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.
"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 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.
Retrieval practice can boost memory and long-term retention. The present research suggests that it may also benefit another domain that is critical for learning, namely motivation. In three ...experiments, subjects studied Swedish vocabulary by means of retrieval practice – with or without corrective feedback – or restudy. After a final memory test, subjects were left alone for a short period of time, and could choose freely if they wanted to learn more about the Swedish language and Sweden as a country. Retrieval practice with – but not without – feedback increased the time that subjects chose to invest in continued engagement in the materials. The results provide first evidence that retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying, potentially by making one's own progress in learning more transparent and enhancing experience of competence. Caveats and potential limitations are discussed.
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".
Syftet med studien är att demonstrera hur nya och allt större korpusar kan ge oss djupare insikter i svensk och norsk språkhistoria. Detta illustreras av den ganska nya satsadverbtypen ...underligt/klokt nog, t.ex. underligt nog var ingen hemma. För att hitta ett förstabelägg för konstruktionstypen år 2000 fanns bara den stora historiska svenska ordboken (SAOB) att tillgå; där hit-tades ett belägg från 1839. År 2014 var den svenska Litteraturbanken, där stora delar av den klassiska svenska litteraturen finns digitaliserad, redan väl utbyggd, och ett belägg från 1833 hittades. I dag, år 2020, är så gott som alla viktiga svenska tidningar från 1700-talet och framåt digitalt tillgäng-liga via Kungliga biblioteket, och nu kan konstruktionstypen spåras tillbaka till åtminstone 1805. Som framgår av studien är utvecklingen i Norge och norskan, såväl vad gäller digitala textmaterial som den aktuella konstrukt-ionstypen, i allt väsentligt parallell.
In the so-called pseudocoordination two verbs show congruence as in normal coordination while referring to a single event. This article deals with the syntactic status of the pseudocoordination in ...Low German by means of an empirical survey. According to the results of the survey, most aspectual verbs are accepted as first verb, but the absentive verb and the cessative verb are not accepted. Moreover, in this construction the object cannot be moved leftward, which is possible in Swedish pseudocoordination. To explain its syntactic behaviour, this article hypothesizes that the pseudocoordination in Low German does not involve complementation and that aspectual verbs in Low German can stand independently.
We study the role of family wealth for children's educational achievement using novel Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents' wealth and their ...grandchildren's educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the independent role of wealth in contributing to long-term inequalities in opportunity. We use regression models with extensive controls to account for observed socioeconomic characteristics of families, cousin fixed effects to net out potentially unobserved grandparent effects, and marginal structural models to account for endogenous selection. We find substantial associations between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's grade point averages (GPA) in the 9th grade that are only partly mediated by parents' socioeconomic characteristics and wealth. Our findings indicate that family wealth inequality—even in a comparatively egalitarian context like Sweden—has profound consequences for the distribution of opportunity across multiple generations. We posit that our estimates of the long-term consequences of wealth inequality may be conservative for nations other than Sweden, like the United States, where family wealth—in addition to its insurance and normative functions—allows the direct purchase of educational quality and access.
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