Language and culture in Europe
Master’s thesis spring 2013
SUGGESTIONS FOR THESIS WRITING SPRING 2013
Supervisor: Lars Ahrenberg
Topics related to discourse analysis of machine translation output or, corpus-based studies of
translations into Swedish, English, or German
Supervisor: Eva Carlestål & Åsa Nilsson Dahlström
Cultural heritage
Supervisor: Leelo Keevallik & Nazli Avdan
Leelo’s subjects a - c
a. Grammar in interaction: the emergence and use of any feature of grammar or lexicon in
recorded interaction
b. Embodied interaction: the use of the body in real-time face-to-face communication
c. Identities and epistemics: the emergence of any social identity and its relationship to
mutual calibration of knowledge
Nazli’s subjects d-f
Media discourse analysis in political texts.
Recommended questions:
d. How competing meanings are constructed in political texts in the media
e. How political and national identities are positioned in media texts
f. How is power performed in political texts in the media
Supervisor: Anna Ekström
Projects involving analyses of talk-in-interaction. Topics could be related to:
Anna subjects
a. Professional communication (e.g. characteristics of communication in a specific
professional setting, how communicative resources are used to solve tasks and
problems specific to a profession or how domain-specific information is constructed
in-and-through communicative practices
b. Discourse and gender (e.g. how is gender oriented towards and made relevant in
communicative activities, how is discursive practices related to gender in a specific
setting, how is gender constructed in-and-through communicative practices)
c. Talk and embodied activities (e.g. how can talk be understood in relation to embodied
conduct, how is talk used to describe embodied actions, how is talk used in activities
where the progression is primary seen in terms of bodily conduct rather than further
discourse)
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Language and culture in Europe
Master’s thesis spring 2013
Supervisor: Francoise Monnoyeur-Broitman
a. Gender issues in colonialism, post-colonialism, literature, society
b. Any subject related to French or English Literature
Supervisor: Nigel Musk
Bilingualism (or multilingualism) within a European context. These are possible areas or foci
of study:
a. Some aspect(s) of societal bilingualism, e.g. language policy & planning in one or
more European country.
b. Some aspect(s) of bilingual education in one or more European country.
c. Some aspect(s) of individual bilingualism in one or more European country, i.e. the
actual (recorded) language practices of bilinguals (e.g. code-switching).
Supervisor: Karin Mårdsjö Blume & Lotta Lundgren
Data in Swedish and/or English
a. Discourse analysis of text and talk, interaction analysis from a contextual perspective,
textanalysis.
b. Comparative/constrastive/qualitative analysis including case studies (but not purely
quantitative approaches using lots of statistics).
c. Analysis of oral communication (be it mono-, dia- or polylogical) in everyday or
institutional settings such as education, professional interaction, institutional
interaction).
d. Analysis of written communication (discourse analysis, linguisitic text analysis):
institutions communicating with citizens, journalistic texts, marketing material, plain
language initiatives, internationalisation/localisation of graphical user interface text
and other software related texts.
Supervisor: Ann-Sofie Persson
a.
b.
c.
d.
Autobiography
Postcolonial perspectives in literature
Gender perspectives in literature
Francophone literature
Supervisor: Lotta Plejert
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Language and culture in Europe
Master’s thesis spring 2013
a. Second and foreign language interaction, with particular focus on English.
b. Interaction involving people with communicative disabilities (adults with aphasia or dementia,
children with language impairment, people who use augmentative and alterantive communication).
Note that a working knowledge of Swedish is required for writing a thesis for me on topic 2.
Supervisor: Maria Strääf & Jenny Malmqvist
Aspects of intertextuality and /or narratology.
Supervisor: Victoria Thörnryd
a. Studies of novels or short stories in which parody, satire, irony, etc. are involved
b. Studies of literary discourse analyses in novels or short stories in English, Swedish or
Spanish
c. The vision of women in historical novels in English, Swedish or Spanish
d. Studies of memory related to the Spanish Civil War
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