Kiteytynyt se että keskustelupuheessa: Rakenne ja vuorovaikutustehtävät

Our article concerns the fixed expression se että in spoken Finnish. We focus on turns at talk where the words se and että and the utterance that follows are not syntactically integrated in any other clausal construct but rather form their own structural and ­actional unit. Our research is based on the functional and usage-based grammatical tradition and is conducted from the perspective of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis. Our main data are Finnish everyday conversations from the morpho­syntactically coded Arkisyn database containing 30 hours of face-to-face and telephone conversations recorded between the years 1996–2015. We also utilize the D­ialect Corpus of the Syntax Archives of the University of Turku, which contains 142 interviews of elderly speakers conducted in different areas of Finland in 1960–1970.

The fixed expression se että occurs in our data toward the end of lengthy, complex turns and on the other hand as a turn-initial element in shorter assertion and assessment turns which function as reactions or responses to a just preceding turn. The fixed expression comes early in the turn-constructional unit, projecting continuation and indexing what follows as central in its context. The expression is typically prosodically reduced and is often preceded by a particle. The utterance that follows se että is constructed as identifiable to the addressee but the responses do not always confirm that the content of the turn is previously familiar.

The article shows that the use and patterns of variation of the se että expression contain features typical of grammaticization, but in the conversational data from the different periods of time used in the study, the se että expression is used in similar ways and in similar contexts. Therefore, the data we use does not lead us to conclude that the present-day se että expression would be a result of a recent process of grammaticization. Rather, it is a projective expression, emergent from its contexts of use with its particular functions in interaction.