Jan-Ola Östman

Language attitudes and the ideology of the Nordic

Abstract This article discusses the rise and the current standing of “Norden” (the Nordic societies) as an imagined community (Anderson, Imagined communities, Verso, 1991). The ideology of Norden as a coherent community rests on the one hand on the perceived mutual intelligibility of the Scandinavian languages, used as mother tongue or as lingua franca. On the other hand the ideology of Norden rests on a sense of historical unity. Historically, the ideology of the Nordic grew out of the era of national romanticism. The present study therefore addresses the pertinent question of how the ideology of the Nordic fares in late modernity where ideology is under threat from more “rational”, e.g., financial lines of thinking.

The soft-spoken, angelic pickax killer : The notion of discourse pattern in controversial news reporting

Abstract Using the controversial 1998 Karla Faye Tucker execution and its local newspaper coverage as an illustration, this paper investigates the applicability of the notion of discourse pattern (Ostman, 1999) in a situation where, at first sight, the well-known, accepted, and familiar discourse pattern could be expected to fail. The local newspaper in the town where all Texas executions are carried out, has developed a highly predictable pattern of reporting about routine executions (Halmari, 1999). Our paper shows that even in the case where the routine pattern is expected to change (in this case because the person executed was a woman and a born-again Christian — two issues to cause plenty of controversy) the newspaper uses implicit means in order to ‘secretly’ adhere to the expected discourse pattern. While at the explicit level the news reports convey a balanced view (Karla is portrayed both as angelic and as a pickax killer), at an implicit level, the reports nevertheless also manage to fulfill the expectations of the members of the local community, which the newspaper — from its own perspective, rightly so — sees as its primary audience. The study supports the notion of discourse pattern as a force contributing to discourse coherence and aiding the cognitive processing of textual interpretation.

Hvor parallelt om parallellspråkighet på Nordens universitet

Sprogpolitik er blevet et hot emne pa de nordiske universiteter. Det skyldes forst og fremmest at brugen af engelsk har bredt sig til snart sagt alle omrader, og at det i sig selv kalder pa bevidst ...