Syntax som social resurs : En studie av samkonstruktionssekvensers form och funktion i svenska samtal

One prerequisite in order for conversation to take place is cooperation between the participants. In other words, each person must adjust his or her behavior according to the actions of the other participants. One method that the speakers use in interaction is the co-construction of syntactic units. A speaker can complete or add on to a unit begun by another person. The subject of this dissertation is conversational sequences containing co-constructed units. The methods employed are drawn from the field known as interactional linguistics, which can be viewed as a subdiscipline of conversation analysis (CA) with influences from linguistics. The focus of interactional linguistics is the investigation of how linguistic forms interact with various social norms and structures and with the actions carried out during interaction. As a starting point for the analysis, a distinction between different categories of co-constructions is made. The various categories have quite different prototypical functions when they occur in an interactive situation. However, there are also certain functional qualities that cross the boundaries between categories. A very prominent pattern in the material is that speakers do not continue another person’s utterance in order to interrupt them or manipulate their words. Instead, the producer of the syntactic continuation strengthens solidarity between herself and the other speaker by helping, showing sympathy, indicating understanding, or agreeing with that person. “Sponging off” another speaker’s syntactic unit constitutes an excellent resource for initiating and maintaining various cooperative projects.