The adjectival agreement of noun phrases referring to human individuals in Swedish is renowned for its complex pattern of variation between -a and -e. This article reports three studies on the subject. The first one maps the use of the marked form -e, and finds it to be mainly used for males and generic individuals, but occasionally also for other animates, such as animals, women, and nonpersonal agents. The variation between -a and -e for males has often been thought of as regionally governed, but the second study, based on blog texts, suggests that region plays a subordinate role (or possibly no role at all) in writing. Many factors have been said to influence the variation, and the third study reported in the article tests their impact with statistical methods on modern data. The results indicate that the variation in noun phrases referring to specific male individuals is more influenced by pragmatic and semantic factors, as compared to the variation in noun phrases referring to generic individuals, which is more affected by formal and lexical factors. This difference is interpreted as a consequence of how the referents are conceptualized. The variation between -e and -a is often assumed to reveal an ongoing change. However, when the results of these studies are compared to a thorough description of the system from 1892, the emerging picture is one of enduring variation, influenced by the very same factors today as over a century ago.

Konferensserien Svenska språkets historia höll sin tolfte sammankomst i Stockholm 13–14 april 2012. Konferensens tema denna gång var Variation och förändring. Det är ett brett tema: språkhistoria är i mycket just ett studium av hur språk varierar i tiden och förändras över tiden. Temat belystes ur olika perspektiv av fyra inbjudna plenarföreläsare: Lars-Gunnar Andersson (Göteborg), Lars-Olof Delsing (Lund), Karl G. Johansson (Oslo) och Mirja Saari (Helsingfors). De fyra plenarföreläsningarna inleder denna konferensvolym. Därtill hölls 22 sektionsföredrag, varav 15 publiceras här.

This thesis tells the tales of auxiliation in Swedish. It describes how the auxiliary features of the aspectual auxiliaries bruka ‘use to’, tendera ‘tend to’, börja ‘begin, start’, fortsätta ‘continue’, sluta ‘stop, cease’ och hota ‘threaten’ evolve, as seen in a text corpora covering the 11th to the 21st century.

A grammaticalization perspective is employed, which not unexpectedly has implications for the way data is interpreted and presented, but also less expectedly for how the method is understood and applied. The method consists of Swedish auxiliary tests, designed to reveal auxiliary features. The discussion of their validity involves auxiliation theory as well as a more general theoretical discussion of how the category and the function of auxiliaries have been conceived. The main point made is that a valid test should have an explicit link to auxiliary function. Establishing the nature of such a link, however, is no trivial matter and so the plausibility of the link turns out to be the main factor in judging the validity of auxiliary tests.

In the early stages of the auxiliation processes, action nominals were often used as complements of the verbs under study. Later on these verbs started taking infinitive complements, lost their semantic restrictions on their subjects and started occurring in a type of passive construction where the nonfinite verb carries the semantic relationship to the arguments of the clause. The occurrence in this type of passive construction is perceived as the most plausible indication of auxiliary function available for subject raising auxiliaries, since the auxiliary and the nonfinite verb in these clauses do function together as one single predicate.

The evolution of these aspectual auxiliaries essentially follows the predictions made by auxiliation theory. That said, they all show individual deviations from those predictions, depending on such factors as their semantics, their source construction and during which period in the history of Swedish their auxiliation took place.