Swedish Texts Research Articles

SWENER-1800

Named entity recognition (NER) is the process of automatically identifying persons, places, organisations and other name-like entities in text, in order to perform natural language processing tasks such as automatic extraction of metadata from text, anonymisation/pseudonymisation of sensitive personal data, or as a preprocessing step for linking different terms describing the same entity to a single reference. While NER is a mature language technology, it is generally lacking for historical language varieties. We describe our work on compiling SWENER-1800, a large (half a million words) reference corpus of historical Swedish texts, covering the time period from the first half of the 18th century until about 1900, and manually annotating it with named entity types identified as significant for this time period, as well as with sentence boundaries, notoriously difficult to recognise automatically in historical text. This corpus can then be used to train and evaluate NER systems and sentence segmenters for historical Swedish text. An additional concrete contribution from this work is a manual for annotation of named entities in historical Swedish.

«Смерть Лопатинского» Ф. Булгарина в переложениях финских авторов XIX в.

The article explores the Swedish translation and poetic adaptations of F. Bulgarin’s “war story” “The Death of Lopatinsky,” published in Finland at the turn of the 1830s and 1840s. The article documents and explains the differences between the Swedish translations and the original Russian work. It also notes the reaction of the Finnish readership to the Swedish texts. The response to the relatively accurate translation of Bulgarin’s story published in the newspaper “Wasa tidning” (January 1839) was an article in “Borgå tidning” (May 1839), containing a truthful, in contrast to the Russian version, description of the death of Lieutenant Lopatinsky in September 1808. The article discusses Janne Lundmark’s poem “The Death of Lopatinsky, and the Voices at the Tomb,” which was published in Helsingborg in 1843. This poem is a poetic reworking of Bulgarin’s text and includes references to several characters from Scandinavian mythology, with the Houris being the most prominent. The article suggests that Lundmark indicates the eastern origin of the hero of the poem in this way. The article also notes that Valkyries and Houris often form a pair of “maidens of Paradise” in Swedish literature from the first half of the 19th century. Lundmark probably takes this into account. Finally, the article mentions that Lundmark’s poem is one of several works by Swedish-speaking authors from the 17th–18th centuries that are dedicated to the death of a hero.

Child sexuality and interdependent agency in sexuality education texts for Swedish preschool practitioners 1969−2021: three discourses on children’s sexual play

ABSTRACT This paper provides a discourse analysis of 12 Swedish sexuality education texts intended for preschool practitioners and published between 1969 and 2021. Using Fairclough’s framework, we identify three discourses about children’s sexual play in relation to children’s sexual agency in the texts: child sexuality as encouraged and entangled with adult sexuality; child sexuality as conditioned by what is perceived as normal or abnormal in children; and child sexuality as repressed. These three discourses mainly appear chronologically, but also overlap and connect with one another. When analysis begins from children’s position and a theoretical understanding of children’s and adults’ agency as interdependent, it becomes possible to see how the child is construed as agentic, and how the adult role changes from encouraging sexual play to regulating and monitoring behaviour so that it does not occur. Over time, discourse on young children’s sexual play has changed our understanding of both adults and children. Adults are increasingly construed as less knowledgeable in relation to young children’s sexuality, and young children have become understood as more dangerous and in need of having their sexuality constrained and civilised.

CENTENARIANS IN SWEDISH MASS MEDIA: IS IT REVERSE AGEISM?

Abstract Studies on ageism often deal with negative stereotypes due to increasing age. Seldom studied is the increase in status that seems to occur at the turning point of 100 years. This study explores how centenarians are portrayed in Swedish media texts and relates this to mechanisms of ageism and age coding. We used Retriever database, which is the biggest Nordic database containing news media, to search for press articles concerning 100- to 105-year-olds. Our search resulted in 1468 articles, consisting of both news articles and feature articles. Excluding articles that did not deal with persons, articles with a paywall and redundant articles resulted in 235 articles. We analyzed (1) the contexts in which centenarians appeared, (2) the relevance of the persons’ age to the event and (3) feelings and values evoked in the articles. On the one hand, news reports evoke how centenarians ought to be shielded from harm and emphasize the indignity of even small wrongdoings. On the other hand, feature articles often use superhuman adjectives to describe centenarians, and emphasize their “youthfulness”. In birthday features, there was also an expectation for centenarians to publicize their celebrations and there was a recurrent trope was that centenarians held well-kept secrets about ageing well. Portrayals of centenarians show that they are an esteemed group. However, we also interpret that these portrayals can hide other forms of ageism, particularly compassionate ageism, and a stereotyping of centenarians that play down ill health and emphasize youthfulness at the extremes of old age.

