Tiedätkö – kysymyksestä kiteymäksi

The article covers the use of tiedätkö ‘do you know’ expressions in everyday Finnish conversation. The aim is, on the one hand, to describe the interactional contexts in which tiedätkö expressions occur, and, on the other hand, to explore whether tiedätkö has, in certain contexts, grammaticised into a particle-like expression. The data consist of approximately 30 hours of both face-to-face and telephone conversations taken from the Arkisyn corpus, a morphosyntactically coded database of conversational Finnish. The study adopts the framework of interactional linguistics, supplemented by the conversation analytical method.

The article shows that in everyday Finnish conversations, a tiedätkö expression can be used as an authentic question, as a pre-announcement, as a tag-question or as a fixed expression. A tiedätkö expression that poses an authentic question functions as the first-pair part in question–answer adjacency pairs, and its main task is to elicit a response in which the addressee provides the questioner with the desired information. As for a tiedätkö expression that is used as a pre-announcement, it prepares the recipient for the content within the upcoming turn, and is typically followed by a response by which the recipient shows that he or she is listening. When tiedätkö expressions are used as tag-questions, their main task is to elicit a response to the action to which they are attached. Finally, a tiedätkö expression used as a fixed expression gives relevance to intersubjectivity-related matters, regulating the mutual understanding between the conversational participants.

The research data suggest that there is an ongoing expansion in the category of tiedätkö expressions, since tiedätkö can function as a question, as a routine-like expression related to certain social actions, or as a fixed expression that is syntactically and pragmatically very similar to (other) Finnish particles. Based on the variation in the way tiedätkö expressions are used in the data, this study proposes that there is a continuum of different degrees of grammaticisation in tiedätkö expressions. In this ongoing process of grammaticisation, different uses exist alongside each other.