Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles Swedish particles of the type you know Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

University of Helsinki / Society of Swedish Literature in Finland

This paper investigates the historical origins, both syntactic and functional, of a set of discourse particles commonly used in present-day spoken Swedish: hör du ‘(you) listen’, vet du ‘you know’, ser du ‘you see’, and förstår du ‘you understand’. From a synchronic perspective, the particles seem to be a morpho-syntactically unified phenomenon, and have been treated as such in earlier linguistic works. However, there is no diachronic account of these particles. This paper presents a number of hypotheses concerning the syntactic and functional sources of the discourse particles; we also evaluate the hypotheses against the background of historical linguistic data collected from Old Swedish, Middle Swedish, and Modern Swedish sources. The Modern Swedish period is covered by a large corpus of plays from the 1700s to the late 1900s. Comparisons are also made to Old and Modern Icelandic data. The historical data show that the particle hör du is of imperative, functionally directive origin, while the rest of the particles include a verb in present tense indicative, thus presumably originating from minimal clauses with a declarative or an interrogative function. Hence, historical formal and functional differences are hidden behind the apparent uniform present-day forms and functions of the discourse particles. Keywords: discourse markers, discourse particles, addressing, grammaticalization

.

Introduction

This paper tries to shed some light on the historical development of a group of discourse particles1 commonly used in Swedish conversations: hör du, vet du, ser du, and förstår du. Synchronically speaking, these particles seem to be variations of a distinct, well-defined grammatical formula. The common denominator is a

Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6:2 (2005), 2–236. issn 1566–5852 / e-issn 1569–9854 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

22 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

lexicalised minimal clause, in which the subject is a pronoun in the second person singular and the predicate verb stands in first position: hör du ‘listen-you, you listen’, vet du ‘know-you, you know’, ser du ‘see-you, you see’, and förstår du ‘understand-you, you understand’.2 The second person plural pronoun ni may be used instead of the singular if the speaker is addressing more than one person, as in hör ni. Examples of the use of these particles in present-day Swedish are shown in the conversational fragments (1–4). (1) A

hördu ja har beställt biljetter eller ja har biljetter till Kontrapunkt i moron ‘listen, I have ordered tickets or I have tickets to (the show) Kontrapunkt tomorrow’ (Luckan)

(2) A

å vetni där hör å häpna gick ju Dallas på en kanal ‘and you know, there just, listen to this, was Dallas on one channel’ (SAM:V2)

(3) A

jorå näj men de går bra de serru ‘oh yes, no, but that goes well that, you see’ (GRIS: UVAT6, A:6)

(4) A

jaha (.) jamen jaa nästan sluta me de föratt .hh ja ja mår inte bra förstår du ‘uh huh, but I almost quit that because I, I don’t feel well, you understand’ (GRIS: SÅI NF 2:1)

As the translations suggest, the grammatical formation and pragmatic function of these Swedish discourse particles make them close relatives to discourse particles of the type you know and you see in English. There have been no significant investigations to date of the historical origins of the discourse particles we are studying here. Hence, the grammatical development of these expressions and their age in the language remain obscure. The lack of diachronic studies is probably for two reasons: firstly, historical linguistics has not traditionally concentrated on studying intrinsic features of conversational language, partly for the understandable reason that there is no real access to historical records of genuine conversations; secondly, scholars of linguistics in general were not interested in phenomena lying outside the realm of written, monologic language until the last decades of the twentieth century. However, it should be noted that researchers of spoken interaction have not shown much interest in diachronic aspects of language use either, except in works that have been inspired by the theory of grammaticalisation (see e.g. Hopper and Traugott 1993).

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 23

This paper offers a remedy for this situation, tracing possible paths of historical development of our discourse particles, also testing how such an analysis can be implemented. We are more or less compelled to start from scratch in our diachronic analysis. Previous accounts of the discourse particles in question are limited to sparse notes in the Swedish Academy Ordbok (SAOB) in the context of the verbs associated with a given particle, i.e. förstå ‘understand’, höra ‘hear, listen’, and se ‘see’ (on veta ‘know’ we do not have even this, since work on the dictionary has not yet progressed as far as v). In addition, there are some vaguely stated hypotheses concerning the formal and functional origins of our particles in studies dealing with Swedish sentence types and pragmatics (see Saari 1984, Hellberg 1985, Nordenstam 1989). However, there have not been any serious attempts to prove or disprove these hypotheses. Against the background of the historical evidence which we have collected, we will evaluate the earlier hypotheses and put forward a suggestion of our own concerning the historical development of these discourse particles.

2. A note on syntactic and discourse functions It is clear that the expressions under consideration here have gone through a process of grammaticalisation in which they have been desemanticised, pragmaticised, desyntacticised, and prosodically reduced. These discourse particles have essentially lost something of their literal meaning of listening, knowing, seeing or understanding, and likewise of their speech act function as independent communicative moves. In fact, the meanings of the particles are hard to pinpoint. The literal meanings have been replaced by pragmatic functions which are generally concerned with contextualising the action communicated by the host utterance to which the particle is attached. Earlier accounts of the particles suggest a variety of possible discourse functions, including “get the other party’s attention”, “make an unexpected move”, “mark astonishment”, “appeal to the other party’s comprehension or judgement”, “mark the following as an explanation”, “point out something as a natural or a self-evident consequence”, “underline what is being said, possibly with a connotation of threat” (cf. the relevant verbs in the Swedish Academy Ordbok, SAOB). There is no space here for a detailed sequential analysis of the particles in conversational contexts; however, it is evident that they are closely related to the management of turn-taking and the achievement of mutual understanding of the course of interaction. Hör du, vet du, ser du, and förstår du are typical of discourse particles displaying an example of a kind of “appositionals”, as defined by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974: 719). Hence, they are not ordered as clause elements in the inner sentence frame; therefore they could generally be classified as interjections. Like interjections, these particles typically precede a syntactically integrated sentential unit as a kind of a pre-segment of it or follow such a unit as a post-segment (cf. topological analyses of the structure of conversational turns in Schegloff 1996, Steensig 2001,

24 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide Pre-segment hör du ‘listen’

The inner sentence frame jag har beställt biljetter till Kontrapunkt i morgon ‘I have ordered tickets to Kontrapunkt tomorrow’ ja mår inte bra ‘I don’t feel well’

Post-segment

förstår du ‘you understand’

Figure . Discourse particles in the pre- and post-segments of an utterance.

