La frase pseudoscissa nello svedese parlato e le sue caratteristiche interazionali

In this study we present an interactional linguistic analysis of pseudo-clefts in Swedish based on audio and video recordings of everyday and institutional conversations, resulting in a collection of 80 instances. The ‘free relative’ initiating the construction can have an English-style wh-word as an opener ("va" ‘what), but in the majority of cases there is a fused item consisting of a demonstrative and a relativizer ("det som"), in resemblance of "ce que" in French. Our collection shows that there is variation in the degree to which pseudo-cleft constructions are syntactically integrated: from fully integrated biclausal constructions (cleft clause + copula verb + main clause) to non-copular variants and further to variants in which the latter clause stands in a loose relation to the cleft clause or is aborted or even missing. The analysis shows that the initial part (cleft clause, or A-part) has an important turn-projecting function: it alerts the recipient about the pragmatic course of the speaker’s unfolding turn. This projected content is very much coded in the predicate verb of the A-part, which often refers to the speaker’s stance towards the issue at hand. Moreover, the construction constitutes a shift in the speaker’s ongoing reasoning or a narrative, signalling a transition from a positive to a critical stance or from the background of a telling to its peak or point. Half of our instances come from everyday interactions, the other half from institutional settings with asymmetric participant roles of the expert–non-expert kind. One feature that stands out in the institutional contexts is that pseudo-cleft constructions are typically produced by the expert part. Our findings shed new light on structural and functional properties of pseudo-clefts not only in the Swedish language but also more generally in mundane and institutional spoken interaction.