Pivåyttranden och pivoider i svenskan

Abstract

Engdahl, Elisabet, elisabet.engdahl@svenska.gu.se, Professor, Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg; Per Linell, per.linell@gu.se, Professor, Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg; Niklas Norén, niklas.noren@edu.uu.se, Associate Professor, Department of Education, Uppsala University: “Pivot utterances and ‘pivoids’ in Swedish”. Språk och stil NF 31, 2021, pp. 5−38.

This article explores the syntactic properties of pivot utterances in Swedish, i.e. utterances in which one constituent is shared between two clauses. Previous research has primarily investigated the communicative functions of pivot utterances, leaving grammar aside. Pivot utterances are produced incrementally as three units, pre-pivot – pivot – post-pivot. These units are syntactically and prosodically integrated into one another in such a way that the pre-pivot and the pivot form the first clause, while the pivot and the post-pivot form the second clause. In addition to the syntactic aspects, prosodic and interactional aspects of utterance production are taken into account. The analysis of more than 200 spontaneously produced utterances shows that the construction makes use of the fact that Swedish is a verb second language with an open prefield. The pivot is the final constituent of the first clause, which is then reconstructed as the prefield of the second clause. In most cases, the pivot’s syntactic function is the same in both clauses (e.g. adverbial or object), but the pivot can also be reconstructed as subject in the second clause. The analysis also identifies several types of pivoids, i.e. utterances that resemble pivot utterances but where the final unit does not meet the criteria for being analysed as a post-pivot. Among these are the dialogic grammatical constructions topic drop and nexus add-ons.