the hypothesis that the progressive has an impact on information selection and discourse structuring in event conceptualisation in terms of infrequent endpoint encodings and language-specific patterns of perspective-taking in structuring discourse. Languages lacking the grammaticalised progressive clearly show different effects.

There are system-based similarities/differences in aspect between English and Persian. They have the progressive in common but differ with respect to the imperfective-perfective distinction. This difference is manifested as an increase in the use of the progressive in English. In contrast, the Persian system with two aspectual non-past forms which are possible for expressions of ongoingness leads to decreased use of the particular dāštan-progressive.

The key finding for the single, motion event descriptions is that the dāštan-progressive in Persian shows less frequent endpoint encodings, like in English, as compared to languages lacking the progressive. However, the imperfective bare mi-form is associated with frequent endpoints while English shows no such association because the progressive must always be used.

In narratives, differences emerge again due to the different typology. When the uses of the progressives in re-narrations are differentiated for clause type, the progressive in English is used equally in main and sub-clauses, though more dominantly in sub-clauses in Persian. These sub-results speak about differences in perspective-taking between these L1s.

The analysis of the complexities involved in aspect establishes that the bare mi-form in Persian can denote ongoingness in cases where the progressive is obligatory in English as it has no optional verb form. Consequently, the typological difference of the absence/presence of the imperfective-perfective categories leads to a significant increase in the use of the progressive in English, which results in a cross-linguistically different, and L1-specific, patterns of perspective-taking in the narrative discourse in English and Persian. Thus, despite the fact that the L1s have the progressive aspect, their principles of use differ as they are dependent on the relevant aspectual system.

Relating the results to linguistic relativity and cross-linguistic influence, the study shows that owing to the grammatical category of the progressive in common, event conceptualisation is similar in English and Persian in terms of infrequent endpoint encodings in single motion event descriptions, despite the overall typological difference. However, L1-related influence on the principles of use of the progressive in L2 English is considerable in the narrative discourse of the advanced L2 users of English as they seemingly proceed from the principles of use in L1 Persian towards those in L1 English.

Peer review is aan interestingwell-researched  topic, with much research focusing on the students’' own perceptions of peer review/assessment as well as benefits and challenges with the method. However, little research has been conducted on teachers’ perceptions of students’ peer review of written assignments in English, with a general focus on junior high school level in a Swedish school. Thus, this study was aimed at examining six English teachers’´ perceptions and their usage of peer review of written assignments in English at two junior high schools in Stockholm. A qualitative method was applied, with semi-structured interviews which were analysed using content analysis. The findings revealed that the teachers used different strategies during peer review depending on students’ knowledge level, social competence and the challenges and opportunities that the method offered. Despite a lack of knowledge about the English language and other variables such as different personalities and lack of self-confidence causing difficulties for students to implement peer review as intended, teachers still had positive attitudes towards peer review on written assignments in English. In order to enhance the implementation of peer review, both teachers and students need to become familiar with the practical implementation of the method. Future classroom research within the Swedish education system will help engender favourable conditions that move learning forward.

This thesis explores the themes of counterfactuality, determinism and free will in Thomas Hardy’s novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge. The aim is to show how some literary strategies create a sensation that the characters are trying to diverge from an anticipated destiny, and how these measures contribute to the impression that the characters possess free will. In other words, Hardy’s literary devices create the notion that the characters are confined but paradoxically they appear independent. The tragic fate and the tragic past of the characters are the two main literary strategies which are investigated in order to show how the characters are confined by the plot, which influences the reader’s perception of the characters. The tragic fate of the character is expressed through the numerous coincidences, the characters’ choices and actions as well as the way the order of events is presented in the narrative. The tragic past is expressed through a history that is assigned to the character or by the events that the character experiences as part of the narrative. Highlighting these literary devices allows for a reading where many of these events have the ability to spark a counterfactual thought in the reader’s mind, an imagined possibility of how a causal chain could have developed differently. I claim that the moment the reader begins to construct a different possible outcome of the plot the feeling that the character has free will is strengthened. This is due to two separate, but related reasons. Firstly, a variety of possible plotlines, caused by counterfactual thinking, strengthens the image of a character with the choice to follow another causal line of events. Secondly. by claiming that the characters take part in creating their fate we are in a way making them responsible for their actions. 

