This compact volume offers an integrated guide to the major grammatical concepts needed for writing and speaking Swedish.

This grammar-reader is based on almost twenty years' experience of teaching beginners the Swedish language and is reassuringly practical in approach. Miss Hird's aims are threefold: to provide a compromise between the traditional grammar-readers and the new textbooks which are not designed for beginners outside Sweden; to supply grammatical information and exercises and reading texts together for ease of reference; and to stimulate the student's interest in Swedish life, institutions and culture. The grammar part of the book is in seventeen lessons, each comprising a text in Swedish which Miss Hird has specially composed to include useful vocabulary and graded grammatical points upon which exercises (including translation exercises) are set for practice. The central theme of the texts is Stockholm, and attractive drawings illustrate it. To help the student, there is a full vocabulary list covering all the lessons, a brief summary of Swedish grammar, a glossary of grammatical terms, a check list of irregular verbs and a comprehensive index of the grammatical points covered in the book. In the reader part of the book, the texts chosen range from a short play by Strindberg to a sketch by Stig Claesson, one of Sweden's most popular contemporary authors. Each text is preceded by a short biographical and literary introduction and is followed by questions designed to test the student's comprehension and to stimulate his appreciation.

This book shows that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favorite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. United by a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations, the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.