Curriculum vitae
Over the years, I have worked with such things as pronominalisation rules, theme-comment structure, quantifying expressions, semantic roles, computational linguistics, morphological case and phonology, predominantly in Czech and Russian.
There are currently three problem areas of special interest to me:
1. Problems concerning morphological case, e.g. how to distinguish case languages from non-case languages (which only have prepositions and/or postpositions); how to establish that something is a case while something else is not (e.g. postposited articles in Swedish); how to establish how many cases there are in a language; whether it is possible to find a common invariant meaning in all uses of a certain case, etc.
2. The classical structuralist phonology is worth preserving. Its main weakness was not that any serious mistakes were made, but rather that it refrained from going all the way, from actually making concrete the things that were talked about in terms of abstract principles.
In my opinion, this phonology is a fascinating field in which one has to take a stand in the eternal linguistic dispute (already the ancient Greeks...) between Anomalists and Analogists, i.e. those who emphasise the chaotic, irregular nature of language versus those who stress the regularity of language. Both of these extreme positions are of course wrong (as in only partly right), and the fundamentally important thing is to establish explicit criteria for the right "mixture" of analogies and anomalies in a language description.
3. My newly awakened interest in Slavic aspect has to do with the untenability of what all descriptions of Slavic languages with at least a minimum of theoretical ambitions claim, namely that the imperfective verbs are unmarked, that they lack explicit information about some semantic characteristic, while the corresponding perfective verbs hold the explicit information about the presence of the same semantic characteristic (whatever this semantic characteristic may be). For many verbs, this is simply not true, which I am trying to prove and hope to replace with a more realistic analysis.
Some publications
Monographs
• Coreference Rules Described in Terms of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP). Working Papers 15, Department of Linguistics, Lund University, 1978, pp. 1-53.
• Coreference Rules in Czech and Functional Sentence Perspective. Slavica Lundensia 6, Lund Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists in Zagreb - Ljubljana 1978, pp. 51-104.
• Intrasentential Pronominalization and Functional Sentence Perspective (in Czech, Russian, and English). Lund Slavonic Monographs 1, Lund 1981, 238 pp.
• Case grammar and Semantic Roles. 41 pp., Report 30, Department of Linguistics, Umeå University, Umeå 1990.
• Valence and Semantic Roles. 45 pp., Report 30, Department of Linguistics, Umeå University, Umeå 1990.
• Application of a System of Semantic Roles to a Swedish Text. 42 pp., Report 30, Department of Linguistics, Umeå University, Umeå 1990.
Other
• Pronominalization Rules (Coreference Rules) Described in Terms of Functional Sentence Perspective. Papers from the Third Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (utg. F. Karlsson), Turku 1976, pp. 51-62.
• Some Thoughts about Functional Sentence Perspective, Empathy and Reflexives. Working papers 16, Department of General Linguistics, Lund University, 1977, pp. 5-18.
• Reflexives and the Subjective (›Empathic›) Side of Functional Sentence Perspective. Papers from the Fourth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (ed. K. Gregersen), Odense 1978, pp. 227-233.
• What is FSP Really About? Papers from the Fifth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, Part II: General Sessions (ed. T. Petterson), Stockholm 1979, pp. 7-22.
• Anaphoric Relations from the Viewpoint of the Referential and Attributive Use of Language Sign. Slavica Lundensia 7, Sueco-Polonica, Papers from the Second Swedish-Polish Slavistic Conference, held at Forsakar, Sweden, June 15th-18th, 1979, pp. 133-174.
• Pronominal vs. Zero Subjects in Czech and Russian. Slavica Lundensia 8, 1980, pp. 29-50.
• Is There Any ›Backward Pronominalization›? Papers from the Sixth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (ed. T. Fretheim), Trondheim 1981, pp. 21-33.
• Some Remarks on the Government-Binding Theory and Anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 6, pp. 37-53.
• Experience with ›Commentator›, a Computer System Simulating Verbal Behaviour. 1e Nordiske Datalingvistikkdagene 1981 (ed. E. Lien), Trondheim 1981, pp. 39-46.
• (w. Bengt Sigurd:) Developing the Commentator, a Computer System Simulating Verbal Production. 9th Internatioanl Conference of Computational Linguistics COLING 1982 (ed. E. Hajicová), Prague 1982, pp. 42-45.
• (w. Bengt Sigurd & Lars-Åke Henningsson:) Från tagging till förståelse. TAGGNING, föredrag från 3.e svenska kollokviet i språklig databehandling (utg. G. Källgren), Stockholm 1982, pp. 1-12.
• Simulating Verbal Behaviour by a Micro-Computer. Computers and Artificial Intelligence 4:3, 1985, sid. 233-244.