The present thesis approaches the newly developed phenomenon of Influencer Marketing, with the aim to investigate the structure of influencer’s sponsored posts on the social media network Instagram. As people continuously express their opinions and feelings on social networking sites, this thesis analyses the textual and multimodal aspects of 18 posts from six influencers of two companies, namely Daniel Wellington and Na-kd, from the perspective of stance to distinguish similarities, differences and patterns concerning the structure of the posts and what these might imply regarding how a sponsored update marketing a product is structured. The results indicate that a common structure of how sponsored updates are generally constructed exists, but that the way they structure their posts does not depend on which company they are presenting, but rather how influencers structure their posts in general. Hence, there are similarities that conform to the influencers marketing both companies, for instance that the texts have roughly the same length and similar composition- both regarding the textual and the multimodal aspects. In addition, one important finding was the need of pragmatic competence to fully interpret how the influencer expresses stance, evaluation and positioning in the sponsored updates. To conclude, as Influencer Marketing provide a new way of communicating, I hope that other researchers continue to investigate Influencer Marketing on social media to contribute to the field of linguistics further. 

Criticism of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has maintained that its popularity stems from a well-marketed, repetitive and simple structure. However, this essay considers that this success derives from recognizable mythological heroic structures. The essay traces the protagonist’s development from the perspective of two different theories that contrast and complement each other in various ways, Otto Rank’s theory of the myth of the birth of the hero and Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. Campbell and Rank both hypothesize that hero myths are repetitive because they emerge from the subconscious of human kind. It can be seen in the tracing of the heroic development in Harry Potter that— although various aspects and features in the hero’s journey are followed in the narrative — the series does not strictly fit these theories. The result is a combination of different features from both theories, which modernizes the heroic myth that has pervaded human culture and history since time immemorial.

While William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a satire, a humoristic account of the vanities of the different characters in the fictitious society of Vanity Fair, it is also a social criticism of early nineteenth century British society. The essay examines Thackeray’s social critique, which is sometimes explicitly expressed and sometimes more implicit. His criticism is aimed both at the new commodity culture where everything is reducible to money—even people and human relations—and at the class system of the up-and-coming middle classes and the established gentry and aristocracy. When Thackeray sends Becky Sharpe off in a vain pursuit of wealth and social status, he also uses her to expose the vanities of the other characters in Vanity Fair. Their vanities derive from the prevailing commodity culture and are mainly connected to wealth and social status. The essay discusses Becky’s progress from a sociological perspective through the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. His concepts of field, habitus, capital and distinction deal with the power structure in society and what distinguishes different social classes.  Here his theories are used to demonstrate how the different characters in Vanity Fair engage in competition for social status, by using their different forms of capital, and the essay emphasizes the convertibility of these kinds of capital. Bourdieu’s theories contribute to the understanding of how Becky who comes from nowhere, manages to climb to very top rung of the social ladder, but they also demonstrate that her chameleon-like ability to fit in everywhere is an exception to Bourdieu’s general model. 

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has received considerable critical attention with respect to a wide range of themes and critical approaches. Variously labeled feminist, political, mythical and suicidal, Plath has been subject to enormous biographical scrutiny but the critical responses available today offer increasingly nuanced understandings of Plath’s work.  However, sufficient attention has not been given to the significant prevalence of images of places and spaces in Plath’s poetry. With particular focus on a selection of poems from The Collected Poems, this thesis argues that the personae in the poems confront “infelicitous places” and that the poems resonate with a tension between place (here referring to a space that is delimited by certain values) and space (in the sense of an expansion without the restrictions of place). What I here refer to as infelicitous place can be understood as an inversion of Gaston Bachelard’s conception of “felicitous space” and accounts for the way in which places in Plath’s poetry are marred with anxiety and ambivalence as opposed to Bachelard’s benevolent, protective spaces. The places and spaces in the poems are dealt with in relation to the notion of infelicitous place, as well as the significance of walls and the affinity between place and poetics.