Lindström 2002). Examples of the syntactic ordering of the particles are given in Figure 1. Sometimes the particles are also inserted into the middle of the inner sentence frame, thus interrupting the clausal syntactic progression towards a point of possible completion rather than taking a place in the syntactic progression within the grammatical relations in the inner sentence frame. Another feature of particles is the prosodic downgrading of the units, evident in the different conventionalised, phonetically reduced forms that are especially characteristic of variants of standard Swedish: hörru, hörrö, vettu, serru, fstårru. These forms are not typical of the variant of Swedish spoken in Finland; however, the latter has some characteristic pronunciations of its own, such as sidu for ser du and hödu for hör du. The prosodically weakened and contracted forms reflect a development by which the pronoun has been cliticised on to the verb, which also is a typical feature of grammaticalisation. The criteria we use for the definition of hör du etc. as discourse particles are, as seen above, syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic (cf. Östman 1981 on you know). It can seem somewhat contradictory that these expressions have retained deictic sensitivity, reminiscent of “inflection”. All the particles have two variant forms where the verbal element is combined either with the second person singular (du) or plural (ni) pronoun, for example hör du and hör ni. This could be interpreted so that the process of grammaticalisation/lexicalisation is not yet total. There is still today a continuum between more literal (and syntactically productive) and more pragmatic (and lexicalised) functions of the expressions. Similar variability can be seen in other languages with formally corresponding pragmatic elements, for instance kuule ‘(yousg) listen’ and kuulge ‘(youpl) listen’ in Estonian (Keevallik 2003: 53ff.). It is also possible to assume that the singular and plural variant forms are, in fact, stored as separate lexical (and thus lexicalised) entries in the consciousness of the speakers. Of course, this problem is not actualised in English expressions of the you know type, since English has only one pronoun in the second person.

3. Research questions and data In trying to pursue the historical origins of the set of Swedish discourse particles studied here we posit four major research questions: –

What is the grammatical and functional source of these expressions?

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 25

– – –

With regard to question 1: Is there a single source, or are there several competing or different sources? With regard to question 2: How unified a phenomenon is the set of discourse particles in the language historically and synchronically? Can present-day usage be dated to a certain time period?

Our historical pragmatic quest aims at enriching the understanding of linguistic processes where syntactic and pragmatic developments are intersected. Furthermore, it is essential to investigate the reliability of the fairly sketchy previous hypotheses of the diachronic development in order to avoid their mere mechanical repetition in future studies. Trying to answer our research questions is a challenge in many respects, not least because discourse particles, although an intimate feature of the spoken language, are mostly absent in written documents. There are, of course, no recordings of spoken Old Swedish, but we try to bridge this gap by studying historical written texts that have at least some interactive properties, and therefore may reflect colloquial usage. We have studied sources from three Swedish historical linguistic periods. The first period (–1526) is covered by Källtext, a one million word corpus of Old Swedish in the Swedish Språkbanken, which contains, amongst others, a collection of religious, potentially interactive texts like Saint Birgitta’s Revelations. The second period (1526–1732) is represented by the Early Modern Swedish Supplement in Fornsvenska textbanken and Allén’s (1965) edition of Johan Ekeblad’s letters from 1639–1655. From the third, Modern Swedish period (1732–), we have chosen to study a corpus of dramatic dialogue, Svensk dramadialog under tre sekler, collected at Uppsala University and containing 45 plays from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century (see Melander Marttala and Östman 2000). As regards this source, we have focused particularly on the oldest plays, those from the eighteenth century. In addition to this, we have compared parallel developments of particles in medieval and present-day Icelandic texts. To explore whether a study of the above, available material can give any useful results will be a methodological contribution of the present study. We continue this discussion by briefly presenting paradigmatic aspects of the discourse particles in a contemporary light, and by discussing earlier hypotheses of their grammatical origin. We then proceed by exploring the particles in the context of the historical material. Finally, we relate the findings to our research questions and sketch a picture of the possible development of the discourse particles in question.

26 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

4. A synchronic perspective on the possible origins of the discourse particles The discourse particles hör du, vet du, ser du and förstår du have the general syntactic form of [Vfin+Pron2nd p.]. Due to this formal property, these expressions have been analysed as originating from minimal interrogative, declarative or directive clauses. All these hypotheses make the point that the particles have similarities with clauses constructed with the finite verb in first position, i.e. before the subject. Verb-first word order is commonly associated with the functional category of yes/no-questions in Swedish. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the discourse particles hör du, vet du, ser du and förstår du originate from literal questions, like ‘do you hear/listen (to me)?’, ‘do you know (that)?’, ‘do you see (that)?’, ‘do you understand (that)?’. The interrogative function is supposed to have been bleached in a process of lexicalisation/ grammaticalisation, whereby the clause has become a discourse particle (see Saari 1984, SAG 4: 757 note 2). The process of grammaticalisation is manifest in that the lexicalised unit does not express a proposition of its own, and cannot normally be responded to when pre-posed in an utterance, as exemplified in (5): (5) Constructed example (cf. Saari 1984: 216). A: Hör du, ge mig lite mjölk. A: ‘Listen, give me some milk.’ B: *Ja, jag hör. / Ja, det ska jag göra. B: *‘Yes, I listen. / Yes, I will.’ This analysis of the set of discourse particles as original interrogatives is synchronically reasonable but not the only conceivable one. As regards the particular expression hör du, the extensive Swedish Academy Ordbok (SAOB, s.v. höra) notes that the imperative form of the verb höra may be used as a kind of an interjection, often in combination with a pronoun or a noun that singles out the addressee. Following this, the unit could be analysed as a lexicalised directive instead of an interrogative: (6) Hör will tu predijka om söndagh och komma till afftonmåltijdh. ‘Listen would you like to preach on Sunday and come to a supper.’ (SAOB, example dated to 1675) Hör du Percy, hur står det egentligen till med dig? ‘Listen (you) Percy, how are you really doing?’ (SAOB, example dated to 1920) Indeed, in Modern Swedish there is ambiguity as to whether the finite verb form hör is indicative or imperative in mood. It might be significant that the cognate expression in Icelandic, heyrðu ‘listen-you’ consists unambiguously of an imperative with the second person pronoun þú ‘you’ cliticised on to the verb form3 (in present-day Icelandic bare imperatives occur only in idioms and in emphatic and formal contexts, cf. Þráinsson 1994: 158; Friðjónsson 1989: 42).

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 27

(7) M já einmitt heyrðu þakka þér kærlega fyrir þetta Óli M ‘yes, exactly, listen, thank you very much for this, Óli’ (Þjóðarsálin June 3, 1996) Directive clauses do not usually contain a subject (du) in Swedish, but it can be inserted for specific emphatic reasons, in which case it follows the verb: Kom du hit med dina frågor! ‘You come here with your questions!’. The pronoun du is also frequently used as a vocative discourse marker in spoken standard Swedish, often preceding the verb and the rest of the utterance: Du, kom hit med dina frågor! ‘You, come here with your questions!’ (SAG 4:710, 711; Hellberg 1988). In fact, the particle hör du is often combined with an additional du in spoken standard Swedish giving forms like hör du du: (8) Hördudu, gå och vänta där borta, va? ‘Listen, go and wait there, right?’ (SAG 2:755) Finland Swedish does not have this vocative use of du, which suggests that the pronoun in the simple discourse particle hör du, also present in Finland Swedish, is indeed the subject, whereas the extra pronoun in the longer sequence hör du du could most plausibly be said to be the vocative (this is also suggested in Hellberg 1988). Before pursuing the imperative argument further, let us consider a third hypothesis. Hellberg (1985) suggests that the expression vet du is in fact a declarative with an inverted word order. This claim could be backed up by the typological word order characteristic of Swedish, whereby main clauses that are subsequent to an antecedent clause may take this clause as a kind of object. In grammatical terms, this means that the antecedent clause is treated as the first obligatory constituent in a larger sentence, and is then regularly followed by the finite verb, and finally the subject, which forms the rest of the sentence. This is very typical of short, parenthetical clauses that indicate quotation or speaker comment, illustrated by two constructed examples in (9) (cf. Andersson 1976: 43–45). (9) Jag mår inte bra, sa hon. ‘I don’t feel well, she said’ (lit. ‘said she’) Det är inte bra, tycker jag. ‘It’s not good, I think’ (lit. ‘think I) Certain short clauses of this V1-declarative type have in fact evolved into more or less formulaic modal expressions, like tycker jag ‘I think’, tror jag ‘I believe’, ser jag ‘I see’, vet jag ‘I know, I suggest’. The pragmatic function of such parenthetical clauses — the clarification of the speaker’s motivation (cf. Andersson 1976: 44) — is quite reminiscent of that of discourse particles.

