This book presents the first major study of ditransitives in Swedish. Using a combination of well-established and innovative corpus-based methods, the book reveals considerable changes in the ...constructional behaviour of ditransitive verbs over the course of the last 200 years.
Övdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically ...closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.
This book is an account of the variation between two possessive constructions in Danish and Swedish: the s-genitive and the prepositional construction. Present-day corpus data, as well as historical ...data (corpus texts from 1250-1550) are explored.
"Tense/Mood/Aspect-agreeing Infinitivals is an in-depth investigation of the syntax of verb-verb agreement phenomena in Swedish, including pseudocoordinations of the form John started and wrote 'John ...started writing' and double participles of the form John had been-able written 'John had been able to write'. Providing evidence from facts concerning extraction, locality, selection, and interpretation, the book argues that the relevant construction types all involve surface variants of ""infinitives in disguise"", infinitivals that agree with the matrix clause in tense/mood/aspect. Arguments are presented in favour of taking the dependencies underlying the agreement to be instances of Agree between functional heads of the same label, a configuration that yields restructuring/clause-union. The main theoretical contributions of the book are two: (i) Agreement is proportional to functional structure: The possibility of ""copying"" a particular morphosyntactic form is contingent on the presence of the corresponding functional projection in the agreeing XP. (ii) Size constancy between restructuring/non-restructuring infinitivals: The category selected by a verb may remain constant between restructuring and non-restructuring configurations. It is suggested that an important aspect of restructuring may be alternation between unmarked (negatively specified) features and unvalued varieties of the same features, capturing properties such as ""tenselessness"", ""finitelessness"", etc. of restructuring infinitivals. The book is an important contribution to the syntax of infinitival clauses, the syntax of clause-union/restructuring, and more generally to the syntax of agreement phenomena in natural language. In addition, it provides a general reference source for anyone interested in the syntax of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages."
This book is an account of the rise of definite and indefinite articles in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, as documented in a choice of extant texts from 1200-1550. These three North Germanic ...languages show different development patterns in the rise of articles, despite the common origin, but each reveals interdependencies between the two processes. The matter is approached from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The statistical analysis provides an improved overview on article grammaticalization, focusing on the factors at the basis of such process. The in-depth qualitative analysis of longer text passages places the crucial stage of the definite article grammaticalization with the so-called indirect anaphoric reference. Readership: All interested in historical linguistics and North Germanic languages, in particular those with interest in the rise of definite and indefinite articles; also linguists (including undergraduates) with interest in the category of definiteness and in corpus linguistics.
This study identifies similarities and differences in the structural organization and cultural attitudes expressed in Swedish and Russian proverbs of comparative semantics on poverty and wealth. It ...provides a classification of linguistic units (35 Swedish and 60 Russian proverbs) based on their expression of identity, comparison, contrast, and syntactic organization. The research reveals that in the Swedish language, proverbs expressing comparison with adjectives in the comparative degree have quantitative advantages, while in the Russian language, proverbs expressing contrast prevail. Similar cultural attitudes in Swedish and Russian proverbs of comparative semantics on poverty and wealth include: (1) The wealthy person’s material status is incomparably higher than that of the poor, but the poor person surpasses the wealthy in moral terms. (2) The wealthy always desire more, being unsatisfied with their wealth. (3) Laws operate differently for the rich and the poor. (4) Wealth is fleeting if not used wisely. Differences lie in specific cultural attitudes. For instance, Swedish proverbs focus on the wealthy person’s daughter as a coveted prize for those seeking easy enrichment, while Russian proverbs intensify certain qualities of individuals based on their degree of poverty / wealth (the poorer a person is, the more generous, wise, intelligent, brave, cunning they are, etc.).
This article investigates transitional points in interaction (junctures) where participants use the Swedish adverbial expression på något sätt ('in some way') in conversations about visual art. The ...conversations take place between 1) professionals in gallery settings and 2) lay people in group conversations. These participants have different knowledge about and different rights to assess art. Thus, how they position themselves epistemically in relation to the situational context and with the help of på något sätt is an additional aim of this study. The junctures scrutinized are found in places where på något sätt occurs as a turn extension, in responsive turns and in aborted turn constructional units (TCUs). At these junctures the participants deal with potential interactional troubles that can hamper the progressivity of talk and make repairing actions relevant. Deploying a multimodal interactional analysis, the study shows how the participants' observations can be modified and negotiated by på något sätt co-occurring with relevant embodied behavior, such as emblematic, iconic and other-oriented hand gestures. The participants in both data sets seek to establish a mutual understanding. They seem to agree more easily on observables when these are modified and delivered in relative terms. In this interactional work, where the participants need to organize their descriptive and evaluative actions in relation to each other, the adverbial expression på något sätt is a highly flexible resource.
This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have ...tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.
Der Band verfügt über detaillierte Register der Personen- und Ortsnamen, über 44 (leider nicht aufgelistete) Kartenskizzen, etliche Schwarzweiß-Fotografien und -Faksimile im Text sowie farbige ...Reproduktionen dreier im Dokumentenanhang wiedergegebener moskauischer Schriftstücke. Jahrhundert hindurch von „hostile coexistence" gekennzeichnet, wie Heinz Ellersieck in einem prägnanten, indes vom Autor nicht herangezogenen Aufsatz zum Thema des Selin'schen Buches formuliert hat (Heinz Ellersieck: The Swedish-Russian Frontier in the Seventeenth Century. Mit Blick auf das Verhältnis von Finnen und Esten mit ihrem übermächtigem Nachbarn im Osten lösten die vor genau 400 Jahren im nordwestrussischen Weiler Stolbovo getroffenen Festlegungen dann doch eine bis in die Gegenwart hinein reichende longue durée-Wirkung aus, ein veritables „Making of Finnland in Karelia and of Estonia on Lake Peipus and along the Narva River" also mittels des engen Zusammenhangs von „Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness".
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