Browsing by Author "Engdahl, Elisabet"

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Att använda SAG : 29 uppsatser om Svenska Akademiens grammatik /
(2000) Engdahl, Elisabet; Norén, Kerstin
Frågor i NoTa
(2008) Engdahl, Elisabet; University of Gothenburg. Department of Swedish
Negotiating about lexical meanings
(2009) Engdahl, Elisabet; Norén, Kerstin; University of Gothenburg. Department of Swedish
One central issue in the generative lexicon approach is how to account for the context dependence of certain aspects of the meanings of lexical items. Pustejovsky (1995, 2005), Ginzburg (to appear) and Ginzburg and Cooper (2004) exemplify how the interpretation of lexical items is influenced by the context of use. An interesting source of data comes from conversations in which the participants spontaneously comment on the appropriateness, or lack of appropriateness, of a particular word or phrase in the given situation. These comments are often introduced by locutions like It depends on what you mean by X or Qu’est-ce que vous entendez par X? In Swedish there is a lexicalized grammatical construction which functions as a cue to this kind of negotiation about the meaning of lexical items, the x-och-x construction. In this paper we show how the xoch- x construction is used in spontaneous conversations and informal writing as a means for questioning and clarifying aspects of meaning. The conventionalized x-och-x construction thus provides us with a tool to investigate which aspects of meaning language users are aware of and tend to negotiate about. One hypothesis that we will explore is that logical terms like negation and grammatical function words like complementizers are less likely to give rise to negotiations. However, when they are used in the x-och-x construction, the negotiation may reveal important aspects of their use in ordinary language.
Språkkänsla
(Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2009) Engdahl, Elisabet; University of Gothenburg. Department of Swedish
Strange things happen on extraction paths
(Institutionen för svenska språket, Göteborgs universitet, 2013) Engdahl, Elisabet
Vad händer med subjektstvånget? Om det-inledda satser utan subjekt
(Språk & stil NF 20, 2010, 2010) Engdahl, Elisabet; University of Gothenburg/Department of Swedish Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för svenska språket
Grammatical descriptions of contemporary Swedish normally state that Swedish has a strong subject requirement: finite clauses (except imperatives and conjoined clauses) must contain an overt subject. If the clause lacks a referential subject, the expletive det is inserted either in initial position, e.g. the so-called fundament, or in the subject position following the main verb in a matrix clause. In this article, a new clause type is presented and analyzed. The initial det in examples such as det var bra att du sa (‘it was good that you said’) at first appears to be an expletive subject, but can be interpreted as the missing object of the embedded clause, which means that the matrix clause has no overt subject. The new construction resembles so-called tough constructions such as det är lätt att säga (‘it is easy to say’), but differs in several respects: it is not restricted to adjectival complements, the complement clause is finite, and the fronted object can only appear in initial position [Spec, CP], not in the postverbal subject position [Spec, IP]. So far the new construction has mainly been attested in informal spoken language, but it seems to be spreading to other registers and used with initial elements in addition to det.