John Löwenadler

• University of Gothenburg

The aim of the study is to investigate trends in academic L1 Swedish and L2 English reading comprehension ability among Swedish adolescents, with a specific focus on 18- to 20-year-olds in the period 2012–2018. The material consists of results from regular tests and anchor tests in the spring administrations of the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Tes...

This study aims to investigate patterns of variation in the interplay of L2 language ability and general reading comprehension skills in L2 reading, by comparing item-level effects of test-takers’ results on L1 and L2 reading comprehension tests. The material comes from more than 500,000 people tested on L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in the Swedish...

This paper concerns crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of so-called relative clause extraction constructions, exemplified by the unacceptable English sentence * This boat I know the guy that owns (associated with the acceptable canonical sentence I know the guy that owns this boat ). It has sometimes been argued, since Ross (1967), th...

Issues concerning the nature of so-called ‘filler-gap’ constructions and the constraints on their acceptability in different languages have for a long time been at the center of the linguistic debate. In more recent years, claims have often been made that many or all constraints on such constructions can be explained in terms of processing restrict...

This chapter discusses the implications of an acceptability test designed to evaluate the Swedish native speakers's reluctance to form the neuter gender of certain adjectives such as the defective adjectives. This chapter provides some observations related to the Löwenadler paper. While the paper focused on the certain Swedish adjective forms which...

A well-known phenomenon in Swedish is that some adjectives are ‘defective’ in the sense that they are not possible in neuter gender. In previous explanations, it has usually been argued that the defective forms could be distinguished from non-defective forms by phonological and/or semantic criteria. Showing that such proposals cannot account for th...

Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface presents on-going research in Role and Reference Grammar in a number of critical areas of linguistic theory: verb semantics and argument structure, the nature of syntactic categories and syntactic representation, prosody and syntax, information structure and syntax, and the syntax and sema...