28 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

It thus seems conceivable that discourse particles like vet du, ser du and förstår du could have originated from this source via a process of further lexicalisation, as illustrated in (10) (cf. also (4) above): (10) Jag mår inte bra. → (Det) förstår du. ‘I don’t feel well. (That) you understand.’

Jag mår inte bra Ø förstår du ‘I don’t feel well, you understand.’

This hypothesis is supported by parallel non-inverted declarative forms of the discourse particles in the cases du vet and du förstår. Equivalents of these can also be found in Icelandic, e.g. þú veist ‘you know’. Paradigmatically, the Swedish verb forms ser and förstår are present indicative and, unlike hör, cannot be confused with the imperative. Vet is again ambiguous, although the imperative of ‘know’ might be considered to be pragmatically somewhat awkward; note that the imperative function is totally out of question if the formally quite similar but self-referring particle vetja ‘I know, I suggest’ is considered. If we look at Icelandic, there are direct equivalents to vet du and förstår du in the expressions veistu ‘you know’ and skilur(ð)u ‘you understand’. Paradigmatically these are based on present indicative forms of the verbs vita and skilja. en áður settist fólk bara niður við sjó eða [eða upp á fjall D [já það hlustaði kannski bara á hafið og þa var orðið ambint [skiluru A [mhm A ‘but earlier people just sat down by the sea or [or up on a mountain’ D [‘yes, they listened perhaps just to the sea and that became ambient music, [you understand’ A [‘mhm’ (O hve)

(11) A

(12) M veistu ég heyrði ekki hvað þú sagðir Ari M ‘you know, I did not hear what you said, Ari’ (ICLA:Ari02) Icelandic, however, presents a more complex picture regarding particles which have developed from the semantic field of seeing or looking. The clausal unit sérðu, which is formally equivalent to the Swedish ser du, is not lexicalised to such a high degree as in Swedish. The function is more literal, namely interrogative, and the

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 29

verb form is indicative. Instead, the imperative sjá ‘look’ or its less formal variant sjáðu (til) ‘look-you (to)’ is sometimes used as a kind of an interjection. (13) A A

sjáðu til sko þetta var… ‘see, this was…’ (Þjóðarsálin June 7, 1996)

However, the most common expression in this semantic domain is the particle sko. Sko, which can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century, is originally a shortening of the imperative skoða(ðu) ‘look(-you)’ and/or a loan word from Danish (Da. sgu < saa gud hjælpe mig ‘so God will help me’). (For references concerning sko, see Hilmisdóttir 1999; Hilmisdóttir and Wide 2000). (14) sko þegar ég upphaflega byrjaði að skrifa þessa sögu… ‘see, when I originally started writing this novel…’ (O hve) It can be noted that the Swedish verb se ‘see’ has also been lexicalised as an interjection in a bare imperative form, se or si: (15) Varför uppfördes denna oerhörda mur? Jo, se kineserna äro ett fredsälskande folk. ‘Why was this enormous wall raised? Yes, see, the Chinese are a peaceloving people.’ (SAOB, Från pol till pol by S. Hedin, 1911) This shows that a parallel development from two grammatical sources may have been going on, at least as regards se and ser du. The evidence from Icelandic suggests, in turn, that the imperative is, in Scandinavian languages, a generally available source for discourse particles originating from verbs of seeing, looking, listening and hearing, whereas this is less common for verbs of knowing and understanding. Interestingly, a principally corresponding distribution is found in the discursive uses of finite verbs in Finnish and Estonian (see Keevallik 2003). From a strict synchronic Swedish perspective all three hypotheses of functional origin are supported to some extent: the discourse particles could originate from declaratives or interrogatives, and it is plausible that at least some of them have their source in a directive clause. Interestingly, all these possibilities are left open in the Swedish Academy Grammar (SAG) which briefly discusses the formal analysis of these particles in a note (4:757). The position generally taken in the Grammar is nonetheless that the discourse particles are lexicalised main clauses with the function of a polar question. We will now discuss some historical evidence which may possibly provide an explanation for the origin of the discourse particles under consideration here.

220 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

5. A diachronic perspective on the possible origins of the discourse particles 5. Old Swedish4 (–1526) In the oldest written documents available on Swedish, i.e. in texts primarily from the fourteenth century, imperative forms of the verbs höra ‘hear’ occur in contexts where their function is clearly directive. Occurrences can be found especially in religious texts, such as the (re)translations of Saint Birgitta’s Revelations from Latin into Swedish. These texts contain quite a few combinations of the verb form hör with the second person singular pronoun thu ‘you’, some of which also have features which indicate that they are syntactically parenthetical in the sentential context, as in (16). (16) Än tha j thässe samtalan syntis bradhelica diäfwllin oc jomfrun sagdhe til hans Hör thu diäfwl Sigh hännne ahörande huar är thz thu skapadhe Diäfwllin suaradhe… ‘But then in this conversation appeared suddenly the devil and the virgin said to him. Listen you devil say so she hears where is that which you created. The Devil answered …’ (Källtext: bir3030, Den heliga Birgitta, 1340–1370) In the Icelandic sagas a few occurrences of imperative uses of the verb heyra ‘hear’ can be found. In Íslensk hómilíubók ‘Icelandic sermon book’, preserved in a manuscript from around 1200, some similar occurrences as the ones in Saint Birgitta’s Revelations can also be found. (17) Heyr þú, Drottinn, bæn þá, er þræll þinn biður þig í dag, að augu þín sé upp lokin og eyru þín heyrandi yfir hús þetta dag og nótt. ‘Hear you, Lord, the prayer which your slave prays to you today that your eyes should be opened and your ears listening over this house day and night.’ (Orðabók háskólans, http://www.lexis.hi.is/homilia/homil.htm) The use of imperative forms of höra and heyra, in Old Swedish and Old Icelandic respectively, seems to be tied to quotations and dialogues in certain genres, in particular religious texts. We may note that hör du may still be used today to introduce a direct quotation in conversational Swedish (cf. Hakulinen et al. 2003). Many of these older texts are translated from, or influenced by, Latin. The forms themselves have not been borrowed from Latin. However, imperatives in Latin and Old Swedish are functionally similar (Wollin 1983: 144; Lindell, personal communication), and the frequent use of imperatives in religious Latin texts could of course, despite this, have had an influence on Swedish (and other languages).

