Progressives are grammatical patterns primarily used to refer to events that are ongoing at a specific time. This thesis investigates uses of such patterns in a number of languages as well as the interaction of a number of progressives in contact. The dissertation includes a typological study of the uses of 89 progressive pat...

The notion adverb is often treated as encompassing leftover items in a class that shows little consistency both within and ​across languages. Adverbs are less frequent than other parts of speech cross-linguistically, they seldom inflect, and they are rarely used as a source for derivation to other categories.

T...

This study describes the verse design of Old English poetry in terms of modern phonological theory, developing an analysis which allows all OE verse lines to be described in terms of single metrical design.

Old English poetry is typified by a single type of line of variable length, characterised by four metrical peaks. ...

This compilation thesis engages with practices that in some way place stakes in the social existence of Övdalsk (also älvdalska, Elfdalian, Övdalian), a marginal form of Scandinavian used mainly in Sweden’s Älvdalen municipality. The practices at hand range from early 20th century descriptive dialectology and contemp...

This thesis investigates the system of compounding attested in the earliest written Latvian texts of the 16th and 17th centuries. The philological analysis presented in this work is the first systematic attempt to extensively treat compounds in Old Latvian. The purpose of this thesis is to thoroughly describe the system of co...

This dissertation investigates the expression of the indirect evidential subdomain in two languages in contact, i.e. the northern variety of Central Aymara and the variety of Spanish spoken in La Paz (Bolivia).

For this aim, the study uses first-hand data collected in La Paz and El Alto (Bolivia) during 2014 and 2015. D...

This thesis is about whether language affects thinking. It deals with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we speak influences the way we think. This hypothesis is investigated in the domain of caused motion (e.g., ‘The man rolled the tyre into the garage’), by looking at Spanish and Swedish,...

In this dissertation, I investigate various aspects of object marking and how these manifest themselves in the signed modality. The main focus is on Swedish Sign Language (SSL), the national sign language of Sweden, which is the topic of investigation in all five studies. Two of the studies adopt a comparative perspective, in...

This dissertation examines mealtime conversations between parents and children in eight Swedish and eight Italian middle class, dual-earner households, exploring the ways in which children are engaged in the cooperative construction of social order. The study is part of an international project (cf. Aronsson & Pontecorvo,...

The aim of this thesis is to investigate lexical replacement processes from several complementary perspectives. It does so through three studies, each with a different scope and time depth.

The first study (chapter 3) takes a high time depth perspective and investigates factors that affect the rate (likelihood) of lexic...

Lexical access, the matching of auditory information onto lexical representations in the brain, is a crucial component of online language processing. To understand the nature of lexical access, it is important to identify the kind of acoustic information that is stored in the long-term memory and to study how the brain uses s...

This thesis investigates the syntactic features, functions, and diachrony of a complex predicate called ‘the inceptive construction’ which is based on a grammaticalised use of the converbs ‘get up’, ‘pick up’, ‘grasp’, and ‘take’. The languages under investigation are Amharic, Argobba, Harari, Zay, and Selt’i. The data collec...