Högskolan i Skövde

This study examines the background of the homogenous structure of usage labels in dictionaries. A typological analysis of the rhetorical virtues (elocutionis virtutes) and the levels of style (genera dicendi) in classical rhetoric theory encompasses prescriptive as well as descriptive elements and shows that this rhetorical system, emanating from Roman rhetoric, is the base for the still used taxonomy of usage labels.

This study aims to shed light upon the question of whether stylistic and textual variation depends on the fact that individuals are acting consciously, selecting style and text patterns, or, if they are instead driven by external textual factors. The material chosen for the analysis is a representative selection of Swedish stylistic and textual research. The study shows that traditional stylistics, focusing on micro-analysis, emphasizes the actor perspective. Modern textual research, often focused on macro-analysis, ignores the author perspective and is instead focused on how structural factors influence text production. The external factors affecting style and text patterns are described as being of a psychological nature related to the psyche of the individual, as well as of a social nature. Theoretically based explanations of how external factors affect text production hardly exist. Within stylistic and textual research, the characteristics sof texts are described in great detail, but these descriptions are related to them of texternal structural factors in sweeping pseudoscientific and unsubstantiated words.

This study describes how Swedish linguistics normally defines the denomination grounded on dichotomy of concepts as standard (language) and regional dialect, and what is considered falling in between the places of these basic concepts. Advantages and disadvantages regarding constructions of such geographically defined conceptual systems are analysed and evaluated. Normally, there is a compartmentalization into a number of vague forms of language fluctuating between standard and regional dialect, where the linguistic frontier dividing them is difficult to define; it is generally drawn on haphazardly chosen indexations of language specifics. Moreover, the link between different forms of language and their geographical habitat is superficial, unsystematic, and arbitrary. Distinctions of language determined by habitat are described as either complete systems or as varieties. Many linguists emphasize - although using conceptual systems of this kind - the failings of them in their description of a contemporary language situation.

The major part of the wordstock in a Swedish monolingual general dictionary is based on the so-called standard variety of the language. A century ago, this standard variety was well defined, stable and easily recognisable, distinguished as the one used by the elite. Today, changes in society and language have largely resulted in the development of an instable, pluralistic standard variety, marked by insecurity partly towards disintegration and partly towards dissolution of norms. The new standard has somewhat integrated previous specific varieties (e.g. geographical dialects and sociolects), whereby older variety specific langauage traits have now come to be regarded as style markers within the standard variety, and also being influenced by those who speak and write Swedish as their second language. The evolution of new electronic media has resulted in written and  oral forms of the language being closer to each other, and also in an ever increasing amount of text being stored, not in the traditionally printed form but, instead, on the net. This new reality must involve important consequences for future lexicography work.

Research on writing makes use of a system of concepts, whose purpose it is to describe various forms of text production. Within this field are primarily found concepts as genre but also text type, discourse type and text; characteristic for the use of these concept is that they are highly renowned for their vague or even non-existing definitions of the conceptual content. In a critical survey of the field these central concepts are delimited and defined. Moreover, the use of genre within traditional and digital media is studied. Traditional genres of high prestige, marked by discursive discourse types, normally have a similar structure in digital and in traditional print media. The screen-based text use of the young, however, is characterized by newly developed, loose, colloquial, and highly social communicative genres, which will not likely facilitate promoting the school objectives meant to further discursive thinking and writing.