I currently do not have any teaching duties, but I have previously taught courses in Swedish (and Scandinavian) language history and grammar. I have also supervised bachelor and master theses. Since 2021 I am supervising Ana María Rodríguez-González' phd-project (together with Gunlög Josefsson, Lund University). 

So far, my research has primarily focused on various aspects of the history of the Swedish language. Currently, I am interested in the development of complex adverbial constructions during the Late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish periods, for example prepositional infinitives. 

Together with Anna Sahlée, Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University, I am working in a project focusing on the Swedish matriculation exam between 1864 and 1968. We have, among other things, been interested in the numerous corrections and comments made by the teachers who assessed the essays in Swedish.

Together with Johan Brandtler, also from the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, I was the editor of the textbook Nyanser av grammatik (Studentlitteratur, 2021), and I also wrote a chapter on word classes in the anthology.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• ”Är det kritiskt tänkande om alla tänker att kritiskt tänkande är samma sak?”: En fokusgruppsstudie om att vara kritisk på universitetet

  2024. Mikael Kalm, Lena Lind Palicki. Svenskans beskrivning 38, 218-233

  Conference

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• The emergence of adverbial infinitives in Swedish

  2022. Mikael Kalm. Morphosyntactic change in Late Modern Swedish, 195-237

  Chapter

  Prepositional infinitives are commonly used in present-day Swedish to express a range of adverbial notions, including purposive, abessive, substitutive, temporal, and instrumental meanings. However, only purposive infinitives are attested in Old Swedish. The aim of this article is to give an account of the emergence of adverbial infinitives in the history of Swedish. Other adverbial infinitives emerge from the late 17th century onwards possibly as the result of contact-induced (replica) grammaticalization. It is furthermore argued that the emergence of adverbial infinitives should be seen as a result of the increasing importance and consequent demands of precision of the written language and as part of the establishing of a written norm, separate from the spoken language. This assumption is supported by data from the traditional dialect of Övdalian, where adverbial infinitives are not used.

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• Nyanser av grammatik

  2021. .

  Book (ed)

  Det är välkänt att grundläggande läroböcker i grammatik av pedagogiska skäl behöver utgå från en starkt idealiserad bild av språket och grammatiken. Men efter det alldeles nödvändiga tragglandet av form, funktion och klassificering väcks också nyfikenheten för vad som kan finnas mer att förstå om språkets mönster och principer. Grammatisk fördjupning innebär därför att i viss mån slå sönder flera av de ”sanningar” och föreställningar som den grundläggande grammatiska beskrivningen förmedlar.

  I 18 kapitel problematiserar författarna en rad olika aspekter av svenskans grammatik och diskuterar grammatikbeskrivningens praktiska och teoretiska nytta. Hur många ordklasser finns det, egentligen? Hur kan man skilja mellan adverb och adjektiv, eller huvudverb och hjälpverb? Och hur gör man med konstruktioner som förekommer i vardagligt språk?

  Nyanser av grammatik är avsedd för universitetskurser i svenska och nordiska språk samt för ämneslärarutbildning i svenska.

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• Ordklasser – finns de?

  2021. Mikael Kalm. Nyanser av grammatik, 23-42

  Chapter

  Ordklasserna hör verkligen till grammatikens grundbultar. Även den som inte kommer ihåg särskilt mycket av skolans övriga grammatikundervisning brukar kunna rabbla upp ett antal ordklasser, som substantiv, adjektiv och verb. Och alla som studerar språk, vare sig det är svenska, engelska, franska eller något annat språk, kommer troligtvis i kontakt med ordklasser. Därför framstår de som en så självklar del av grammatiken att vi sällan reflekterar över dem. Men den som börjar skrapa på ytan, märker snart att ordklasserna inte är riktigt så självklara eller ens så entydigt avgränsade som vi kan förledas att tro. I detta kapitel tittar vi därför närmare på ordklasserna.

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• Adverbiella infinitivfraser i svenskans historia

  2020. Mikael Kalm. Studier i svensk språkhistoria 15, 107-119

  Conference

  The aim of this article is to give an account of prepositional adverbial infini- tives in the history of Swedish. Present Day Swedish shows a range of such adverbial infinitives, including purposive, abessive, substitutive, temporal, and instrumental infinitives. With the exception of purposive infinitives, such adverbial infinitives are not attested in Old Swedish (1225–1526). The earliest examples of other adverbial infinitives are abessive and substitutive, from the second half of the 17th century. Temporal infinitives are first attested in the late 18th century and instrumental infinitives in the first half of the 19th century. This order of appearance is strikingly similar to the order in which adverbial infinitives emerge in Romance (cf. Schulte 2007a). One way to understand this is that the spread of adverbial infinitives in Swedish follows a general, cross- linguistic pattern of the evolution of adverbial categories. In an attempt to understand how these adverbial notions were expressed before the adverbial infinitives are attested, I also conduct a contrastive study of Övdalian transla- tions of Swedish texts. The results show that an adverbial infinitive in Swedish is often translated with another construction in Övdalian. It is possible that the same linguistic resources were used in earlier stages of Swedish.

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• Infinitivmärket i östnordiska fornspråk

  2019. Mikael Kalm. A Copenhagen Miscellany, 127-143

  Chapter

  Infinitive clauses show substantial variation across Scandinavian languages, not least with regard to the distribution and syntactical status of the infinitive marker at. Although etymologically identical, this variation in use and status of at suggests that infinitive markers are relatively late innovations in Scandinavian and that they, to a certain extent, have emerged independently. The aim of this article is to give an account of the infinitive marker in early East Scandinavian texts in order to detect variation regarding its use at early stages of the languages. Previous studies have pointed out that the distribution of at is less regular in Old Swedish than in Old Icelandic, which suggests possible regional differences. The empirical study is based on eight Old Danish, Old Swedish and Old Gutnish texts, mostly laws. Verb complements excluded, all infinitive clauses in the texts are considered. These contexts would, if applied in the modern languages, trigger the use of the infinitive marke. The result shows major differences between the texts. Whereas at is regularly used in all of the Old Danish, its use is much less regular in the Old Swedish and the Old Gutnish texts, with the exception of the only West Swedish text. In this text, at has a distribution very similar to that of Modern Swedish. The investigation thus supports the assumption that the infinitive marker at has emerged independently across Scandinavian and that there are regional differences to be considered. 

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• Bedömningspraktik i förändring

  2020. Mikael Kalm, Anna Sahlée. Svenskans beskrivning 37, 282-295

  Conference

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• Lärares uppfattning om den goda uppsatsen i slutet av 1800-talet

  2020. Mikael Kalm, Anna Sahlée. Studier i svenska språkets historia 15, 254-267

  Conference

  This article is an investigation of teachers’ corrections and comments on gra- duation essays from the 1870s. Our aim is to learn more about the linguistic norms in Swedish secondary schools at the time, such as they appear in this specific context. The study is based on 13 graduation essays (in total 7,184 words) from one secondary school (Högre Allmänna Läroverket i Falun). There are 532 corrections and comments in the texts, corresponding to an average of 7.4 corrections/comments per 100 words. Corrections and comments are thus very common in the texts that we have investigated. Many of the cor- rections focus on textual details, such as the choice of words and sentence structure, but by no means are all of the corrections due to incorrect language use. Rather, it seems that many of the corrections target the style of essays. Corrections or comments concerning the structure of the texts are very rare. Most of the comments made by teachers are in the category called focusing, i.e. co-appearing with a correction in the text. None of the essays contain positive feedback from the teacher, which we believe could be significant for the cor- rection norm at the time.

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Show all publications by Mikael Kalm at Stockholm University