• Sgall et al.: Aktuální clenení vety v cestine. (Recension), Russian Linguistics 6, 1982, sid. 381-385.
• Peter Steiner (ed.), The Prague School: Selected Writings 1929-1946. (Recension), Studia Linguistica 37:2, 1983, sid. 199-202.
• E. Koktová: Sentence Adverbials in a Functional Description. (Recension), Lingua 75, 1988, sid. 251-287.
• Preliminaries to an Aspect Heuristic that Makes Sense to Learners of Slavic Aspect Systems. X Nordiska Slavistmöte (= meddelanden från Stiftelsens för Åbo Akademi forskningsinstitut nr 102), Åbo 1984, sid. 13-26.
• Iterative verbs in West Slavic Languages, Especially in Czech. SLOVO 32, Uppsala Universitet, 1986, sid. 21-37.
• Some Thoughts on Quantification in Russian. Scando-Slavica 33, 1987, sid. 141-167.
• Russian Quantification expressed via Grammatical Number and the Construction 'idti v soldaty'. Scando-Slavica 34, 1988, sid. 69-93.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) A Typology of Case. Abstracts of Papers to Be Read at the Meeting Perilepseis Anankoinoseon. Societas linguistica Europaea, Athens 1982, sid. 7-9.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) Towards a Theory of Morphological Case. Papers from the Seventh Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (utg. F. Karlsson), Helsinki 1983, sid. 568-582.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) Kasusteori - en modell för morfologiskt kasus. SLOVO 28, Uppsala Universitet 1984, sid. 5-24.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) Ergativity in Dyirbal. Language and Discourse: Test and Protest. A Festschrift for Petr Sgall (utg. J.L. Mey), Amsterdam 1986, sid. 143-161.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) Defining Surface Case. Slavica Lubomiro Durovic Sexagenario Dedicata (=Slavica Lundensia 10), Lund 1986, sid. 29-45.
• (m. Thore Pettersson:) Neutralization in Case Morphology. Working Papers 33, Department of Linguistics, Lund University. Studies Presented to Bengt Sigurd on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, Lund 1988, sid. 5-21.
• Typology of Case Languages with Respect to Grammatical Constructions Used. Scando-Slavica 32, sid. 111-138.
• The Case of the Invariant Case Reconsidered. SLOVO 37, Uppsala Universitet, 1989, sid. 5-33.
• The Case 'Jakobson vs. Kurylowicz' Dismissed. Wiener Slavistischer Almanach 1989, sid. 53-70.
• H.-E. Seidel: Kasus. Zur Explikation eines sprachwissenschaftlichen Terminus (am beispiel des Russischen). En debattartikel i Russian Linguistics 14, 1990, sid. 185-203.
• Får bofinken och fonologin se ut hur som helst? SLOVO 35, Uppsala Universitet, 1987, sid. 157-175.
• On the Nature of Alternations and the So-Called Zero Vowel in Russian, Scando-Slavica 35, 1989, sid.141-165.
• Three Problems Concerning the Morphological Case, Scando-Slavica 43, 1997, sid. 117-133.
• The So-Called e - o Alternation in Russian, Scando-Slavica 44, 1998 , sid. 227-246.
• Linguists Go Home! or; Hands Off the Riches of the Czech Language!, Scando-Slavica 45, 1999, sid. 81-94.
• Linguists Go Home 2, or It Is Hard to Quit, Explorare necesse est, Hyllningsskrift till Barbro Nilsson, (Stockholm Slavic Studies 28, 2002), sid. 25-33.
• Aleksej D. Smelev, Referencial'nye mechanizmy russkogo jazyka (= Slavica Tamperensia 4), Tampere 1996 (recension), Scando-Slavica 45, 1999, sid. ca 130-134.
• The Identity of Cases and the Establishing of an Overall Case System in Russian, and Case Languages in General, Issledovanija po slavjanskim jazykam 9, Korejskaja associacija slavistov. Seul, 2004, sid. 221-252.
Större verk föreliggande i manusform
• The Case. (Tillsammans med Thore Pettersson) – Inledningen, de tre första kapitlen plus bibliografi, 103 sidor, av ett opublicerat bokfragment.
• A Functional Phonology of Czech. Ca 300 sidor – ett manus som ligger nära publicering (prof Sgall i Prag vill ge ut boken där).
Läromedel för undervisning på universitetsnivå
• Rysk fonologi. Slaviska institutionen vid Uppsala universitet, Uppsala 1988, 53 sidor + övningar och facit 8 sidor.
Populärvetenskapligt arbete – använt som bredvidläsning i grundskolor
• (m. Gertrud Malmberg:) Språk – vad är det?, Stockholm, 1996, 72 sid.