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Title:
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Orthographic Codes And Code-Switching. A study in 16th century Swedish orthography
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Author:
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Alexander Zheltukhin
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Stockholm University
, Department of Scandinavian Languages
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Degree Date:
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1996
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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Swedish
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Director(s):
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Barbro Soederberg
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Abstract:
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The opinion that 16th century Swedish orthography varied at random, with scribes spelling according to whim, has prevailed until now. One of the chief aims of this dissertation is to show that it may be misleading to equate variation with total irregularity. Variation itself can be structured, and the orthographic repertoire of a 16th century scribe could also vary in a systematic and consistent way.
Due to variation, 16th century orthography recalls modern speech: both are diffuse (or internally divergent). I therefore assumed that it would be appropriate for my purposes to apply sociolinguistic methods developed for analysis of speech habits of a given community.
I use a model of variable consensus-norms in order to map and describe orthographic patterns in 16th century writs of several chanceries and in the productions of the Royal print. I distinguish two kinds of norms: periodic norms, those agreed upon over a period in time, and community norms, through which different social groups are characterized. To describe these norms I use a number of selected orthographic variables, each of them represented by at least two interchangeable variants. The analisys of the spread of the variants provided new information about general tendencies in 16th century Swedish orthography. It revealed, for example, several irreversible shifts of variants, which turned out to be universal for all the communities considered.
Another emphasis of this study is on the analysis of individual orthographic strategies. They are described by sets of the selected variables, termed individual orthographic codes. I focus primarily on factors capable of stimulating changes in an individual orthographic strategy, such as collisions with other strategies, language contact, etc. I refer to psychological mechanisms that stimulate changes and seek sociolinguistic explanations for their successful implementation. I also discuss possibilities of rough dating of texts, reconstruction of original orthogarphic patterns, and identification of scribes, using the interplay between orthographic codes and variable orthographic norms.
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