This study focuses on L2 learners of English in Swedish upper secondary schools and their ability to comprehend and use connectors in a multiple-choice cloze procedure. Connectors are used in text to signal the text structure and make explicit the relation between text segments. A study by Geva (1992) suggests that with an increased proficiency, learners also improve their ability to comprehend text relations and the use of connectors. The present study applies the suggestions of Geva’s results in a Swedish context. English in Swedish upper secondary schools, is taught at three levels (designated English 5, 6, 7) with increasing difficulty and proficiency level requirements. This study tests the ability to comprehend the context and use the correct connector on pupils in the two mandatory courses (English 5 & 6). Similar to previous studies, the aim is to investigate the relationship between levels of English and the ability to use connectors. This empirical survey investigates the English 5 & 6 pupils’ success in applying the appropriate connector in relation to the level of English they are placed in, in order to analyze whether there is any perceived development, as is presupposed by the English curriculum. Furthermore, the study also aims to analyze what type of connectors the pupils excel at or struggle with and any factors that might affect pupils’ performance. The test consisted of three categories: adversative (6 questions), additive (5 questions), and causal connectors (4 questions), a total of 15 questions, with one point being awarded for each correct response. The results of the two groups were similar and a subsequent t-test revealed that there was no statistical significance between the two groups in any of the categories. This suggests that in the sample which was tested there is no proficiency increase in terms of connectors and comprehending inter-/intrasentential relationships. Furthermore, the results indicate that the pupils are more likely to correctly select the appropriate adversative and causal connectors, but struggled in selecting the additive connectors.

Keywords: connectors, comprehension, intrasentential & intersentential relationships, teaching, coherence, cohesion

Research in the field of fictional and possible worlds examines the real and its hypothetical counterparts. The interaction between the actual and the fictional is a cause of debate within this field, and includes questions concerning the ontological status of fictional characters and their relation to reality. The following discussion will engage current positions in this debate. These include questions of reference regarding the correlation between fictional characters and actual personalities. Studying the transmedial migration of character properties from fictional worlds into the actual world engages with the possible as dependent on the actual, as well as the influence fiction can have on reality, by demonstrating how individual characters are perceived as packages of properties, some of which we identify and recognize as adaptable to our own behavior. Transmedial migration requires compatibility between different media. Accordingly, it is explained through the direct correspondence of fictional properties to actual properties, and the indirect correspondence of fictional characters to actual people. I am claiming that an interaction can be observed between different media, such as fictional worlds and the actual world, with particular emphasis on the example of fictional characters and their properties. In order to comprehend this we need a robust framework and the model that I am proposing here comprises the essential elements for such a framework. The transmedial migration of character properties from a textual medium, such as a Sherlock Holmes story, into the physical, social medium of the actual world is the action of adapting a fictional character’s package of properties into an actual person’s behavior. The agency of actual people in adapting fictional character properties to their corporal, social actions is what constitutes transmedial migration. This is a specific example of behavioral learning that recognizes certain behavior by the means of a label or trademark that is acquired from a fictional character. It is conceivable that any number of behavioral attributes, such as attitudes or habits, could be scientifically proven to have transmedially migrated by means of experimentation. Nevertheless, culturally and socially, it is only the definite identification of such character properties that substantiates my argument of transmedial migration through adaptation.

Speech Errors are the most widely recognized and discussed type of Language

Processing Errors. They have been included as a research topic in many fields of study,

e.g. cognitive linguistics, psychology and medicine. These studies have shown that

speech errors are inevitable and very common: they can be observed in every kind of

utterance, regardless of its formality or speakers’ age, socioeconomic background or

environmental surroundings. Even though they are so ubiquitous, they are usually not

paid attention to. Nevertheless, they might be representing a way of understanding how

the human brain functions and why we dysfunction at times.

