Forskningsintressen

Semantik, grammatik, lexikalisering, ordbildning, metaforer, kollokationer, korpuslingvistik, kognitiv lingvistik, psykolingvistik, språkvård.

Tidigare forskningsprojekt

Metakommunikation om ord

Ord och uttryck kommenteras ofta i samband med att de används. Sådan metakommentering förekommer särskilt frekvent för nyare ord som ännu inte är helt konventionaliserade. Bland annat kan ordets status kommenteras, och det kan vara viktigt för skribenten att ange vilka som brukar använda uttrycket. Ibland förklaras orden, eller också kommenteras klangen och värdeladdningen:

1. Plötsligt har begreppet "bokstavsbarn" fått en nedsättande klang.
2. Göran Tägtström värjer sig inför uttrycket "stafettläkare" som används på många håll i landet.
3. Curlingföräldrar har blivit ordet på allas läppar.
4. Begreppet "skurkstater" är numera en del av den amerikanska utrikespolitiska retorik som ersatt det kalla krigets.

Projektet har två huvudsyften: dels att närmare analysera olika sätt att metakommentera ord generellt, dels att undersöka vilken inverkan metakommenterandet har på konventionaliseringsprocessen och på den framtida användningspotentialen hos de metakommenterade orden. Det övergripande målet är att utveckla kunskapen om vilken roll metakommenterandet spelar i språkbruket, dels under konventionaliseringen av nya ord, men också i den ständiga dynamiken kring redan etablerade ord.

Finansierat av Vetenskapsrådet 2012–2014.

Hur nya ord får betydelse. En undersökning av hur nya sammansättningar konventionaliseras

Projektet handlar om hur det går till när nya sammansättningar etableras och blir konventionella, framför allt hur de får sin betydelse.

Betydelsen hos nya sammansättningar – som t.ex. virusskydd, musarm, curlingförälder och flytträtt – följer inte automatiskt av de ordleder som ingår. Betydelsen påverkas av en rad faktorer, bl.a. mönster från likartade ordbildningar, föreställningar som lederna aktiverar, kunskaper som användningssituationerna aktiverar, de diskursmönster som utmärker dessa situationer samt de språkliga kontexter där orden etableras.

Betydelseetableringen studeras här hos olika typer av ord, både samhällsord och mer vardagliga ord, både i tal och i skriftspråkskorpusar. Hur ser fördelningen ut mellan olika faktorer och hur samspelar de? Finns det generella mönster? Ordens kontexter analyseras systematiskt. Framför allt undersöks ordens konstruktionssätt, vilket dels ger indikationer om ordens betydelser, dels i sig utgör en väsentlig aspekt av konventionaliseringen.

Finansierat av Riksbankens jubileumsfond.

Resultaten sammanfattas i Svanlund 2007 och Svanlund 2009.

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• Metalinguistic comments and signals: What can they tell us about the conventionalization of neologies

  2018. Jan Svanlund. Pragmatics & Cognition 25 (1), 122-141

  Artikel

  Many neologies receive a large amount of metalinguistic focus during their conventionalization. This includes explicit metalinguistic comments, as well as several ways of emphasizing a new word qua word in running texts, so-called metasignals (e.g., quotation marks). This article reports from a large quantitative study of 360 Swedish neologies. It investigates the nature and the amount of metafocus during conventionalization. More than 96% of the neologies received metafocus at least once, but the mean proportion of metafocused citations was low, just under 3.5%. Metafocusing is likely to be more intense in early phases and is likely to decline over time. No long-term effects of metafocusing on the conventionalization process itself were found in corpus data.

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• Lexikal etablering

  2009. Jan Svanlund.

  Bok

  This corpus-based study deals with the process whereby new compounds become established as conventionalized lexical items in the Swedish language. Special attention is given to how their meanings develop during the early phases of usage. Strictly compositional accounts of their semantics are rejected. Nine recently conventionalized compounds have been investigated in detail. The main corpus consists of all citations of these compounds from two full-text databases consisting of newspapers and magazines. Together they cover almost all of the major newspapers and several other ones as well. In addition to these corpus data, a questionnaire was used where informants were asked to describe (what they thought was) the meaning of these compounds and also to indicate how sure they were about the conventional usage of these words. Furthermore, the Swedish Language Bank has been used, mainly to get frequency data which show what kinds of word formation patterns the component parts of the compounds usually take part in, and how strong these patterns are. These data are used as reference points when analyzing the actual uses of the compounds and the semantic associations that the informants had.

  The compounds do not show a great deal of semantic variation. All but one has one clearly dominating sense, but most of the compounds are occasionally also used with strikingly deviant meanings. Metacomments and metasignalling seem to have an impact on conventionalization, at least they affect the familiarity of these items. While some of the compounds are extensively metacommented, explained and problematized, others are treated as natural and self-explanatory. The latter are generally found to instantiate strong word formation preferences, which make them seem transparent. 

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• The construal of entity permanence

  2009. Jan Svanlund. Studies in Language and Cognition, 97-110

  Kapitel

  This chapter concerns how we individuate entities more abstract than material objects and how we judge different instances as being instances of the same entity. Linguistic construals of sports teams in Swedish are examined as an example of how collective human institutions can be treated as permanent entities. Just like prototype categories, such entities must be conceived as rather flexible, and it is argued that they have a dual nature concerning the type vs. instance distinction.

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• Dåvarande lektorn, sedermera professorn - är det samma person?

  2007. Jan Svanlund. Språkets roll och räckvidd, 242-253

  Kapitel

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• Metaphor and convention

  2007. Jan Svanlund. Cognitive Linguistics 18 (1), 47-89

  Artikel

  This article argues that lexical metaphors should be seen as graded: they differ in their conventionalized ability to activate concepts from the source domain. Such differences in metaphorical strength are analyzed, along with other (graded) dimensions of conventionality. Co-occurrence patterns for conventionalized metaphors from the WEIGHT domain in Swedish are investigated in some detail, making use of extensive corpus data. The results indicate large differences in metaphorical strength. This provides implications for the relation between conceptual and lexical levels of metaphor, which are found to be more dialectic than usually assumed, especially within Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

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• Hur man etablerar sig som curlingförälder och stafettläkare

  2006. Jan Svanlund. Svenskans beskrivning 28

  Konferens

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• Metaforen som konvention

  2001. Jan Svanlund, Kerstin Norén.

  Avhandling (Dok)

  This dissertation examines the nature of conventional lexicalized metaphors, especially their degree of figurativeness, which is defined as their ability to activate conceptions from the source domain of the metaphor. The corpus in question consists of central words from the source domain WEIGHT. The analysis concentrates on collocations, the basic approach being to compare the metaphorical uses of a word with the non-metaphorical ones.

  The study demonstrates that the WEIGHT domain consists of two subdomains, partly distinct, partly overlapping: 1) the vikt subdomain primarily connected to weighing procedures with metaphorical meanings like 'importance' and 'consider'; 2) the tyngd subdomain primarily connected to gravitational effects on objects and bodies with metaphorical meanings like 'heaviness' and 'weigh upon'. Metaphors from the vikt subdomain were in general found to be less figurative, basically due to its conceptual nature. But there were also differences within the same subdomain. Some words seem metaphorically projected one by one, rather than as parts of a conceptual unity. The degree of figurativeness can therefore be said to depend on both (sub)domain properties and on lexical properties specific to the lexicalized metaphorical item. 

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