This article presents structural and interactional aspects of Strong Finals, a prosodic feature characterised by lengthening, increased volume, and non-falling intonation on word-final syllables. Interactionally, Strong Finals support five types of action: listing, projecting a description, stating conditions, asking questions, and announcing reported speech. In general, Strong Finals project that there is more to come, and this ‘more’ may in some cases be provided by either participant. Strong Finals are often found in multi-speaker settings, where they assist speakers in taking the floor or changing the topic. The article’s descriptions are based on recordings of natural spoken interaction in linguistically diverse areas in Aarhus, Denmark. Here, a new urban dialect has developed like other urban dialects that have been described in Copenhagen and other North Germanic cities. Strong Finals are a local phenomenon, however, and are not found in the Copenhagen studies.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world’s languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential.

Through in-depth analysis of the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ occupying the first clausal position (the prefield) in Danish talk-in-interaction, this paper investigates how speakers use highly flexible linguistic elements to their advantage when commencing clauses in real time. These particular words are useful when occupying the prefield, because their flexible nature means that they can be used even when speakers do not have a full format ready for the carrier clause, as long as they have some idea of the interactional purpose of the clause and its information structural prerequisites. The dominating frequency of the most frequent clause openers goes largely unmentioned in previous accounts of the prefield, and the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ challenges the popular notion that the textually unmarked prefield is also the grammatical subject of the carrier clause.

This article focuses on two Finnish personal constructions which can be used to create indexically open reference, i.e. they can be used to refer to generalized or shared human experiences. These two constructions are the zero-person construction and the open 2nd person singular construction. Using Finnish everyday conversational data, we (i) statistically analyze the distributional semantico-grammatical differences in the use of the zero-person and open 2nd person singular constructions, and (ii) examine these differences on a clausal and sequential level in interactional contexts. In our analysis, we integrate quantitative and qualitative methods. Our aim is to show that by mixing methods it is possible to both reveal the recurring semantico-grammatical patterns of the constructions across a large corpus and analyze how these patterns are shaped by the ongoing interaction.

This special issue includes a collection of papers on language and intersubjctivity. There are two paradigms in linguistic approaches to intersubjectivity; cognitive linguistics and interactional linguistics, but these two paradigms hardly ever meet. This is due to the fact that these paradigms have opposing views on cognition and mental events. However, both these paradigms draw from phenomenology: whereas cognitive linguistic approaches to intersubjectivity have their basis on Husserl's philosophy, interactional linguistics is influenced by ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the philosophy of Schutz. Despite the apparent differences between these approaches, there are convergences, too. Moreover, both approaches are needed for a full account of language and human intersubjectivity.

In this paper, I will present an empirical study on the use of the temporal adverbs nú and núna ‘now’ in Icelandic talk-in-interaction. The aim is to investigate whether the two words have different functions, and, if so, to describe these differences. As I will show, nú and núna show clear differences in respect to their syntactical distribution. Furthermore, I will argue, that the syntactic distribution also reflects differences on the functional level. While núna occurs in the end field and has a clear referential function, nú tends to occur in the front field and have closer ties to the finite verb. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study is interactional linguistics, and the data comprises my transcription of around fourteen hours of conversation.

In contemporary informal Estonian, the negative verb form ei tea ‘don't know’ has become a routinized part of generic questions, in which the agent is left unexpressed. This pattern is in accordance with the general impersonal and reference-avoiding style of conversing in Estonia. The study outlines a continuum of synchronic usages from the original expressions sa ei tea ‘you don't know’ and ma ei tea ‘I don't know’ to the epistemic usages of (ei) tea, which are specifically tied to the speech act of questioning. The data is interactional and the analysis relies on the interpretation of (ei) tea-questions by the participants themselves, following the methodology of conversation analysis. It is demonstrated that the development of (ei) tea displays phonological and semantic erosion, pragmatic strengthening, subjectification, and decategorialization. Thus, grammaticalization theory is here combined with interactional linguistics in order to display the emergence of a grammatical structure from a discourse pattern.

This paper explores different syntactic variations and functional properties of clausal units that are initiated by the finite verb in Swedish. We focus on V1 constructions that are basically declarative in function, thus excluding interrogative, conditional and directive uses. Because V1 constructions, and particularly certain variants of them, are typical of spoken Swedish, our examples and analyses focus primarily on the usage in speaking. The V1 constructions studied include whole-utterance constructions in conversational sequences, utterance-internal extensions, and utterance-internal reshapings, such as syntactic blends. We will offer an analysis of (declarative) V1 constructions, which in some respects differs from analyses proposed by generative syntacticians or traditional grammarians. Our analysis of the constructional resource is discourse oriented. In this perspective, V1 constructions are analyzable as sequentially dependent, second, or ‘subsequent’ moves, viz. units that can scarcely initiate a communicative project but which instead continue, extend or comment on an already initiated project. Thus, rather than analyzing V1 constructions as one type of ellipsis they could be seen as full-fledged clausal units whose existence is conditioned by their position in a discourse or utterance context. From a theoretical perspective, this paper is a contribution to an emerging dialogical or interactional model of (Swedish) grammar.

The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers. The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this notion are here identified, and a possible solution is suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context, that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific, and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP unless particular linguistic and interactional resources are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.