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 22

Some occurrences of imperative forms of höra can also be found in types of text other than religious prose, such as the romance Flores och Blanzeflor, which was originally written in French and translated into Swedish at the beginning of the thirteenth century (Pettersson 1996: 73). (18) leddo them bundna fore konungins ‘led them hands bound to the King’s stool. chair. Tha mælte konungin: “Hør thu, fool! Then the King said: “Hear you, fool! Hwa gaff thik til dirfue ok raadh, What gave you the courage and resource, thet thu hafuer mik swa for smadh, that which you have withheld from me, thu togh mik Blanzaflor ij fra?” you took Blanceflor from me?”’ (Källtext: flor116, Flores ohc Blanzeflor) Occurrences of the type presented above indicate that the source of the particle hör du in present-day Swedish is most likely the collocation of the imperative form hör and the second person singular personal pronoun du (thu). Several collocations of this kind can be found in Källtext, the one million word corpus of Old Swedish texts, and some of them (16, 18) are used in a discourse structuring albeit clearly addressing manner. At the same time, very few examples of the expression hör du in present indicative contexts can be found in this corpus. Tracing the source of the particles ser du, vet du and förstår du in Old Swedish and Old Icelandic is difficult. Instead, imperatives of both se in Swedish and sjá in Icelandic can be found in addressing and vaguely discourse structuring functions. (19) sprungo prestene fram til susannam Oc sagdho See dørin ær stængd oc oss seer her engin ‘the priests ran forth to Susanna and said, See, the door is closed and nobody sees us here’ (Språkbanken, Källtext: troe321, Sjælinna thrøst, 1420) (20) Og er Pétur var efablandinn um með sjálfum sér hver þessi sýn mundi vera sem hann hafði séð, sjáðu, að þá spurðu þeir menn er út voru sendir frá Kornelio eftir húsi Símonar og stóðu úti við hurðina.

‘And when Pétur was confused about what this vision would be which he had seen, see, then the men who had been sent by Kornelio asked where Simon’s house was and stood outside by the door.’

(Orðabók háskólans, http://www.lexis.hi.is/ntodds/nto.htm, Post. 10:258, The New Testament by Oddur Gottskálksson, 1540) Occurrences of this kind, however, provide little help in explaining the source of the present-day Swedish expression ser du as they contain an imperative rather than an indicative form of se. In the Källtext corpus there are a few collocations of the indicative form seer/ser and the second person singular pronoun thu. Most of

222 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

these collocations occur in interrogative or conditional clauses with verb-initial word order and cannot be conceived of as discourse particles. For example, Herra konung seer thu ekke… ‘Lord King do you not see…’; Seer thu ath konungen wardher wredher / tha sigh honom… ‘If you see that the king becomes angry, then say to him…’. Also non-inverted collocations (du ser) occur but these are used in a literal sense in a construction with an object (usually a dependent clause). In Old Swedish texts there are several occurrences of the present indicative (second person singular) form west (vest, wet, vet) ‘know’ with the pronoun thu ‘you’, which suggests that the source of the lexicalisation vet du could be a verb phrase in the indicative. However, it is difficult to find examples that give hints about the functional contexts from which vet du has emerged as a discourse particle over time. Both interrogative and declarative contexts seem possible. (21) wi swarar thu mik ekke / west thu ey at [iak] ær een konung / Alexander swaradhe / ‘why answer you me not / know you not that [I] am a king / Alexander answered /’ (Källtext: troe377, Sjælinna thrøst, 1420) (22) Ey thy sidhir vest thu väl huat rätuiso bör at göra thässe siälinne ‘Not less know you well what justice should be done to this soul’ (Källtext: bir3263, Den heliga Birgitta, 1340–1370) A syntactic point of interest is that vet/vest sometimes occurs in a parenthetic addition to a preceding clause as a retrospective commentary to it: (23) ‘Do you remember, Iwan, you said so, Minnis thu, Iwan, thu sagdhe swo, when you my wife promised faith, tha thu minne frugho lofuadhe tro, that you would come there again at thu skulde ater koma thär when one year had passed; första thet aarith forganith är; I shall hold you responsible for, iak vil thik ther til göra skäl, thu hafuer thet lughit, thet veet thu väl. that you have lied, you know that well.’ (Källtext: ivan145, Herr Ivan, 1303) This kind of extraposition is a typical syntactic and pragmatic environment for present-day vet du (some corresponding usages are also found in the corpus of plays we have studied). Such parenthetic additions, then, constitute a possible contributing source for the lexicalised expression vet du. Evidence of this kind support further the hypothesis that vet du builds upon a verb in present indicative and a form of verb-first declarative as presented in example (10): the anaphoric first constituent would have been dropped, (det) vet du (väl). The particular occurrence in (23) is, however, complicated by the fact that the context is poetic and the addition has, apparently, (also) metrical motivations.

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 223

As for the grammaticalised expression förstår du, there is little evidence for this in the Old Swedish texts which we have studied. There are very few occurrences of the verb förstå in the first place and collocations with the indicative form förstår and the pronoun du can be found only in sentential contexts where there is no apparent unity between the verb and the pronoun, such as thz skalt thu (swa) forsta ‘that should you (then/so) understand’ and som thu wel forstaar at… ‘as you well understand that…’. The verb förstå is, indeed, a loan from Middle Low German and is absent in Old Icelandic texts (in sixteenth to nineteenth century texts, such as the translation of the New Testament by Oddur Gottskálksson in 1540, some occurrences of the verb can be found). To summarise, no clear sources for the set of present-day Swedish discourse particles under discussion can be found in Old Swedish (or Old Icelandic), apart from the expression hör du, which, it is fairly clear, was originally a directive.

