David Håkansson, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University

Carin Östman, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University

“the teacher interrupted eagerly”: A diachronic study of the speech-tag in Swedish fiction (“afbröt skolläraren ifrigt”. En diakron studie av anföringssatsen i svensk skönlitteratur)

The narrative structure of Swedish fiction underwent several changes during the 20th century, and it has been emphasized that the role of the narrator was reduced. In order to shed light on this change towards a more ”objective” style in Swedish fiction, this article reports a diachronic study of speech-tags in Swedish 18th- and 19th-century novels. In direct discourse the reader meets the voices of the characters without any involvement of the narrator. However, the narrator still has an opportunity to give complementary information about the utterance and the speaker by using the speech-tag, and hence, a study of speech-tags can contribute to the discussion of the narrator’s transformed role in Swedish fiction. In this study, the form and function of speech-tags are examined in terms of structure, position and content. The result of the analysis shows that the speech-tags in the 20th century novels are much less varied in comparison with the novels from the 19th century. Moreover, the speech-tags in the modern novels are shorter and dominated by the verb säga ’say’ to a much higher extent. In the older novels, on the other hand, the speech-tags are dominated by verbs reporting something about the content or the function of the utterance, such as fråga ‘ask’ or hota ‘threaten’. As far as the position of the speech-tags is concerned, the results show that the final position dominates to a greater extent in the modern novels. On the whole, the results of the study confirm the picture of a reduced narrator in Swedish fiction over time.

Sedan 1963 har det vid olika universitet i Sverige och Finland regelbundet anordnats sammankomster för svenskans beskrivning. Vid dessa har forskningsresultat som rör svenska språkets uppbyggnad och användning presenterats och diskuterats.

Den trettiosjätte sammankomsten ägde rum den 25–27 oktober 2017 i Uppsala. Temat för konferensen, som samlade runt 200 deltagare, var denna gång Varför svenska? Ambitionen var att på olika sätt belysa, problematisera och tydliggöra svenska språkets innebörd, roll och betydelse inom vetenskap, skola och samhälle. Sektionsföredragens ämnesmässiga spännvidd var som vanligt för konferensserien stor och föredragen berörde de flesta områden inom ämnet svenska språket.

I denna volym publiceras i bearbetad form 27 av de föredrag som hölls vid sammankomsten. Den ger därmed en god överblick över aktuell forskning om svenska språket. Alla som vill följa den senaste utvecklingen på området finner här mycket av intresse.

Sara Stymne, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University

Johan Svedjedal, Department of Literature, Uppsala University

Carin Östman, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University

Linguistic Rhythm in Narrative Prose: the case of Karin Boye’s Kallocain (Språklig rytm i skönlitterär prosa. En fallstudie i Karin Boyes Kallocain)

The concept of rhythm in prose is ambiguous, and there is no consensus on how to define it. In this work, we focus on linguistic rhythm, at word, sentence and paragraph levels. We adopt and slightly extend rhythm indicators used in previous research, and show that these can be calculated fully automatically, on a much larger scale than previously done.

We adopt the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye’s (1900–41) novel Kallocain (1940), as a case study. It is an icily dystopian depiction of a totalitarian future, where the protagonist Leo Kall first embraces this system, but for various reasons later rebels against it. The peripety comes when he gives a public speech, questioning the State. It has been pointed out that the novel from precisely this point on is characterized by a much freer rhythm, and that Boye as an author had considerable interest in questions of linguistic rhythm. This paper sets out to test this hypothesis by applying sixteen indicators of linguistic rhythm in narrative prose (such as word length, sentence length, ratio of punctuation, etc.).

We first note that we can expect differences between narrative and dialogue and limit most of our study to the first-person narrative. We find that there are significant differences mainly between phrase and word lengths in the parts before and after Leo Kall’s conversion. In a further investigation we note that there is also great variation among indicators within each part of the novel. We also show that machine learning can be used to differentiate small segments from each part of the novel, with higher accuracy than a random classifier. Finally, we undertake a small study of dialogue, which, however is mainly inconclusive. In summary we find some support for the claim that there is a rhythm break in Kallocain. We also believe that our study is important from a methodological point of view, since it provides a method for largescale studies of prose rhythm in the future.