Pronominal demonstratives in homeland and heritage Scandinavian

AbstractThis paper discusses pronominal demonstratives (PDs) in homeland and heritage (American) Norwegian and Swedish. We establish a baseline approximating the language of the early emigrants, based on 19th/20th century Norwegian dialect recordings and Swedish texts. Baseline Norwegian had a fully established PD expressing psychological distance (see Johannessen 2008a). In Swedish, however, PDs do not quite behave like (distal) demonstratives: they can combine with a definite determiner or a regular demonstrative, and they do not fully have the pragmatic functions that demonstratives have. We propose that the Swedish PD is a pronoun rather than a demonstrative, without the full set of regular pronominal features, but with logophoric features that activate knowledge shared between the speaker and addressee. Data from AmNo show that PDs are preserved in this heritage language, across several generations. On the assumption that PDs are indexical and that speech act participants are represented in narrow syntax, it comes as no surprise that they are retained (Polinsky 2018:63–65), although this may, on the face of it, appear to be at odds with the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace & Filiaci 2006, Sorace 2011).

Reading in Language Introductory Program Classrooms in Sweden

The ability to read is important for studies, work and social life, and therefore, reading needs to be central in all school subjects. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the factors that either facilitate or limit second-language students in a transitional program at an upper secondary school in Sweden in terms of their reading and reading comprehension skills. Observations of teacher-initiated reading practices and interviews with teachers about reading and texts, which were analyzed using Bernhardt’s compensatory model for second-language reading, show that all teachers highlight the importance of reading and the fact that reading in the subject they teach can help students to become competent readers of Swedish texts. Despite this, the amount of reading and processing of texts varies—in some classes, students do not read at all, and in other classes, they read a great deal. The only teacher who seems both to include the processing of texts and to choose texts that interest students is the teacher of Swedish as a Second Language (SSL).

Environment as mediator – a discourse analysis of policy advice on physical environment in early childhood education

ABSTRACT This article examines how environmental design is set in motion as a technique of government in Swedish policy texts issued to advise those who build and plan preschools. Drawing on Foucauldian research on governmentality and Carol Bacchis ‘What’s the problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach, five Swedish government policies on how to build and design preschools are examined from a critical perspective. The WPR analysis helps identify how policies produce problems in certain ways and in this case shows how the preschool environment features in policies in accordance with a certain logic. The study shows that the environment is meant to function as a mediator for disciplinary power, to shape children’s behaviors in desirable ways without coercion. The article also highlights certain silences in the material, the most prominent of these being the lack of discussion about adapting preschool environments to different needs without labeling children as disabled.

The present participle and gender assignment in Swedish

AbstractThe paper considers gender assignment of deverbal nouns, originally present participles, in Swedish. The perspective is diachronic. The corpus consists of a choice of Swedish texts from 1225-1732. The results show that nouns denoting entities ranking higher in the Animacy hierarchy show tendencies to be placed in the utrum gender (originally masculine and feminine genders) and nouns denoting mass, collective or abstract referents to be assigned neuter gender. This tendency is visible throughout the history of the Swedish language.

An assessment of the translation-specificity of over-represented multi-word patterns in Swedish fiction texts translated from English

This paper discusses in what sense an over-represented multi-word pattern in a corpus of translated texts can be said to be typical of translated text. The purpose of the discussion is to assess, from a quantitative as well as from a qualitative perspective, the status of translational collocation data retrieved through data-driven methods from a comparable and parallel aligned cor¬pus of English and Swedish original and translated texts. The study focuses on the explicitation of clausal relations in translations from English into Swedish. In some cases, lexical and grammatical contrast lead to explicita¬tion, but in others explicitation is due to different factors.

