The relative perceptual weight of two Swedish prosodic contrasts

Abstract. In addition to 9 vowel and 18 consonant phonemes, Swedish has three prosodic phonemic contrasts: word stress, quantity and tonal word accent. There are also examples of distinctive phrase or sentence stress, where a verb can be followed by either an unstressed preposition or a stressed particle. This study focuses on word level and more specifically on word stress and tonal word accent in disyllabic words. When making curriculums for second language learners, teachers are helped by knowing which phonetic or phonological features are more or less crucial for the intelligibility of speech and there are some structural and anecdotal evidence that word stress should play a more important role for intelligibility of Swedish, than the tonal word accent. The Swedish word stress is about prominence contrasts between syllables, mainly signaled by syllable duration, while the tonal word accent is signaled mainly by pitch contour. The word stress contrast, as in armen [´arːmən] ‘the arm’ - armén [ar´meːn] ‘the army’, the first word trochaic and the second iambic, is present in all regional varieties of Swedish, and realized with roughly the same acoustic cues, while the tonal word accent, as in anden [´anːdən] ‘the duck’ - anden [`anːdən] ‘the spirit’ is absent in some dialects (as well as in singing), and also signaled with a variety of tonal patterns depending on region. The present study aims at comparing the respective perceptual weight of the two mentioned contrasts. Two lexical decision tests were carried out where in total 34 native Swedish listeners should decide whether a stimulus was a real word or a non-word. Real words of all mentioned categories were mixed with nonsense words and words that were mispronounced with opposite stress pattern or opposite tonal word accent category. The results show that distorted word stress caused more non-word judgments and more loss, than distorted word accent. Our conclusion is that intelligibility of Swedish is more sensitive to distorted word stress pattern than to distorted tonal word accent pattern. This is in compliance with the structural arguments presented above, and also with our own intuition.

Konsekvenser av rollövertagandet : ”I”, ”me” och individualiteten

Consequences of role taking: the ”I”, the ”me” and individuality This paper analyzes the tendency of taking the ”I” and the ”me” in G. H. Meads theory of role taking as two separate, qualitatively different parts of human personality, the ”I” being of individual origin, the ”me” of social. In the original Meadian sense role taking gives rise to both the ”I” and the ”me”. They are dialectically united rather than dualistically separated aspects. They refer to the joint functional power of the subject, finding itself as an object, mediated by the Other. As a consequence, the link between body and the social world becomes theoretically more stringent, as the body is given its place as a cognitive social object among others, this by contrast to interpretations where the body is left as an object mainly outside the human social experience and as a source of agency sui generis, a conception which is in opposition to Meads. The stress on the ”I”-phase, as related to body and concrete action in combination with its direct relation to the ”me”-phase, actualizes Mead as a forerunner in modern biologic/neurologic research on human perceptual, motivational and intentional capacity.Swedish Mead interpreters are critically analyzed. Interpretations of Charon, Giddens, Joas and Habermas are partly scrutinized. The author defines the conceptual pair in terms of activity, subjectivity, temporal relativity and distance.

The world of the Sumerian mother goddess : an interpretation of her myths

The present study is an interpretation of the two myths copied in the Old Babylonian period in which the Sumerian mother goddess is one of the main actors. The first myth is commonly called “Enki and Ninḫursaĝa”, and the second “Enki and Ninmaḫ”. The theoretical point of departure is that myths have society as their referents, i.e. they are “talking about” society, and that this is done in an ideological way. This study aims at investigating on the one hand which contexts in the Mesopotamian society each section of the myths refers to, and on the other hand which ideological aspects that the myths express in terms of power relations. The myths are contextualized in relation to their historical and social setting. If the myth for example deals with working men, male work in the area during the relevant period is discussed. The same method of contextualization is used regarding marriage, geographical points of reference and so on. Also constellations of mythical ideas are contextualized, through comparison with similar constellations in other Mesopotamian myths. Besides the method of contextualization, the power relations in the myths are investigated. According to this latter method, the categories at issue, their ranking, as well as their changed ranking, are noted. The topics of the myths are issues important for the kingship and the country, such as irrigation, trade, health and healing, birth, collective work, artisanry and rivalry. All these aspects are used in order to express what the power relations between the goddess Ninḫursaĝa/Ninmaḫ and the god Enki look like. The relations are negotiated and recalibrated, which leads to the goddess getting a lowered status. Part of the negotiations and recalibrations is gender behavior, which is related to historical developments in society. The present work points to the function of these myths as tools of recalibrating not only deities, but also men and women in society.