5.2 Early Modern Swedish (1526–1732) In the Early Modern Swedish texts in the Fornsvenska textbanken corpus5 there are some occurrences of höra and se in directive contexts similar to those which can be found in the Old Swedish texts discussed above. (24) Hör mina bön, her[e], och fornim mit bidiande och akta på mina bön, thet iag af alt min hiärta ödmiukeligh beder tig om ‘Hear my prayer, lord, and perceive my praying and consider my prayer, that which I of my whole heart humbly ask you for’ (Fornsvenska textbanken, Beskrivning över min vandringstid by Agneta Horn, 1657) (25) … menn see, natten förr änn som stormen skedde, rymde thesse två uthur landet inn i Danmark … ‘… but see, the night before the storm occurred, these two escaped out of the country into Denmark…’ (Fornsvenska textbanken, Carl Carlsson Gyllenhielms anteckningar, 1640) In (24) the imperative verb form hör ‘hear’ is directly followed by the noun phrase mina bön ‘my prayer’, which has the function of an object. The context is thus unambiguously directive and the verb is used literally. In (25), however, the imperative form see occurs in a parenthetic comment in a narrative. The form thus has a discourse function rather than the function of pointing out something in the physical surrounding. A couple of comparable examples are found in the Ekeblad letters (Allén 1965: 122, 172): See på sådant sätt söker iagh till att trösta migh sielff ‘See, in such a manner I try and comfort myself ’ (dated to 1653), Sij iag hade så när glömt att säija eer att iag mötte tore olson strax wid hans säteri ‘See, I had almost

224 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

forgotten to say to you that I met Tore Olson right at his manor’ (dated to 1655). These uses of see are very similar to the occurrence of the Icelandic imperative form sjáðu in example (20). However, the Modern Swedish ser du contains an indicative and not an imperative form of the verb se. The form see in (25) is thus not directly comparable to ser du. Nor is the example shown in (26), which contains the interesting collocation of the imperative form lätt ‘let’ and the infinitive se ‘see’. (26) Lätt se mitt kieraste hiertta, skrif migh till hitt på Rijga så… ‘Let see my dearest heart, write to me here in Riga so…’ (Fornsvenska textbanken, letters by Jon Stålhammar, 1700–1708) Several examples of this collocation (either lät(t) se or låt se) can be found in the Swedish Academy Ordbok (SAOB). In an example from the eighteenth century lätt and se are even written together: (27) Lättse att om fålket har någon tidh lätt rödhie up Salshultz ängien. ‘Let-see that if the people have any time to clear the Salshultz field.’ (SAOB, Karolinska krigares dagböcker, 1702) Collocations of lät(t) or låt, se and the first person pronouns mig (sg.) or oss (pl.) also occur in Swedish; cf. English let me see, let us see. Structures of this type are still used today, but they are rare except in solemn or formal contexts. (28) Jag var — låt mig se — aderton år, när jag skickades till Stockholm. ‘I was — let me see — eighteen years old, when I was sent to Stockholm.’ (SAOB, De fyra elementerna by P. Hallström, 1906) It would be highly interesting to investigate collocations of the type lätt se more closely, since these collocations in many contexts clearly have a discourse structuring, and not a literal directive, function. However, in the present context this particular form of expression falls outside the scope of our study. As for the historical development of hör du, the imperative forms in Early Modern Swedish are of relevance, since hör du most likely incorporates an imperative. A few collocations of the imperative form hör and the second person singular pronoun du can also be found in the texts at Fornsvenska textbanken. In all these occurrences hör du seems to refer to the actual event of hearing something. However, in (29) hör du is not syntactically connected to the following statement; there is no conjunction (att ‘that’) between the expression and the following clause. Here, then, we have what is probably a literal use of the clausal unit hör du which is, nevertheless, asyndetically combined with a subsequent, not necessarily subordinated, clause. (29) Twå fölgdes åt i en skog, ok som Göken tog til at ropa, sade den ene, hör du han kallar deg Kukuwall.

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 225

‘Two kept company in a forest, and as the Cuckoo started calling, one of them said, hear-you he is calling you Kukuwall.’ (Fornsvenska textbanken, Mål-roo eller Roo-mål by Samuel Columbus, 1675) In a few examples an indicative form of se occurs together with du. However, the word order tends to be non-inverted, du ser. (30) Lätt migh vetta huru Hr Flintensten visar sigh medh betalningen på dhe 300 D:r Sölf:t iagh länte hanss sohn … du ser han her betalt så nehr som 30 D:r Smt. ‘Let me know how Mr Flintensten does with the payment of the 300 daler silver which I lent his son … you see he has paid everything but 30 daler altogether.’ (Fornsvenska textbanken, letters by Jon Stålhammar, 1700–1708) As in (29) with hör du, the expression du ser is not syntactically connected to the following clause, that is, att ‘that’ is missing. Even though we are primarily investigating the form with reversed word order, ser du, the occurrence in (30) is interesting because the construction is unambiguously indicative and declarative and the use is discursive rather than literal. To summarise, the Early Modern Swedish texts we have studied give some indications about the development of the present-day particles hör du and ser du, even though very few occurrences with forms of se and höra are directly comparable to the present-day discourse particles ser du and hör du. Imperative forms of se, and also the imperatives lät(t)/låt in combination with se, are more clearly used in a discourse function than constructions with se in the indicative. This is different from Modern Swedish, where the imperative se does not very frequently occur as a discourse marker in colloquial contexts, and the combinations låt se and lätt se are to be regarded as obsolete today. The collocations vet du and förstår du are only occasionally found in directive or interrogative sentential contexts in the Early Modern Swedish texts; moreover, these constructions are integrated in the inner clausal frame and hence used literally.

5.3 Modern Swedish (1732–) In addition to the Old, Middle and Early Modern Swedish texts in the Källtext and Fornsvenska textbanken corpora, we have studied a corpus of dramatic texts collected at the University of Uppsala. The oldest texts in the corpus come from the first half of the eighteenth century, which can be seen as a transition period from Early Modern Swedish into Modern Swedish. This material is of great interest, since the plays are mostly Swedish originals, not written in verse form, but as if the author desired to reproduce actual speech, with varying degrees of success.

226 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

Accordingly, the texts contain discourse particles of various kinds, as well as expressions of the type hör du, vet du, ser du and förstår du.

5.3. Hör du The verb höra occurs fairly frequently in lines of dialogue as a kind of attentiongetter. Most of these instances have apparent imperative functions, sometimes also in combination with another verb in the imperative, such as vänta ‘wait’ in (31): (31) Hör vänta lite, Agatha! Får jag tala med dig några ord? ‘Listen wait a little, Agatha! May I speak with you a few words?’ (Svensk dramadialog, Fabriks-flickan, 1796) There is often ambiguity as to whether the verb represents a literal directive or a discourse particle. Many of the contexts are typical of those for the particle hör du in present-day Swedish, e.g. initiating a new move, marking a change of addressee or expressing a change of discourse mood, often as a token of challenge or as a response to a challenging move (Hakulinen et al. 2003): (32) Sara Torb.

Sara Torb.

Fy Juncker, när plägar man röka uti en Fruentimmers kammare? Hör Fru, jag wil så begynna, som jag ämnar hålla ut, jag förstår mig intet på at krusa när man Friar, och wara plump sedan man blifwit gift, sådan som I ser mig nu så blir jag. ‘Shame Squire, when do you smoke in a lady’s room?’ ‘Listen Ma’am, I want to start as I intend to go on, I do not understand why you should stand on ceremony when you are proposing and be rude once you’ve got married; as you see me now I will remain.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Sprätthöken, 1737)

One of the most striking divergences from present-day usage is that hör, in fact, quite seldom combines with the second person du. Instead, the verb occurs alone or in combination with another marker of the addressee, most often with a name, title or another descriptive attribute, e.g. hör min Dotter ‘listen my daughter’, hör min bror ‘listen my brother’, hör Kusin ‘listen Cousin’, hör Petter ‘listen Petter’, hör Fru ‘listen Madam’, hör Herr ‘listen Sir’, hör Grefwe ‘listen Count’, hör Poike ‘listen Boy’, hör min Dufva ‘listen my Pigeon’, hör min vän ‘listen my friend’. This is perhaps a reflection of the fairly complex system of address in Swedish culture before the middle of the 1900s. Another reason for the variety in the addressing terms may be due to dramatic factors. The addressing terms are possibly a means to underline the nature of the relations between the characters, and a simple way to indicate their identities to the audience. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that the second person singular pronoun du was probably not the obvious concomitant of a discursive hör in the historical societal context, which could have affected the pace of grammaticalisation of the particular combination hör du.