Moving up and down in real space

The paper focuses on the role of the Swedish spatial particles upp ‘up’ and ner ‘down’ to signal the endpoint-of-motion in the description of motion situations and is based on Swedish original fiction texts and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Frequently the endpoint is marked with a locative preposition such as på ‘on’ or i ‘in’, and then a particle is required to signal change-of-place. In German and Finnish, the particle is often zero translated and change-of-place is indicated by case. The particle is often zero translated also in French, a V(erb)-framed language. This leads to contrasts at the conceptual level since verticality is not expressed. The result points to radical intra-typological differences between S(atellite)-framed languages in the expression of Path depending on general morpho-syntactic differences. Another important conclusion is that several different classes of motion verbs must be distinguished even in S-languages to describe the expression of change-of-place.

Animacy, Anaphora and Language Change in Swedish

This paper considers the role of animacy in the overt marking of indirect anaphors, i.e., noun phrases (NP), which introduce new discourse referents, that are grounded in the preceding discourse by means of a grounding element, an anchor. The indirect anaphors are considered in a diachronic perspective with reference to the emergent definite article and the variation between the article and other marking elements, in particular possessive pronouns. The study is based on an annotated corpus of Swedish prosaic texts from 1200–1550, which is a period of time when the definite article undergoes the process of grammaticalization in this language. The material was sorted according to the different combinations of the animacy of the anchor and the anaphor.The indirect anaphors which are anchored by means of expressions referring to animate entities show more variation of expression than those expressions referring to inanimate entities at the onset of definite article grammaticalization, but as the grammaticalization progresses, all indirect anaphors are by default expressed by the definite article. This is connected with the ongoing grammaticalization of the definite article and its extended use in new contexts. Keywords animacy; indirect anaphora; language change; definite article; Swedish

Familiar vs. unique in a diachronic perspective. Case study of the rise of the definite article in North Germanic

The aim of the present study is to follow the development of the suffixed definite article in North Germanic, in particular taking into account the unique reference expressed by the nascent article. The study is based on the corpora of Old Swedish, Old Danish and Old Icelandic texts written between 1200 and 1550. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, such as logistic regression models, are applied. The study is grounded in the notions of familiarity and uniqueness, which we explore diachronically. The results indicate that the use of the definite article is much more frequent in familiar than in unique contexts in North Germanic in the periods studied, as a greater proportion of NPs with direct anaphors is definite in the oldest extant texts, as well as throughout the later periods, than the proportion of NPs with unique referents. NPs with unique referents are further shown to constitute a non-uniform group, where the ‘more local’ unique NPs (grounded in specific knowledge) appear more frequently with a definite article than the ‘more global’ unique referents (grounded in encyclopaedic knowledge).

Pronominale demonstrativer: nye perspektiver fra norsk og svensk

This paper is concerned with pronominal demonstatives (referred to as psychologically distal demonstratives by Johannessen 2008a, b) in older Norwegian spoken language, and written Swedish from the 19th century and the present-day. We show that pronominal demonstratives can be attested in speakers born in different parts of Norway in the 19th century, and in Swedish texts from the same period. However, the pronominal forms do not seem to be used in precisely the same way in the two languages. In Swedish, han/hon ‘he/she’ do not seem to behave formally like demonstratives. Instead, we propose that they are syntactically reduced pronouns at the edge of the DP, above the position for demonstratives, and that they double features lower down in the noun phrase. In Norwegian, on the other hand, han/hun are used as demonstratives already in the 19th century, in the way described for present-day Norwegian by Johannessen (2008a, b).

