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

Prosody, grammar, and clause combining: so in American English
Sandra A. Thompson
Ryoko Suzuki
Abstract for Workshop on “Tight and Loose Grammar”, TUFS, Nov. 29-30, 2014
The use of so in English interactions has attracted the attention of several scholars. Schiffrin’s(1987) chapter on so investigates its use as a marker of ‘result’. Bolden (2006, 2008, 2009)
investigates so used to “launch conversational topics” in various contexts. Raymond (2004)
looks at the “stand-alone so” as a practice for prompting action, while Local and Walker (2005)
discuss the way in which prosodic features of the production of the stand-alone so affect its usein projecting a next action. Barth-Weingarten and Couper-Kuhlen’s (2011) paper on and, whose
uses overlap to a considerable extent with those of so, also informs our study.
In our paper, we extend this research by examining the use of so in English conversation
specifically as a ‘connector’ in terms of the ‘tightness’ or ‘looseness’ of its connection. We
investigate the relationship between its prosodic environment and its function in relating a‘result’, ‘tie-back’, or ‘upshot’ to more local or more extended levels of activity. Our data consistof about 30 hours of telephone and video-recorded conversations among friends and family
members speaking American English.
We find three types of ‘connection’ that so engages in:(A) When so is serving strictly as a connector of two clauses, it has a ‘through-produced’
prosody, and a ‘local’ result/purpose 1 interpretation. We consider this a relatively tightconnection.
(1) Michelle: well scoot in though so they can see you.
(2) Ava: we’re gonna see a picture o:n on something good tomorrow in that class anyway
so it’s no hassle
However, the great majority of instances of occurrences of so in our data are prosodic-unit-initialand are connecting its clause back to previous material which is something ‘larger’, more distant,and more amorphous than a previous clause. There are 3 environments in which this can be seen,
each one calling for a different type of inference on the part of the recipient, and each one
revealing a different type of ‘looseness’.

1A so-clause is interpreted as ‘result’ if its mood is realis, and as ‘purpose’ if it is irrealis (as in (1) and (2)).

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

(B1) So initiates a new turn and a new prosodic unit, with pitch reset, where its job is to tie its
clause back to distant previous talk requiring inferencing to make the connection.
(3) Ava: I have a lot of tough courses[83 lines later, with talk unrelated to courses]
Bee:(0.4)
so, I got some lousy courses this term too.
(B2) The so-clause introduces an ‘upshot’ of previous talk, what it is an ‘upshot’ of isindeterminate and left to recipients’ inferencing.
(4) [Bee has been talking about friends’ healthy new baby]
Bee: she had gai:ned about forty pounds anyway. they said she was treme:ndous.
(0.5)
so I’m sure they’re happy about that.
(B3) A so-clause projects an ‘upshot’ of preceding talk, but this time the upshot is unexpressed,i.e., left ‘hanging’; this is similar to Raymond’s ‘stand-along so. Here recipients are required toinfer what kind of upshot the speaker might be projecting but not stating.
(5) Laura:OakRidge Boys are kind of an (.) older band.
(0.2)
to begin with, so,(0.5)(C) A sub-type of (B3) has become a fixed expression and taken on a life of its own: in thisusage, so introduces an ‘upshot’, but the speaker claims no knowledge of what that ‘upshot’ is.
In our pilot-study collection of about 60 sos, 10% of the occurrences of so are found in the fixed
expression so I don’t know.
(6) [Bee has been talking about how uncertain her grandmother’s upcoming surgery is]
Bee: she wasn’t home by the t-you know when I left for school today.
Ava: mhm.
Bee: hh so I don’t know, (0.3)
In spite of all the inferential work required of them, co-participants nevertheless routinely treat
these various ‘connecting’ functions of so as unproblematic.
Based on our data and findings of the researchers mentioned above, we argue that:a. These uses are all related, though the researchers mentioned above treat them as independent.
b. For each of these uses, the combination of the prosody together with the position of so in its
larger environment allow a characterization in terms of ‘tightness’, but thinking in terms of alinear ‘continuum’ of ‘Tight >> Loose’ will not capture the connecting and inferencing

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

complexities involved. Rather, we must envision a multi-dimensional ‘tight’ vs. ‘loose’ grammar
space.
REFERENCES
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen. 2011. Action, prosody and emergent
constructions: The case of 'and'. In Peter Auer and Stefan Pfänder, eds., Constructions: Emergingand emergent, 263-292. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Bolden, Galina. 2006. Little words that matter: discourse markers 'so' and 'oh' and the doing ofother-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56.4: 661-688.
Bolden, Galina. 2008. "So what's up?": using the discourse marker 'so' to launch conversationalbusiness. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41.3: 302-327.
Bolden, Galina. 2009. Implementing incipient actions: the discourse marker 'so' in English
conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 41.5: 974-998.

Raymond, Geoffrey. 2004. Prompting Action: The stand-alone "so" in ordinary conversation.
Research on Language and Social Interaction 37.2: 185-218.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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