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 227

5.3.2 Vet du In the oldest of the eighteenth century plays there are still sporadic traces of the richer verb paradigms of the verb veta, in that the present tense indicative singular form west (vest) occurs. This may also be observed in usages that can be analysed as equivalents to the present-day Swedish discourse particle vet du: Må giöra, jag will bli man och äta för dig, och du skall wara hustru och löpa för mig, du blir ändå i ditt förriga kall west du. Lasse ‘May be done, I want to become husband and eat for you, and you shall be wife and run for me, you will remain anyway in your old calling you know.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Sprätthöken, 1737)

(33) Lasse

(34) Styrb.

Ach! om jag nu kunde wara en liten Fluga och sitta under taket! Westu Brita, jag hade lust, at se och höra hwad det folcket giör eller såger i min frånwaro: Då finge jag bäst weta, hur det hänger ihop med dem. Styrb. ‘Oh if I could be a little fly and sit under the roof! You know Brita, I would like to see and hear what these people do or say in my absence: Then I would best get to know what they really think.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Den Afwundsiuke, 1738)

These morphosyntactic traces confirm the assumption that the verb form in the present-day expression vet du has indicative rather than imperative origins, as is also suggested by the Old Swedish and Icelandic material. However, it is difficult to say anything conclusive about other possible functional sources for this expression. There are a few cases, like (33), where the particle is in final position, and this could be considered to support the hypothesis that it originally constituted a parenthetical declarative clause which was constructed as an addition to a prior utterance (cf. example (10) above). In the dramatic material, however, the majority of the collocations of vet du are utterance-initial, as in (34). It is possible, then, that the fixed expression vet du, or its non-inverted variant du vet, is partly a sedimentation of a presenting utterance-initial matrix clause that is normally followed by an object clause of the att-type (that is, a that clause): (35) Frih. Wet du Lisätt, att ja ä nog nöjd mä di där ungarna. Frih. ‘You know, Lisette, that I am pleased with those kids.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Några mil ifrån Stockholm, 1787) In this interpretation, vet du could be analysed as an interrogative, whereas du vet is apparently a declarative. Some parallels can be drawn to Icelandic where a discourse structuring veistu can still today include the demonstrative það ‘that’, forming the lexicalisation veistu það ‘you know that’.

228 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

(36) R

veistu það ég ætla nú að senda sérstakar kveðjur og þakklæti til hennar Kristínu… ‘you know (that), I intend to send special greetings and gratitude to Kristín …’ (Þjóðarsálin May 30, 1996)

The Old Swedish cognate demonstrative þat (cf. Modern Swedish det) has been grammaticalised into the subjunction att ‘that’, like that in English and dass in German (Wessén 1956: 58). In this process, a non-projecting demonstrative has been possibly lost in Swedish, leaving the particle forms vet du ([det]/att) / du vet ([det]/ att), while Icelandic has preserved traces of a transient stage of the development in fixed forms like veistu það (Lindström and Londen forthc.). Of course, this does not simplify the quest of the original source for the discourse particles. Indeed, the development of lexicalisation may have been complex and involved parallel syntactic sources.

5.3.3 Ser du Uses of the expression ser du that could be equated with the present-day discourse particle are fairly infrequent in the eighteenth century plays and occur mostly in a few plays from the end of the century. The function of ser du is generally to point something out; the most pragmatic occurrences highlight an account or a conclusion. One of the older plays, Swenska Sprätthöken, which has a pronounced tendency to reflect natural spoken language, contains an example of this pragmatic use. We may note that ser du is used in combination with a vocative, the name Trulls: Ser du Trulls, när man tar i rätta strängen med desse Stockholms grangärningar, så kan man fuller kiöra räta fårar med dem ock. Torb. ‘You see Trulls, when you pull the right string with these Stockholm beauties, then you can fully drive straight grooves with them also.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Sprätthöken, 1737)

(37) Torb.

The pronoun is sometimes left out in favor of a more formal vocative, like ser Herrn ‘see Sir’ or ser min gunstige Herr Patron ‘see my fine Sir Squire’. The variant with the second person plural pronoun ni also occurs: (38) Ser ni, det är alt hvad jag kan säga til min dotters beröm. ‘You see, this is everything I can say in favor of my daughter.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Friman, 1798) The final position for the particle is also attested:

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 229

(39) Du har ändå Femton hundra riksdaler qvar om åre, ser du. ‘You still have fifteen hundred riksdalers left per year, you see.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Några mil ifrån Stockholm, 1787) A few bare imperatives of se in a discourse function are also found, notably in the Swedish translation of Tartuffe. The dramatic material does not provide any clear indications of the syntactic and functional origin of the discursive ser du construction. The situation is thus quite similar to that of vet du: it is possible to analyse ser du as a lexicalised declarative that originally occurred after an antecedent clause, and although the interrogative interpretation cannot be ruled out, we may note that there is nothing intrinsically interrogative in the uses of ser du in the dramatic texts. As regards the punctuation, the lines where vet du, ser du and förstår du occur are not marked with a question mark. This could indicate that the expressions are not conceived of as having a prominent interrogative value; however, punctuation is not used in a very systematic manner in the plays.

5.3.4 Förstår du Equivalents to the present-day discourse particle förstår du are found in only two of the eighteenth century plays, both from the very end of the century, and even then only sporadically. This suggests that förstår du possibly represents the latest development in the set of discourse particles studied here. As with all the other particles, the pronoun du may be omitted or replaced with another kind of vocative: Jo, jag skall resa i et ärende åt Herrn til Stockholm i morron, och då ville jag gerna ha et par Riksdaler för egen räkning ock, förstår du! Sven ‘Yes I shall travel to run my master’s errands in Stockholm tomorrow, and then would I like to have a couple of Riksdalers for myself also, you understand!’ (Svensk dramadialog, Friman, 1798)

(40) Sven

(41) Jag red inte physice och proprie utan logice och metaphorice, förstår Mamsell. Jag hårdrog och red på ord. ‘I was not riding physically and substantially but rather logically and metaphorically, Miss understands. I pulled and rode on words.’ (Svensk dramadialog, Fabriksflickan, 1796) Whether the function is declarative or interrogative is once more ambiguous. It must be noted, however, that the examples with förstår du are sentence final and follow the inverted word order pattern verb–subject.