In this paper, selected speech error examples from Fromkin’s Speech Error

Database were analyzed in terms of the changes in meanings from target utterances into

error utterances and the probable causes of the errors with the aim to discover any

patterns of occurrence among erroneous speech. The focus of the examples has been

lexical errors in nouns and adjectives.

According to results of the analysis, contextual and environmental factors appear to

contribute to the making of the errors in many different ways, along with the speakers’

internal thoughts and representations of phenomena related to the utterances. These

contributions could be accounted for various reasons. Along the keywords included in

the search for patterns, distinctive features may only be observed in examples of

opposite meaning. Thus, speech errors seem to have no typical ways of occurrence; still,

some observable similarities among examples may be useful in further studies.

This qualitative study deals with the nature of poeticity and iconicity and their role in the discourse functions of figures of speech: schemes and tropes. The concept of poeticity is that of Roman Jakobson. The poetic function is a particular kind of meaning which is created from language-internal material. It is found in rhythmic schematic repetition and more deliberate tropes whose poetic qualities seem foregrounded and aesthetically designed. Accordingly, they will have rhetorical and mnemonic potential. Moreover, poetic uses will have a monistic character, as their form and meaning will fuse, and this may make it difficult to translate and paraphrase them. Metonymic instantiations and conventional, entrenched metaphors will not be noticeably poetic, but the semantic status of a given use will be a result of more specific discourse factors. The poetic function can interact with factually descriptive, affective, and interpersonal meanings, which are extra-linguistically oriented, as well as with meaningful textual structuring. Poeticity is found in many different text types. It will be a global organisational feature in poetry, but tends only to occur locally in prose. In addition, prototypical iconicity concerns motivated similarity between a linguistic form and the kind of phenomenon out in the world that it represents. However, iconicity has also been used about the similarity relation between e.g. a metaphorical meaning and its source. Iconicity and poeticity often occur together, and they will strengthen and help to foreground each other’s characters.

In this article metonymy and metaphor are described in relation to the notion of poetic meaning, the definitional feature shared by all types of figurative uses. Even if both these types of tropes will draw on encyclopaedic experiences, or pre- or extra-linguistic cognitive complexes, they are also formed in relation to established structures in a language system. In other words, their occurrence shows how intertwined linguistic knowledge and experientially based cognition will be. Moreover, it is arguable that at least “fully alive” metaphors will have a more noticeable poetic and figurative character than metonymic uses. The reason for this is that a metaphor brings together domains that are felt to be similar in some respect, although they are also clearly different. In this imaginative coalescence many features in the source are suppressed, and a kind of “fake” superordinate category is created: the generalised target meaning. It spans both the ordinarily concrete source and some other phenomenon, often something more abstract. The poetic or figurative character of metonymies is by comparison more inconspicuous, presumably because they constitute descriptive or referential shortcuts in relation to just one meronymically structured domain or chain of contiguous domains.

This presentation will start with an overview of theories about the character and function of metaphor, and then proceed to an examination of central dimensions in metaphor analyses, describing and discussing the status or function of aesthetics, rhetoric, categorisation, (embodied) conceptualisation, and text building in metaphor formation and use. It will conclude with an outline of the perceived weight and value of various attempts at explaining the nature of metaphor in human conception and communication.

In this paper metonymy and metaphor are described in relation to the notion of poetic meaning, the definitional feature shared by all types of figurative uses. Even if both these types of tropes will draw on encyclopaedic experiences, or pre- or extra-linguistic cognitive complexes, they are also formed in relation to established structures in a language system. In other words, their occurrence shows how intertwined linguistic knowledge and experientially based cognition will be. Moreover, it is arguable that at least “fully alive” metaphors will have a more noticeable poetic and figurative character than metonymic uses. The reason for this is that a metaphor brings together domains that are felt to be similar in some respect, although they are also clearly different. In this imaginative coalescence many features in the source are suppressed, and a kind of ‘fake’ superordinate category is created: the generalised target meaning. It spans both the ordinarily concrete source and some other phenomenon, often something more abstract. The poetic or figurative character of metonymies is by comparison more inconspicuous, presumably because they constitute descriptive or referential shortcuts in relation to just one meronymically structured domain or chain of contiguous domains.

