Intermediate Swedish

A Grammar and Workbook

Ian Hinchliffe, Philip Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

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:

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