Chronology, discourse structure and change of stance adding to communicative projects with turn-initial sen in talk-in-interaction
Keywords:
sen, Swedish syntax, V3, Interactional Lexicology, talk-in-interactionAbstract
Swedish syntax normally allows only one constituent before the finite verb in a main clause. This is captured by the so called V2 rule. Main clauses with two constituents before the finite verb are referred to as V3 structures. These are often described as a feature unique to urban vernacular Swedish. In this article, I show that this is not the case. Drawing on Interactional Linguistics, I investigate the interactional function of 206 V2 and V3 structures initiated by the adverb sen ‘then’ in ten different conversation podcasts. The canonical V2 structure is by far the most common one for sen, but one fifth of all turn-initial sen are V3 structures. Regardless of the syntactical structure, sen always creates an addition to a previously initiated communicative project. In this addition, sen can have three different meaning potentials. First, sen can add to the communicative project chronologically by emphasizing the temporal relations between different events. Second, sen can structure the discourse by dividing a communicative project in smaller parts, without chronological emphasis. Third, sen is used when speakers change their stance on a subject or introduce a counterargument. All three meanings of sen occur in V2, but the chronological meaning is very rare in V3. Initiating V3, sen is mostly used to structure the discourse and tends to be less prominent prosodically. This suggests that sen in V3 behaves much like a conjunctional discourse particle.
References
Anward, Jan & Bengt Nordberg. 2005. „Inledning“. I: Jan Anward & Bengt Nordberg (red.) Samtal och grammatik. Studier i svensktsamtalsspråk, 5–9. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Auer, Peter. 1996. „The pre-front field in spoken grammar and its relevance as a grammaticalization position“. Pragmatics 6:3, 295–322.
Bijvoet, Ellen. 2018. „Förortssvenska i grindvakters öron. Perceptioner av migrationsrelaterad språklig variation bortom inlärarspråk och förortsslang“. Språk & stil NF 28: 142–175.
Bunk, Oliver. 2020. ”Aber immer alle sagen das” The Status of V3 in German: Use, Processing, and Syntactic Representation. Berlin: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 2004. „Prosody and sequence organization in English conversation. The case of new beginnings“. I: Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (red.) Sound patterns in interaction Cross-linguistic studies from conversation 62:335–376. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins Publishing.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Dagmar Barth-Weingarten. 2011. „A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2“. Gesprächsforschung 12:1–51.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Margret Selting. 2018. Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deppermann, Arnulf. 2011. „The Study of Formulations as a Key to an Interactional Semantics“. Human Studies 34:2, 115–128.
Deppermann, Arnulf & Elwys De Stefani. 2024. Meaning in interaction. Interactional Linguistics.
Drew, Paul. 2013. „Turn Design“. I: Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers (red.) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, 131–149. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.
Eriksson, Mats. 1997. Ungdomars berättande. En studie i struktur och interaktion. (Skrifter utgivna av institutionen för nordiska språk vid Uppsala universitet 43.) Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.
Forsell, Mikael. 2022. „Poddbokssuccén visar vägen in i framtiden“. TT Nyhetsbyrån, publicerad 14 november 2022.
Freywald, Ulrike, Leonie Cornips, Natalia Ganuza, Ingvild Nistov & Toril Opsahl. 2015. „Beyond verb second – a matter of novel information-structural effects? Evidence from Norwegian, Swedish, German and Dutch“. I: Jacomine Nortier & Bente A. Svendsen (red.) Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century, 73–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ganuza, Natalia. 2008. Syntactic Variation in the Swedish of Adolescents in Multilingual Urban Settings. Subject-verb Order in Declaratives, Questions and Subordinate Clauses. Stockholm: Stockholm University.
Haegeman, Liliane, Karen de Clercq, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg. 2023. „Adverbial Resumption in V2 Languages: The Background“. I: Karen De Clercq, Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (red.) Adverbial Resumption in Verb Second Languages, 7–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heritage, John & Marja-Leena Sorjonen. 1994. „Constituting and maintaining activities across sequences: And-prefacing as a feature of question design“. Language in Society 23:1 – 29.
Jörgensen, Nils. 1976. Meningsbyggnaden i talad svenska. (Lundastudier i nordisk språkvetenskap C, nr 7.) Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Lindström, Jan. 2008. Tur och ordning. Introduktion till svensk samtalsgrammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts Akademiska förlag.
Linell, Per. 2011. Samtalskulturer. Kommunikativa verksamhetstyper i samhället. Linköping: Linköpings universitet.
Myrberg, Sara & Tomas Riad. 2015. „The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish“. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 38:2, 115–147.
Norrby, Catrin. 2014. Samtalsanalys. Så gör vi när vi pratar med varandra. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Ottesjö, Cajsa. 2007. „Önskelistor och sportlov – två kommunikativa projekt i ett informellt flerpersonssamtal“. I: Elisabet Engdahl & Anne-Marie Londen (red.) Interaktion och kontext. Åtta studier av svenska samtal, 201–245. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Riad, Tomas. 2015. Prosodin i svenskans morfologi. Stockholm: Morfem.
Rönnqvist, Sara & Jan Lindström. 2021. „Turn Continuations and Gesture: ”And Then”-Prefacing in Multi-Part Conversations“. Front. Commun. 6:670173.
Saari, Mirja. 1975. Talsvenska. En sociolingvistisk studie över syntaktiska drag i intervjusvar. Helsingfors.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. 1974. „A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation“. Language 50(4):696–735.
SAG = Teleman, Ulf, Staffan Hellberg & Erik Andersson. 1999. Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts.
SAOB = Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien. 2024. .
Senter, Karin. 2022. Att göra förort. Om språkliga resurser hos gymnasieungdomar med mångspråkig förortsbakgrund. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.
SO = Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien. 2021. 2 uppl. I: .
Strandberg, Viktoria. 2024. „Varför V3 nu? Temporala och konditionala bisatser som fria initiala annex“. Språk och interaktion 6(1).
Strandberg, Viktoria. u.u. Helt ärligt, vad gör man med fria initiala annex? Språk och stil.
Zachariassen, Ditte. 2023. „Pushing the limits of V2 – new syntactic options in a Danish urban dialect“. Scandinavian Studies in Language 14(1).
