Björn Hammarberg Professor emeritus

Most of my research deals with second language acquisition and development, as an aspect of general linguistics. My work in this field focuses on the development and use of L2 Swedish and, in this connection, properties of Swedish and other languages involved. Topics of grammar, lexis, phonology, discourse and utterance production are usually approached from a cognitive and functional perspective.

A longitudinal corpus of adult L2 learner Swedish, the ASU Corpus, has been constructed by me and co-workers and is being kept accessible as a research facility. It combines spoken and written learner production with a control part from native Swedish speakers.

One field of interest is the nature and development of third (or tertiary) languages (L3s) and individual multilingualism. This goes with the assumption that a dynamic multilingual repertoire is the normal form of linguistic competence in humans. Main contributions here are a comprehensive case study of L3 acquisition processes as well as a critical analysis of some central concepts in the still young discipline of L3 acquisition study.

One earlier focus of interest has been second language phonology and the shaping of an early-stage phonological interlanguage, i.e. the start and successive development of what is perceived by native target language speakers as pronunciation with a foreign accent. In this connection, a central aspect has been the role of phonetic naturalness in L1 for cross-linguistic influence on learner solutions in L2.

Research facility

The ASU Corpus

• Project description 
• Manuals (in DiVA)
• The user interface ITG

Selected publications