International workshop on Tight and Loose Grammar
November 29-30, 2014

Päivi Hakamäki & Karita Suomalainen (University of Helsinki)
The clause and its role as an interactional unit in Finnish conversations – perspectives ontightness and looseness
Dividing conversation into clauses has been – and still is – a rather problematic issue withinlinguistics. Conversations consist of turns, and a turn has traditionally been seen as a dialogic entity
rather than a syntactic one (but see Sacks & Schegloff & Jefferson 1974: 721). However, therelation between grammar and interaction has quite successfully been researched withininteractional linguistics, and some attention has also been paid to the clause as an interactional unit
(see e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001; Laury, Etelämäki & Couper-Kuhlen 2014).

In the presentation, we will take a comparative look at the syntactic structures of everyday
conversations and institutional interaction in Finnish. Based on our data, we will discuss thepossibilities and challenges of understanding conversation and its turns through syntactic units,
more precisely the clause. We will do this by asking what kind of turns there are in Finnish
everyday and institutional conversations, and in which position the clause stands in our data. We
will also take a look at the tightness and looseness of the clause (see Ewing 2005; Englebretson2008) as a potentially relevant unit of interaction: in what way can the clause be seen as a tight,
fixed element in our data, and in which instances it, on the other hand, is flexible and loose as a unitof interaction?

The data we are using consist of everyday and institutional conversations. Our interest with the datais to find out how many of the turns actually are of clausal form, and how many are something else
(e.g. particles, NPs). We will also pay attention to what the most typical turns for the conversational
practices in question are. However, the project of fitting together the clause – traditionally seen as asyntactic unit – and a turn – traditionally seen as a conversational unit – turns out not to be an
unproblematic task.

Literature
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Margret Selting. 2001. Introducing Interactional Linguistics. In(Selting, Margret & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds.), Studies in Interactional Linguistics, 1–22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Copyrighted materials of the authors.

International workshop on Tight and Loose Grammar
November 29-30, 2014

Englebretson, Robert. 2008. From subordinate clause to noun-phrase: Yang constructions incolloquial Indonesian. In Ritva Laury (ed.), Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The
Multifunctionality of Conjunctions, 1–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ewing, Michael C. 2005. Hierarchical constituency in conversational language: The case of Cirebon
Javanese. Studies in Language 29:1, 89-112.
Laury, Ritva, Marja Etelämäki & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds.). 2014. Approaches to grammar
for interactional linguistics. Special issue in Pragmatics. Vol. 24:3, September 2014.
Sacks Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for theorganization of turn-taking for conversation. Studies in Language 50: 696-735.

Copyrighted materials of the authors.