Polysemy is a key question in the field of semantics. Empirical observations, analysis and description of polysemy are important for theoretical considerations and development as well as for applied linguistics, e.g. lexicography.

Polysemy occurs when a lexical unit or a construction is used to represent different but also related meanings. Polysemous variation is either conventional and systematic or the result of merely incidental, contextually induced meaning shifts. A polyseme has one or more distinct and entrenched sense potentials, but they sometimes combine or fuse in actual language use. In addition, there are more general types of regular polysemy that are only pragmatically instantiated, as well as idiosyncratic and unpredictable meaning changes. By comparison, a monosemic element has only one conventional sense, while homonyms just happen to be formally identical although their meanings are not related.

Important factors in polysemous variation are (i) the occurrence of different types of meaning, or language functions, (ii) differences in experiential domain connections, and (iii) differences in sense relations. The following types of polysemous variation have been recognised: collocational tailoring, domain shift, metaphor, metonymy, perspective shift, value reversal, irony, emotive colouring, interpersonal signal, and idiom breaking.  

Christina Alm-Arvius

English Department,

Stockholm University

SE106 91 Stockholm

Sweden

Christina.Alm-Arvius@English.su.se

http://www.english.su.se/

Semantics and Pragmatics

Abstract:

Meanings in natural language use can be either systematic or incidental, but all the same it does not appear possible to identify a set of consistent and non-contradictory criteria for distinguishing two general contrasting meaning categories termed semantics and pragmatics respectively. Instead the most valid theoretical description seems to be to include any possible meanings of a language, or its use, in the qualitative notion of semantics, and, in addition, recognise the occurrence of incidental pragmatic meaning variations and additions. In other words, semantics is the wider or superordinate category, encompassing all and any language meanings, while pragmatics is a smaller, subordinate category, including only situationally induced or personally variable meaning aspects.

Key words: deixis, implicatures, pragmatics, presuppositions, reference, semantics, semantics of understanding, speech acts, truth-conditional semantics

The persistent occurrence of the noun troll in Swedish indicates that it is a culturally entrenched notion in Sweden as well as in other Scandinavian countries. The aim of this chapter is to explore the use of troll in modern Swedish and to show how culturally-entrenched concepts, and the attitudes that are associated with them, are integrated in the language of a speech community as part of its heritage. The noun has a complex and variable sense potential, and both literal and metaphorical uses of the noun are attitudinally coloured, although these attitudes may be ambiguous and even contradictory. Using linguistic evidence gathered from dictionaries and Internet sources, this chapter describes and discusses the rich and partly antithetical set of attitudes expressed by the conventional and novel metaphorical expressions that draw on this Scandinavian mythological concept, and briefly compares Swedish uses of troll with those found in English, finding that even though the word is used also in this comparatively closely related language, it is devoid of the rich cultural associations of the donor term.

This presentation examines two lexicalised compounds in Swedish with at least basically metaphorical senses connected with the Swedish Social Democratic vision and attempted practical construction of a modern egalitarian welfare state: folkhemmet: ‘’the people’s home’ and klassresa: ‘class journey’.

We are going to consider the experiential and conceptual grounding of the compounds folkhemmet and klassresa i) within a specific, Swedish cultural and ideological discourse complex as well as in relation to ii) a set of presumably universal meaning dimensions or functions, and iii) some embodied, also presumably universal image schemas.

This essay will focus on the actions taken by a translator to rid a children’s book of sexist content. First of all the sexist content in the book is located by studying the criticism (of sexist content) the book in question has received since it was published. By using the translation theory of shifts these actions will be exemplified and further discussed by the use of other translation theories.

