Jan Lars Svartvik (18 August 1931 –18 June 2024) was a Swedish linguist and professor in English. Svartvik's work started an entirely new discipline,forensic linguistics. He was the author of several grammar books on English that were widely used in teaching English in Sweden during his lifetime. One of his research areas was also corpus linguistics.
Jan Svartvik was born in Torsby,Sweden 18 August 1931.
Svartvik spent four years at University College,London,starting in 1961. He earned his PhD in 1966 at Uppsala Universitet. [2]
In 1968 Svartvik analysed the statements by Timothy John Evans given to police at Notting Hill police station,England,in the case of an alleged murder by Evans in 1949,who was found guilty and executed but later was found innocent. In "The Evans Statements:A Case for Forensic Linguistics" where Svartvik concluded Evans did not actually give the statements to the police officers as had been stated at the trial,the term forensic linguistics appeared for the first time. [3] [4]
In 1970 Svartvik became professor of English at Lund University,where he remained active until 1990.
The first edition of Engelsk Universitetsgrammatik (University Grammar of English) by Svartvik and Olof Sager was published in 1972. This work remained the standard for Swedish students of English in higher education for years. [2] [5]
Svartvik was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Physiographic Society in the city of Lund. [6]
Jan Svartvik died on 18 June 2024,at the age of 92. [7] His son Jesper Svartvik (born 1965),is a theologian. [2]
International | |
---|---|
National | |
Other |
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).
Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus. Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety. Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections.
Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb. Subject pronouns are usually in the nominative case for languages with a nominative–accusative alignment pattern. On the other hand, a language with an ergative-absolutive pattern usually has separate subject pronouns for transitive and intransitive verbs: an ergative case pronoun for transitive verbs and an absolutive case pronoun for intransitive verbs.
Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods, and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics.
Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA was a British linguist and life peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968 to 1981. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.
In English grammar, the personal pronoun you can often be used in the place of one, the singular impersonal pronoun, in colloquial speech.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
Langueandparole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.
Robert B. Lees was an American linguist.
Standard French is an unofficial term for a standard variety of the French language. It is a set of spoken and written formal varieties used by the educated francophones of several nations around the world.
The International Corpus of English (ICE) is a set of text corpora representing varieties of English from around the world. Over twenty countries or groups of countries where English is the first language or an official second language are included.
The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.
Sidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage, 1983–96. With Randolph Quirk and others, he wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. He also wrote Oxford English Grammar.
The history of English grammars begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were based on those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology, was introduced in the nineteenth century.
Carole Elisabeth Chaski is a forensic linguist who is considered one of the leading experts in the field. Her research has led to improvements in the methodology and reliability of stylometric analysis and inspired further research on the use of this approach for authorship identification. Her contributions have served as expert testimony in several federal and state court cases in the United States and Canada. She is president of ALIAS Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence.
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by Longman in 1985.
Thetical grammar forms one of the two domains of discourse grammar, the other domain being sentence grammar. The building blocks of thetical grammar are theticals, that is, linguistic expressions which are interpolated in, or juxtaposed to, clauses or sentences but syntactically, semantically and, typically, prosodically independent from these structures. The two domains are associated with contrasting principles of designing texts: Whereas sentence grammar is essentially restricted to the structure of sentences in a propositional format, thetical grammar concerns the overall contours of discourse beyond the sentence, thereby being responsible for a higher level of discourse production.