Intermediate Swedish

A Grammar and Workbook

Ian Hinchliffe, Philip Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138779587
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429590375
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Intermediate Swedish: A Grammar and Workbook combines an accessible intermediate reference grammar and related exercises in one volume that covers most of the topics that students might expect to deal with in their second year of learning Swedish. The book follows on naturally from and complements its companion volume, Basic Swedish.

Each of the 26 units discusses one or more grammar topics, with examples that are subsequently practised in the exercises that follow.

The book presents the contemporary language against a backdrop of Swedish culture, society, geography, customs and history. Each unit ends with a cultural text which outlines an aspect of Swedish culture and, in nearly all cases, exemplifies and consolidates the grammar topic examined in the unit.

Features include:

• clear grammatical explanations with examples in Swedish and English

• vocabulary based on a major corpus of written Swedish in order to guarantee authenticity and relevance

• cross-references to other units

• over 100 exercises with a key to all the correct answers.

The book is suitable both for independent study and for class use. It can be used by intermediate students and those who have grasped the basics of grammar and vocabulary.

Unit 1

Intonation, sentence stress, word stress and accent

The music of Swedish (its prosody) is produced by three features:

Sentence stress – which words are stressed in the sentence

Word stress – which syllables in these words are stressed, and

Accent – which tone the word has: a single rising tone ↗ (Accent 1) or a falling-rising tone ↘ ↗ (Accent 2)

Sentence stress

In principle, all words significant for the meaning of the sentence receive stress. For example, the words underlined below have sentence stress:

Åhus och Simrishamn är två vackra städer i Skåne.

Åhus and Simrishamn are two pretty towns in Skåne.

In each of the words underlined at least one syllable is stressed, i.e. there is at least one long syllable. A long syllable contains either a long vowel or a long (double) consonant or consonant group and is marked here with an underline:

å hus sim ris hamn två vack ra städ er skå ne

The sentence elements (see Diderichsen’s sentence model at the end of the book) are now dealt with individually in the examples that follow, and stress is shown below for different situations. Stressed words are italicised below.

Subject

Nouns as subject are stressed:

Eva har köpt biljetter.	Eva has bought tickets.
Biljetterna var dyra.	The tickets were expensive.

Pronouns as subject are unstressed:

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Intonation, sentence stress, word stress and accent
• 2 Pronunciation, assimilation; ‘French’ g– and j–; spelling of words in –m, –n; word division
• 3 Nouns, article use
• 4 Nouns, irregular plurals; plurals in –er or –ar; count and non-count, collective
• 5 Adjectives, definite declension TYPES 3 and 4
• 6 Adjectival nouns; nationality words
• 7 Pronouns, reflexive possessives hans/sin
• 8 Verbs, irregular weak verbs, r-stem verbs
• 9 Verbs, strong verbs, minor series
• 10 Verbs, use of tenses
• 11 The infinitive in Swedish and English
• 12 Verbs, transitive, intransitive and reflexive
• 13 Verbs, past participles and the passive; position of passive agents
• 14 Time expressions, prepositions
• 15 Pronouns, interrogative, relative and determinative
• 16 Translating ‘that’
• 17 Translating the verb ‘to be’ and some other common English verbs
• 18 Adverbs, amplifiers and ju, nog, väl, nämligen
• 19 Preposition or no preposition in Swedish or English; translating ‘of’
• 20 Pronouns and adverbs in main clauses and sub clauses: ingen/inte någon
• 21 Present participles
• 22 Particle verbs
• 23 Word order, sub clauses with main clause order; main clauses with sub clause order
• 24 Word order, unstressed object pronouns
• 25 Word order, duplication; emphasis and ellipsis
• 26 Word formation
• Diderichsen’s Sentence Model
• Key to Exercises
• Glossary of Grammatical Terms