With the translator’s actions in focus certain translation strategies will be compared to the ones taken by the translator of the book. The shifts made in the translation will be located, presented and explained. Finally a discussion, of the problems occurring when editing a translation in order to change the effect on the reader and about the responsibilities of translators, will follow.

Shirley Jackson’s writing often deals with the subject of marginalized characters and the theme of the scapegoat. René Girard argued that societies need the scapegoat in order to control violence and form a unity. This essay discusses the scapegoat mechanism in two of Jackson’s most famous works, “The Lottery” and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and shows how the figure of the scapegoat functions differently in the two narratives. In “The Lottery” the process is laid bare by an omniscient narrator while in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the narrator is a scapegoat as well as a creator of scapegoats. The essay also examines how the scapegoat mechanism turns the characters into either passive objects or active subjects.

The aim of this sociolinguistic essay was to investigate differences and similarities between how the English language is encountered and used in a suburban school compared to an inner-city school. Moreover, the primary material was collected with the use of a questionnaire, answered by 22 and 26 students between the ages of 16-19 years old from two upper-secondary schools. The results obtained from this study highlight that the students irrespective of their social backgrounds encountered and used the English language in similar ways. However, in relation to the acquisition of the language, the results highlighted that the students who came from a high socio-economic background had an advantage compared to their peers who shared an immigrant or migrant background in the sense that they to a higher extent came from an academic household which can be beneficial regarding language exposure and acquisition. Nevertheless, the differentiating factors behind that advantage were reduced to some extent by the role of social media.

The purpose of this study is to compare the novel High Fidelity with its film adaptation, with the same name, and on different levels find what has been changed and what has been retained when changing the setting from the UK to the US. Adapting a novel into a film can in other terms also be described as an intersemiotic translation. The main focus has been the culture related differences as well as an attempt to see if a pattern is found in the way the novel has been adapted and then which pattern the Swedish subtitles follow. In doing this we will find out how faithful the adaptation has been to the original novel, and then how faithful the Swedish subtitles have been to the film. By examining the Extralingustic Cultural References that occurred in both novel and film it showed that the strategy which was most commonly used was retention, i.e. keeping the foreign element in the translation. In the subtitles this proved to be even more common, with very few cases of direct translation. The film adaptation of the novel was domesticating and the subtitles were foreignizing in respect to the film.

This study aims to find whether the language background of a group of upper secondary school students affects their motivation in language acquisition. Based on a previous study which aimed to see the differences in attitudes between boys and girls, a similar questionnaire was distributed and, according to the students’ language background, they were divided into two groups, M and B. The focus has been to see if there would be any difference between the two groups in their attitudes and motivation toward L2 and L3 learning. Since the common assumption is that bilinguals are better at learning languages, the expectation has been that group B, the bilinguals, would automatically be more positive and motivated to learning languages. It was also expected that group M, monolinguals, would be more motivated to learn English, since it is a familiar language and culture. After processing all the numbers obtained from the survey, no significant difference between the two groups appeared. In fact, the levels of motivation for English were high for both groups, as well as for other foreign languages. However, the students in group B showed a slightly more positive attitude towards foreign languages.

� iy8��P�ew Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Motivation and Attitudes in Language Acquisition among Upper Secondary Students

Although there have been some studies conducted in Sweden about the language attitudes

towards different varieties of English, most of these studies have focused on the language

attitudes found amongst students. There have not, however, been many studies conducted

that examines teachers’ language attitudes. The focus of the present study is to investigate

which attitudes are found towards two varieties of English, American English and British

English, amongst English teachers in Sweden. The study also aims to explore whether the

teachers’ age and language backgrounds have an impact on the teachers’ attitudes. The

hypothesis was that older teachers would be more positively inclined towards British