230 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

5.4 Towards present-day Swedish We complete our diachronic investigation with a brief survey of dramatic texts from the nineteenth century till the end of the twentieth century. When compared with the eighteenth century texts, there are no very striking differences in the number of our discourse particles, nor in their significance. The particles under discussion do not seem to become essentially any more important as representations of natural orality in dramatic dialogue. The most evident formal difference is that the wide variety of different vocative items disappears and the second person pronoun du is established as an integral part of the verb forms hör, vet, ser and förstår in discourse-pragmatic functions. This reflects the development of these discourse particles into markers of intimate social relations; they are used between family members and friends, whereas addressing terms involving titles mark social distance (cf. Thelander 2003 on the terms of address in the plays from the nineteenth century). The very recent custom of addressing people by universal du in Swedish society, dating from the 1960s, has not essentially contributed to the principal lexicalisation process of hördu etc. The process of lexicalisation is continuous through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is also evident in an increase in colloquial, contracted written representations like hördu, hör’ru, hörrö. The extra du-vocative in hördu du makes its entry in the early twentieth century plays, and the peculiar double reduplication of du is attested at the end of the century: hördududu. To summarize, from the beginning of the eighteenth century the plays reflected a system of discourse marking devices that was being established in colloquial speech during the entry to this time period. The plays from later periods do not reveal considerable changes in the basic nature of the system, but show that it had become more established and formally uniform, probably as a reflection of a still on-going grammaticalisation. However, any possible continuing developments in spoken Swedish did not have any deeper impact on the conventions of how speech was represented in dramatic dialogue. In fact, the discourse particles are rarely attested in the dialogue of many of the recent plays. Although the plays provide a fascinating window towards spoken language in the historical perspective, they are not a wholly reliable record of the actual conventions or the frequency of the discourse particles in genuine conversational language. Dramatic texts are often constructed to serve specific, indeed, dramatic purposes. Nevertheless, certain hypotheses concerning the grammatical and functional origin of our particles are supported by the evidence of the dramatic texts. It seems fairly clear that the expression hör du is used as an imperative in this material. One piece of evidence which leads to this conclusion is that hör du is almost always placed at the beginning of the utterance. The expressions vet du, ser du and förstår du, however, occur both initially and finally, and it is morphologically clear that they originate from a construction with the verb in the present indicative. It is more difficult, however, to decide whether the functional origin of these latter

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 23

expressions is declarative or interrogative. The use of the particles is not generally explicitly interrogative, but instead often emphatic: ‘you should know/ see/ understand this’. But there is a vagueness about this functional property which is probably caused by the lexicalisation of the expressions and the concomitant overall bleaching of the original literal meaning. The analysis still leaves open questions about the exact syntactic development of the set of discourse particles. As suggested, the development may have had several contributing sources. We have at least from the Middle Swedish period examples where the imperatives hör and se carry functions that in some respects can be interpreted as discourse structuring. The imperative hör also combines frequently with the second person pronoun du. This could have led to a process where the formally ambiguous hör du was gradually interpreted as a declarative or interrogative rather than as a directive, thus coinciding with analoguous constructions with indicative verb forms in vet du, ser du, and förstår du. These expressions had, in turn, become prone to lexicalisation because they, similar to hör du, frequently occurred in utterance-initial and -final sentential contexts. This suggested process is illustrated in (42). (42) Imperative → (Directive) hör! se! lätt se!

Imperative (Directive) hör du! →

Indicative → (Declarative) det ser du. det vet du. det förstår du. Indicative → (Interrogative) ser du det? vet du det? förstår du det?

Non-imperative (Non-directive) hör du → Indicative → (Declar./Interrog.) (det) ser du ser du (det) (det) vet du vet du (det) (det) förstår du förstår du (det)

Particle hördu serdu vetdu förstårdu

Such a formal re-analysis and simplification of the paradigm of expressions that generally structure the discourse would also explain why the bare imperatives hör and se have declined in this function, not to mention lätt se which has disappeared altogether. Clearly, the bare imperatives have been ousted by the seemingly uniform, intimately addressing discourse structuring devices.

232 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

6. Conclusion In this study we have explored the historical development of a group of discourse particles which is central to spoken Swedish. Such an endeavour is not easy, because intimate features of spoken language cannot necessarily be found in written texts. Nevertheless, all the available records of the older language are in written form. We chose to examine three groups of sources that were easily available, and could be processed by computer: a sample of texts from the medieval Old Swedish period, a sample of texts from the Early Modern Swedish period, and a fairly large corpus of dramatic dialogue from the eighteenth century to the present day. The collection of the Ekeblad letters from the Early Modern Swedish period was available in Allén’s (1965) book edition. Comparisons were also made with historical and contemporary Icelandic texts that contain more explicit morphosyntactic evidence, which may be relevant for outlining the developments in Swedish. With reference to our research questions, we may conclude the following: there seem to be two basic sources for the set of discourse particles studied here; one is the imperative use of hör, the other is the present indicative forms vet, ser and förstår. These sources may have been competing at some stage, since the bare imperatives se and hör, as well as the combinations lätt se, låt (mig) se, have also developed discourse functions. It is possible that analogy has played a part in the establishment of the whole set of particles. The originally directive expression hör du is formally ambiguous between an imperative and an indicative, and the ambiguity may have increased during a further lexicalisation process. We assume that the lexicalisation hör du is of oldest date in the set of particles; it is, indeed, a fairly frequent collocation in some of the oldest material studied here. It is more difficult to say whether the expressions vet du, ser du and förstår du are based on polar questions or verbfirst declaratives; perhaps there has been competition and ambiguity also between these sources which has been neutralised in the process of further lexicalisation. It seems that the present-day usage of the set of discourse particles was being established in the language at the turn of the eighteenth century. It appears, however, that there was a great variety in the choice of the form of address included in the particles before the 1900s. The now generally available du or ni could be replaced by a marker of social status, or the discourse structuring verb might not be combined with any overt form of address at all. Some Old Swedish texts contain, as noted, collocations that make at least the initial development of hör du understandable, but there are no true instances of present-day discourse usages in these documents. Some sporadic examples of possible discourse uses of the imperative forms hör and se can be traced in the Early Modern Swedish texts. There is, though, a general difficulty that these oldest texts are not very interactive in their nature, and thus there is little room for the use of dialogically sensitive elements. This remains a methodological problem in diachronic studies like the one carried out here. The set of discourse particles studied here represent what is clearly a more or less unified phenomenon in present-day spoken Swedish. This is true not only

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 233

of the closely related pragmatic functions, but also of their syntactic formation, which generally has the pattern [Vfin+Pron2nd p.]. Linguists, and possibly also Swedish speakers, tend to treat them as a uniform group of expressions. In the diachronic perspective it seems, however, that both linguists and speakers are inclined to analyse, or rather re-analyse, these phenomena as more uniform than their origins would suggest.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank sincerely the following people for their comments on our paper and their help in finding data and literature: Staffan Hellberg, Inger Lindell, Jan-Ola Östman and Mats Thelander.

