It's an everyday experience shared by many that nature can be of help in relieving pain, reducing stress, support mental recovery etc. In the last three decades or so this experience has also found support in a large number of scientific investigations. Among other things the experience of nature has been shown to reduce stress and pain in patients and to boost concentration and reduce impulsive behavior in children. Most of this research however has mainly been concerned with the visual Modality. In this thesis the aim has been to focus on the auditory Modality in this context by trying to reveal some effects on people from the exposure of nature sounds played indoors in three different environments: a grammar school class room, a kindergarten play room and a post-surgery wake up room at an intensive care unit.

The purpose of this study is to analyse and compare how religious and non-religious world views are described and represented in three Swedish textbooks. The main question of this study is: How do three textbooks for the first stage of religious studies in high school represent non-religious and religious world views based on the text analysis tools: ethos, Modality and transitivity?The three textbooks that are being analysed and compared were produced in the years of 2000, 2002 and 2009. The textbooks are used when teaching the first stage of religious studies in Swedish high school. The text analysis that I´ve chosen to use in this study is a part of Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis.

The goal and purpose of this essay is to study if and how multiModality is used within a Swedish school in Kalmar. This is accomplished by observing the different modalities inside the classroom and how the use of different modalities affects the teaching. Unstructured observations combined with a material-based thematic presentation leads up to an analysis based on social semiotics and multiModality. The essay shows how the teaching uses lots of modalities: sound, images, movies, speeches and literary text in lots of different ways. These different types of modalities are used in a multimodal context, providing good conditions for learning..

This paper intends to examine how two newspapers, one local and one national newspaper, reported the gang-related homicides in Malmo in 2011, and compares these two news reports to see if there are any similarities and differences. Another aspect of this study is to elucidate how these two newspapers constitute Malmo as a city. Fairclough?s critical discourse analysis is applied in this study, where I analyze the two newspapers? news coverage based on their content. The content is analyzed by studying the text?s vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, structure, transitivity and Modality. One similarity is the use of objective modalities, where both newspapers have a tendency to make interpretations and speculations as fact.

This study is a critical discourse analysis on the genre of career coaching. Focus lies on questions such as how doescareer coaching articles construct the working subject, and how is working life described in the genre. The categoryof social relations is central to the study. I ask questions about which social relations are of importance, and whichare not, in the career coaching version of working life and how can these relations be interpreted from a critical pointof view. The concepts of power-knowledge is central to the analysis of social relations and the term employabilityconstitute the main theoretical understanding of what distinguish the contemporary labour market.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of sensory Modality on short-term memory recall. An exploratory, cross-sectional study was performed. A total of 119 individuals participated. There were 70 female and 49 male subjects, aged 4 to 80 years (M=34,3). The participants were presented with 12 different objects in auditory, visual or auditory/visual mode over a period of 24 seconds.

The writer has attempted to discuss the distinction between the necessary and the contingent. It begins with a criticism against the possibility for a so-called ?a possible worlds realism? to give a ?philosophical explanation? of this distinction. The writer argues that this is impossible, since it requires that a notion of this distinction be already accepted (more precisely that the necessity of such a theory is already accepted).After this specific criticism, the writer intends to show that this is a more general problem that follows any explanation of the contingent/necessary distinction.The writer then discusses the counter-argument that the requirements placed on these explanations are set to high, therefore the writer shows in theory the problem can be solved and sketches a more specific way how to explain and show the basis for this distinction..

This Master?s thesis aims to study how the concept ?youth? is understood and used in papers and publications about public libraries, written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science from 1972 to 2002. It does this by answering three questions: Firstly, how is the concept ?youth? formulated in papers and publications at SSLIS from 1972 - 2002? Secondly, has the concept ?youth? changed in the analysed texts during the chosen time and, if that is the case, what constitutes this change? And, finally, what types of consequences for the understanding of the users can this have for the writers and readers of these texts? Discourse analysis is used to analyze how this concept is constituted, transformed and understood. Among the things studied in the discourse analysis is the interdiscursivity and intertextuality of the texts, as well as the meaning of the word, the wordings and Modality of the analysed texts.

This Master?s thesis aims to study how the concept ?youth? is understood and used in papers and publications about public libraries, written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science from 1972 to 2002. It does this by answering three questions: Firstly, how is the concept ?youth? formulated in papers and publications at SSLIS from 1972 - 2002? Secondly, has the concept ?youth? changed in the analysed texts during the chosen time and, if that is the case, what constitutes this change? And, finally, what types of consequences for the understanding of the users can this have for the writers and readers of these texts? Discourse analysis is used to analyze how this concept is constituted, transformed and understood. Among the things studied in the discourse analysis is the interdiscursivity and intertextuality of the texts, as well as the meaning of the word, the wordings and Modality of the analysed texts.

Domestic weekly magazines in Sweden are characterized by an emphasis on practical editorial material such as cooking recipes and knitting patterns, and also contain a comparatively large share of reader material. This makes it possible to study the readers through texts produced by themselves. The aim of this study of columns of readers' tips on domestic work is to analyze how readers embody a specific femininity centered around the woman as responsible for the home, in the sense of everyday maintenance as well as aesthetic development. The author defines this femininity as "home maker". The theoretical framework for the analysis is the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, and Jonathan Potter's and Margaret Wetherell's model of interpretive repertoire is also used where Modality is discussed.

The subject of this master thesis concerns the area of change in libraries, with special orientation towards privatisation. Its aim is to investigate how privatisation is portrayed in one of Sweden?s largest library magazines, Biblioteksbladet, in order to gain insight into why these portrayals are what they are, and what consequences they might get. Three theoretical viewpoints create the general base of the thesis; first, Fairclough?s critical discourse analysis (CDA) theory on the relations between text and society; second, Audunsson?s theory concerning how change is dealt with in public libraries; and third, a conceptual framework on privatisation consisting of definitions and perspectives of the phenomenon.

This research addresses the issues of identity and culture in Latvia in the context of the upcoming European Union enlargement in 2004. Political self- determination of Latvia was historically indebted to culture. The phenomenon of cultural identity, so important 12 years ago when Latvian independence was regained, is largely ignored by politicians in the upcoming enlargement process. This is especially worth attention since the 8-th parliamentary elections took place in October 2002. The obvious lack of interest in cultural issues on the part of politicians is compensated by the apprehensions in the society (reflected in mass media) to loose Latvian specific culture and identity when joining the big European family.

Domestic weekly magazines in Sweden are characterized by an emphasis on practical editorial material such as cooking recipes and knitting patterns, and also contain a comparatively large share of reader material. This makes it possible to study the readers through texts produced by themselves. The aim of this study of columns of readers' tips on domestic work is to analyze how readers embody a specific femininity centered around the woman as responsible for the home, in the sense of everyday maintenance as well as aesthetic development. The author defines this femininity as "home maker". The theoretical framework for the analysis is the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, and Jonathan Potter's and Margaret Wetherell's model of interpretive repertoire is also used where Modality is discussed.

Within media and communications studies, questions of taste have often been associated with the dichotomy of high versus popular culture. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has also used mass media products in his studies of class determined tastes and dispositions. In this paper the author uses the theoretical framwork of Bourdieu to examine aspects of social class and legitimate taste in the interior design magazine "Sköna Hem", a market leading magazine within it's genre of lifestyle magazines in Sweden. A specific type of feature article, where a real-life home is portrayed, is studied using the critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough. The homes portrayed are predominantly affluent and display elements of conspicuous consumtion as mediated through legitimate taste and cultural capital.