English while younger teachers would prefer American English. Furthermore, it was also

hypothesized that teachers who grew up monolingual would prefer British English and

those who grew up bilingual would favour American English. The data collection method

that was used in the study was a questionnaire which was distributed online to English

teachers in Sweden. 115 teachers participated in the study and answered the

questionnaire, which provided both quantitative and qualitative data. The results of the

study show that the teachers seem to display equally positive attitudes towards both

varieties. For example, American English is favoured in terms of being most familiar,

easiest to understand and easiest to teach. British English, on the other hand, is favoured

in terms of pleasantness and is in many ways seen as more respected. The findings of the

study did confirm the hypotheses to a certain degree. The results showed a tendency

amongst younger teachers and teachers who have grown up bilingual to prefer American

English. In contrast, the tendency amongst older teachers and teachers who have grown

up monolingual was to prefer British English. Overall, the results of the study raise the

question of how these attitudes affect the teachers’ teaching of English.

Abstract

The global development with an increased need to communicate internationally has given the English language a prominent role worldwide. Consequently, English has become an important linguistic tool in Swedish society and is now incorporated in several domains. Apart from being a lingua franca, used as a vehicular language by speakers of different first languages, English is frequently used in education and in many workplaces. It is also a language often heard on TV and when using a computer. We are surrounded by English more or less every day. There are different views on how this affects Swedish society. Some people believe that Swedish is strong enough to survive the English impact while others are concerned that English might pose a threat to the future of Swedish as Sweden’s main official language. The speakers that seem to be most committed to this issue are Swedish adults who were brought up at a time when English was not as widely used. However, we rarely hear about young people’s opinions. Today’s younger generation has been exposed to English from an early age and it is interesting to study how this might have affected their attitudes to the current and future linguistic situation. In this project, semi-structured interviews have been carried out with six informants aged from 18 to 24 to investigate their use of English and their attitudes to this use. All informants predicted a further strengthening of the English language in the coming years but disagreed as to whether it might replace Swedish as our main official language. This study does not aim to convey an overall picture of young people’s attitudes; however, it can be seen as a basis for further discussion on the subject.

The present paper is a comparative, cross-linguistic study of modal verbs in legal speech acts expressing deontic notions such as orders, prohibitions and permissions. The study comprises the four largest Germanic languages spoken today: English, German, Dutch and Swedish. With English as a reference point, EU legal documents in these four languages are compared to see how legal speech acts signalled by modal verbs in the English text are expressed in German, Dutch and Swedish. The main focus is however on English and Swedish. The material consists of EU treaties and directives, UK and Irish statutes and Swedish statutes. The legal documents are first investigated for the total amount of certain modals and words in order to get a general outline of potential differences in modal verb patterns. Secondly, a close examination of ten randomly chosen treaty articles and two directives is conducted to see how English legal speech acts containing a modal verb are translated in German, Dutch and Swedish. The initial general results for the English and Swedish EU texts are then compared to UK, Irish and Swedish national statutes.

The results found show that Swedish has very similar modal patterns to English, although there are similarities to German and Dutch as well. Swedish is the only language that has a modal verb equivalent to deontic shall. English and Swedish is thus, in terms of deontic modal patterns, closely related while German and Dutch display equal similarities.

One of the biggest problems concerning presuppositions has been correctly dealing with their sensitivity to the context, i.e. why inferences triggered by certain expressions do not project out in all linguistic environments, even though the triggering words preserve their semantic content in different settings. The answer which is of particular interest here goes along with the principles of the binding theory of presuppositions developed by van der Sandt (1992). According to this theory, presuppositions behave asanaphors and can be resolved in the same way at the level of discourse representation.

This article contributes to a very scarce body of empirical work on presuppositions, as it scrutinizes examples of presuppositions that act like discourse anaphors in the context of three psychotherapeutic sessions. Such sessions can be analyzed in the same way as ordinary spoken discourse; however, the initial premise that the usage of presuppositions differs in this genre in comparison to daily interaction is confirmed. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis indicate that presuppositions are used for different strategic reasons in the two genres compared, which influences the way they should be interpreted and also their frequency.