Typical Grammatical Peculiarities of Formal and Business Writing in the Russian and Swedish Languages

The article deals with comparative analysis of the Russian-Swedish parallel texts of the Convention between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the Kingdom of Sweden about mutual assistance in the fight against the violation of the tax legislation (Avtal mellan konungariket Sveriges regering och Ryska federationens regering om msesidigt bistnd vid bekmpning av vissa fiskala brott). The Swedish and Russian texts differ immensely in their lexical and grammatical structure. The reason for these discrepancies is rooted, firstly, in typological distinctions between Russian and Swedish as languages of different groups and, secondly, in those processes of conscious simplification and regulation that the Swedish Language of formal business communication have been affected by during the last fifty years particularly in relation to clear language policy (klarsprk). In spite of some innovations the Russian Language of formal business communication in many ways continues to be traditional enough. The article is focused on a narrow range of issues relating to differences in grammatical structure of a sentence and prevailing nominal structures in the Russian text as compared with the verb oriented Swedish one. The juxtaposition of parallel texts and further systematization of differences between the Russian and Swedish Languages of formal and business communication makes it possible to give a comparative characteristic of this functional style existing in Russia and Sweden. The research is carried out by means of the continuous sampling method using the method of linguistic description to characterize utterance structure in grammar. Research results can be used in courses on a comparative typology of Russian and Swedish, stylistics, the theory and practice of translation.

Questions in English and Swedish fiction texts

AbstractThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the use and translation of English and Swedish questions in fiction by using a combination of parallel and comparable corpus data extracted from the bidirectional English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. In particular, the study examines questions containing a question mark (QMquestions) categorised intowh-interrogatives, polar interrogatives, alternative questions, tag questions (including those with invariant tags), declarative questions,wh-fragments and non-wh-fragments. The parallel analysis shows that most QMquestion types are more often translated congruently into English than into Swedish. The focus is on types with low mutual correspondence scores: fragments, tag questions and declarative questions. The comparable analyses concern both bilingual contrasts between the original texts and monolingual contrasts between the translation and original subcorpora in both languages. The bilingual analysis aligns with several preliminary findings in the parallel analysis, e.g. the favouring of tag questions and some types ofwh-fragments in English. The monolingual analysis reveals both over- and underuse in translations and points to a strong effect of source-language influence.

Supervised OCR Post-Correction of Historical Swedish Texts

Current approaches for post-correction of OCR errors offer solutions that are tailored to a specific OCR system. This can be problematic if the postcorrection method was trained on a specific OCR system but have to be applied on the result of another system. Whereas OCR post-correction of historical text has received much attention lately, the question of what role does the OCR system play for the post-correction method has not been addressed. In this study we explore a dataset of 400 documents of historical Swedish text which has been OCR processed by three state-of-the-art OCR systems: Abbyy Finereader, Tesseract and Ocropus. We examine the OCR results of each system and present a supervised machine learning post-correction method that tries to approach the challenges exhibited by each system. We study the performance of our method by using three evaluation tools: PrimA, Sprakbanken evaluation tool and Frontiers Toolkit. Based on the evaluation analysis we discuss the impact each of the OCR systems has on the results of the post-correction method. We report on quantitative and qualitative results showing varying degrees of OCR postprocessing complexity that are important to consider when developing an OCR post-correction method.

КАТЕГОРИЯ «СВОЕ – ЧУЖОЕ» В ШВЕДСКОМ ФОЛЬКЛОРЕ О СААМСКИХ НОЙДАХ

The article is devoted to the search and analysis of the category «our – alien» in Swedish folklore about Sami noaidis a specific category of people with supernatural powers. We have selected Swedish folklore texts, recorded in the second half of the twentieth century, which had never before been translated into Russian. The idiographic, cultural-historical and thematic generalization method are used. It turns out that noaidis were partly «aliens» to the members of their tribe: the Saami believed that noaidis possessed two souls, one of which could be sent to the world of spirits. We establish that the noaidis, as the informal leaders of their tribe, seemed to the Swedes, claiming to have Sami territories, the greatest threat. The Swedes could not classify the Sami sorcerers as «their own» because of their rejection of their claim to possessing abilities that were contrary to the Christian worldview, but easily overcame their prejudice when they were forced to turn to the medicaster skills of the noaidis. Despite the high level of tension, the noaidis allowed the Swedes to be present during their autochthonous sacred rites and rather willingly made contact with people oriented assimilative politics towards them.

