Blogg

In our research group, we are exploring ways of analysing language to find early signs of possible cognitive impairment, which may develop to dementia. Dementia is a condition that affects people all around the world, and the risk of developing it increases with age.

 

Ord kan förändra sina betydelser. Man behöver inte en doktorgrad i språkvetenskap för att upptäcka att grym i (1) betyder inte samma sak som i (2).

At Språkbanken we collect resources, mainly lexica and corpora, most of them in Swedish. So far we have collected Swedish corpora totalling 13 billions of words, in all kinds of genres and from all time periods.

Among the flurry of Språkbanken’s historical resources we find the Kubhist corpus – a diachronic collection of historical newspaper texts – in two versions: Kubhist 1 spanning the time period of 1750–1950, and Kubhist 2 spanning the time period of 1645–1926. Historical corpora of this kind, especially when available in searchable format, are valuable sources of information for learning about our history, language and culture.

One of the most central aspects of language learning is the learning of words. Casual observation tells us that a learner with a knowledge of the relevant words can get a message across to native speakers, even without much grasp of grammatical structure above word level, whereas for somebody with the opposite distribution of language skills, this will typically not work out.

Ordet tsunami var helt okänt för de flesta i Sverige före julhelgen 2004. Då inträffade ju det som så småningom kom att kallas tsunamikatastrofen, en förfärlig naturkatastrof som skördade otaliga dödsoffer i Sydasien och Sydostasien.