Two fundamental components of causality are the Cause and the Result. In linguistic work the distinction between these aspects is commonly blurred, presumably because the primary research focus has been on describing how language encodes causality. The semantic nature of the component events and the constraints on their relationship are seldom discussed; however, the current work aims to shed light on a broader spectrum of features that underlie the concept. This is an essential foundation for understanding how language communicates Result. The present discussion explores and illuminates the nature of this concept focusing on a relatively open-ended set of linguistic elements that can play a role in shaping a discourse relation in addition to discourse connectives. This is in contrast to the majority of the previous research, which has been quite intensely concerned with investigating a limited collection of well-established causality markers. Also, despite the fact that English has been used in studies on causality both as a control language and a metalanguage, there is surprisingly little work on the semantics of the relations that occur specifically in English, let alone Result relations.

By borrowing from several cognitively-oriented approaches and combining empirical data from two written corpora (British National Corpus and the Penn Discourse Treebank) with experimental work, the current study systematically investigates the conceptual and linguistic properties of several closely related Result relation types (including Purpose), along with the joint role of discourse connectives and other discourse elements in conveying the intended sense. The findings indicate that linguistic signals of the conceptual structure of the relation seem to play a more significant role in the interpretation than explicit marking. Two factors emerged as more vital cues than the presence of the ambiguous connective so.  In Purpose relations, a modal auxiliary conveying an intended effect, and in Result relations the presence/absence of an intentionally acting actor are crucial for disambiguation. The multifunctional connective therefore seems to merely satisfy the mandatory marking requirement related to the intrinsically unrealized (‘nonveridical’) nature of Purpose. In Result the presence of an ambiguous marker is to a great extent optional in English.

However, discourse markers can also reflect how language users categorize causal event types. This claim has been confirmed in several cross-linguistic analyses, but the lexicon of English connectives has not been systematically investigated from this vantage point. The few existing studies found that the uses of English connectives are quite unconstrained across causal categories. The present work contributes to this line of research and suggests that two unambiguous markers, as a result and for this reason, indeed cover a wide range of causal event types; however, they also exhibit significant tendencies to occur prototypically in certain relation types. The presence and role of an intentionally acting discourse participant behind both real-world and linguistic causally-related events contributes to these tendencies. The contexts that include such a participant are regarded as intrinsically subjective and have been found to manifest surface expressions of subjectivity in previous work on other languages. The current study confirms similar tendencies in the linguistic construal and marking of Result relations in English, which proves that certain language elements partake in establishing the intended interpretation on a par with discourse connectives.  What emerges as a result of this discussion, is therefore an account on how English utilizes the broad category of Result and what linguistic elements are used to convey the array of resultative events.

Coherence relations differ in their tendency to be explicitly marked. How such relations are recognized and what determines their tendency to be marked is a matter of debate. The connective so represents a special case: it can be used to signal RESULT coherence relations and the more specific cause-effect relation of PURPOSE, but overt marking has been claimed to be required for PURPOSE and optional for RESULT. We present written corpus and experimental results on the use of so that show that RESULT and PURPOSE with this connective can be reliably distinguished from each other, and that the modal auxiliaries can/could and will/would are strongly associated with PURPOSE. In the corpus study, PURPOSE always occurs with explicit so, while RESULT is often left unmarked. These results are in line with recent claims based on annotated corpus data that implicit (unmarked) and explicit (marked) coherence relations can be qualitatively different (e.g. Sporleder and Lascarides, 2008; Webber, 2009). However, in our experiments using strongly purposive event pairs, 35-40% of examples were identified as PURPOSE without a connective or a modal verb cue. We argue that the difference between the corpus results and the experimental results can be explained as a difference between the tasks of speakers and hearers, and we outline an explanation for how marking can be obligatory for PURPOSE relations and yet optional for RESULT. We also propose that nonveridicality seems to play a key role in a marking requirement for PURPOSE, and explain why the unusual marking pattern found makes it difficult to give a pragmatic account similar to more well-known language asymmetries.