ШВЕДСКИЙ ЯЗЫК ОФИЦИАЛЬНО-ДЕЛОВОГО ОБЩЕНИЯ В НОВОЕ И НОВЕЙШЕЕ ВРЕМЯ

Processes typical of the Swedish business language during the modern era were described. The study is of high importance, because this functional style of the Swedish language has been insufficiently investigated despite the regulation and normalization processes in it are of obvious interest to specialists in the Germanic languages. The main research method is synchronic analysis enabling examination and description the material in terms of the existing norms. A wide range of examples were provided to illustrate that in the modern era the language of law gradually gets closer to the language of notifications, rules, orders, regulations, etc., i.e., to documents that are usually implied when talking about officialese (the official and business style). It was concluded that the modern period was marked by not only the distinction between these two stylistic types of text, but also by the fact that they both acquired features common to Swedish non-fiction texts (sakprosan). In the 19th century, these processes were not very evident and, despite some minor innovations, the Swedish business language still contained a number of archaic features revealed in the so-called “substantival sickness” (substantivsjukan). A fundamental change took place in the 20th century and is associated with the spelling reform of 1906, as well as significant changes in such elements of the Swedish business language as syntax, morphology, and vocabulary that emerged mostly in the second half of the 20th century. The results obtained are of great importance for studying the Swedish stylistics, as well as for understanding the essence and roles of language policy in the process of normalizing and codifying the literary language.

”Varför vi är där vi är idag”

This article explores if conversations about literary texts that thematize abortion can provide new knowledge about the clinical everyday practice of midwives. The empirical material consists of conversations with seven clinical midwives after shared reading of a sample of fictional and biographical Swedish texts from the 1930s, 1950s, 1990s, and 2010s. Drawing on theories of power relations, gendered knowledge, and narrative medicine, the article investigates the relationship between the texts and the midwives’ professional experiences. The study demonstrates that the participants agreed on the positive effects of reading and discussing literary texts related to their professional work. The study cannot establish that it has provided new knowledge about the midwives’ clinical practice; it concludes, however, that the shared reading and conversations generated an exchange about experiences of abortion care that subsequently could deepen knowledge about treatment and practice within the profession. The study demonstrates that the reading experience generated discussions about the clinical practice that otherwise would never have taken place, for the participants asserted that the conversations had given time for reflection about medical, social, and emotional issues that did not occur in clinic. The texts brought specific professional experiences to the fore and offered new perspectives on norms, practices, and the professional role. One distinct impression conveyed by the participants was that shame is still a salient feeling among the patients, signaling that abortion is still a sensitive subject. The article concludes that similar elements of reading and discussing literary texts could prove an important part of (continuous) training for professional midwives.

Eating the [M]Other: Exploring Swedish Adoption Consumption Fantasies

Drawing on bell hooks’ classic essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, this article discusses ethnic consumption fantasies of white Swedish international adopters. The article uses deconstructive narrative analysis techniques to explore racial desires concealed and revealed in adopters’ descriptions of international transracial adoptee bodies in published Swedish adoption texts. Taking the use of food race metaphors (for example, almond eyes, chocolate skin) as a “positive” means of describing race differences in a supposedly post-race, colour-blind discourse as a starting point, the article discusses how ethnic consumption desires are reflective of white adopter fantasies of becoming something more than white Swedish, and even a bit “Other” themselves. The symbolic consumption of both the adoptee and the first mother enable the adopter to imagine internalising a spirit of primordial Otherness, which can fundamentally change them and enable them to step outside the confines of Swedish whiteness. It also gives them a claim to a connection with the adoptee that goes beyond biology. While the desire to consume the adoptee-Other body is imagined as progressive and anti-racist, this paper argues that such fantasies are dependent on maintaining and reinforcing the status quo of the white supremacist patriarchal structures that enable international adoption in the first place.