Notes . We use the general term discourse particle in this paper for expressions that indicate discursive relations between utterances but that have no propositional content of their own. Other terms used in the literature include discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987) and pragmatic particles (Östman 1981). 2. When we discuss our discourse particles in the text, for the sake of clarity, we represent the verb and the pronoun as two separate words, as in hör du. As these units have become strongly lexicalised and also prosodically unified, they could alternatively be written as one word, as in hördu. This latter approach is the one we have taken in the examples cited from present-day conversational Swedish. In our historical written sources possible representatives of the particles are mostly spelled as two-word units, as in hör thu, and there is, of course, no reason to change this convention here. 3. According to Barðdal (2001: 50), heyrðu is a filler which is very common in spoken Icelandic. 4. In Swedish, the period 1225–1375 is usually called klassisk fornsvenska ‘Classic Old Swedish’ and the period 1375–1526 yngre fornsvenska ‘Younger Old Swedish’. In English the term Middle Swedish is sometimes used for the “younger” Old Swedish period (cf. e.g. Norde 1997). In this study, however, we use the term Old Swedish for the whole period between 1225–1526. 5. Then Swänska Argus (Olof von Dahlin, 1732–1734) and the play Swenska Sprätthöken (Carl Gyllenborg, 1740) are included in the Early Modern Swedish Supplement in Fornsvenska textbanken. However, Then Swänska Argus is generally seen as the “starting-point” of Modern Swedish (1732). We will not, therefore, discuss occurrences from Then Swänska Argus here. Occurrences from the play Sprätthöken are treated in Section 5.3 along with other occurrences from the corpus of plays at the Department of Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University.

234 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

Sources Fornsvenska textbanken. A full text database of Old Swedish. (http://www.nordlund.lu.se/ Fornsvenska/Fsv%20Folder/index.html). Created by Lars-Olof Delsing, Department of Scandinavian languages, Lund University. (Most of the texts in The Modern Swedish supplement have been collected within the project Bidrag till en nysvensk textbank på data at the Department of Scandinavian languages, Uppsala University, and are published in the database with the permission of Mats Thelander and Carin Östman). GRIS. The kernel corpus of the project Samtalsspråkets grammatik (GRIS) (Grammar in conversation: a study of Swedish); SAM:V2 (group discussion), SÅI NF 2:1 (group discussion), UVAT6:A:6 (telephone conversation); for the latter, see A. Lindström 1994. General information: http://www.tema.liu.se/tema-k/gris/. ICLA:Ari02. Child-adult conversation from the Icelandic Child Language Acquisition (ICLA) corpus recorded in 1981–1988 under the supervision of Dr. Randa Mulford. Participants: child aged 2;00:19, mother, two investigators. Iceland University of Education (project leader Prof. Hrafnhildur Ragnarsdóttir). Íslendingasögur. Orðstöðulykill og texti. (Cd-Rom) Edited by Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson et al. Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 1996. Källtext. A one million word corpus of Old Swedish (Källtext) in the on-line linguistic reference database Språkbanken, Göteborg University (http://spraakbanken.gu.se/). Luckan. A corpus of Swedish service encounters in Sweden and Finland (telephone calls to a ticket order desk in Helsinki). Department of Scandinavian languages and literature, University of Helsinki. Orðabók háskólans. Texts with concordances available on the website of the Institute of Lexicography at the University of Iceland (http://www.lexis.hi.is/ordstodulyklar.html). Ó hve. The youth radio program Ó hve glöð er vor æska ‘Oh how merry is our youth’ broadcast on Rás 2 ‘Station 2’ Oct. 6, 1997. Transcription, Helga Hilmisdóttir, tape Camilla Wide. Svensk dramadialog. The corpus Svensk dramadialog under tre sekler (Drama dialogue in Sweden through three centuries). A corpus of 45 plays, mostly Swedish originals, from the period 1725–2000. Department of Scandinavian languages, University of Uppsala. Þjóðársálin. 15 broadcasts of the radio call-in program Þjóðarsálin ‘Soul of the nation’, recorded and transcribed in 1996. Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland (project leaders Prof. Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, Camilla Wide).

References Allén, Sture. 1965. Johan Ekeblads brev till brodern Claes Ekeblad 1639–1655. (Nordistica Gothoburgensia 2.) Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Andersson, Lars-Gunnar. 1976. Talaktsadverbial. Nysvenska studier 56, 25–46. Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2001. Case in Icelandic — A Synchronic, Diachronic and Comparative Approach. (Lundastudier i nordisk språkvetenskap A 57.) Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University. Friðjónsson, Jón. 1989. Samsettar myndir sagna. Reykjavík: Málvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands.

Tracing the origins of a set of discourse particles 235

Hakulinen, Auli, Leelo Keevallik Eriksson, and Jan Lindström. 2003. Kuule, kule, hördu. Projicerande praktiker i finska, estniska och svenska samtal. In: Bengt Nordberg et al. (eds). Grammatik och samtal. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 199–218. Hellberg, Staffan. 1985. Scandinavian sentence-types. (Färsk forsk 9.) Institutionen för nordiska språk, Göteborgs universitet. Hellberg, Staffan. 1988. SAG: Direktiva huvudsatser. Draft of a chapter of the Swedish Academy Grammar. Received May 19, 2003. Ms. Hilmisdóttir, Helga. 1999. þa er alveg geðveikt sko. En funktionell analys av den isländska diskurspartikeln sko. Unpublished master’s thesis. Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature, University of Helsinki. Hilmisdóttir, Helga, and Camilla Wide. 1999. sko — en mångfunktionell diskurspartikel i isländskt ungdomsspråk. In: Ulla-Britt Kotsinas, Anna-Brita Stenström and Eli-Marie Drange (eds). Ungdom, språk och identitet. Rapport fra ett nettverksmøte. (Nord 1999: 30.) København: Nordisk Ministerråd, 101–121. Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keevallik, Leelo. 2003. From interaction to grammar. Estonian finite verb forms in conversation. (Studia Uralica Upsaliensia 34.) Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Lindell, Inger. Personal communication. E-mail, June 4, 2003. Lindström, Jan. 2002. Från satsschema till turschema? Förfältet i fokus. Språk & Stil 11 (2001), 25–80. Lindström, Jan, and Anne-Marie Londen. Forthc. Constructing reasoning. The complex connectives för att (causal), så att (consecutive) and men att (adversative) in Swedish conversations. Ms., Department of Scandinavian languages and literature, University of Helsinki. Melander Marttala, Ulla, and Carin Östman. 2000. Svensk dramadialog under tre sekler — en projektbeskrivning. (FUMS Rapport nr 200.) Institutionen för nordiska språk, Uppsala universitet. Norde, Muriel. 1997. The history of the Genitive in Swedish. A case study in degrammaticalization. Vakgroep Skandinavische taal- en letterkunde, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Nordenstam, Kerstin. 1989. Tag questions och dylika påhäng i svenska samtal. (Färsk forsk 14.) Institutionen för nordiska språk, Göteborgs universitet. Östman, Jan-Ola. 1981. You know. A discourse functional approach. (Pragmatics and Beyond, 2:7.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pettersson, Gertrud. 1996. Svenska språket under sjuhundra år. En historia om svenskan och dess utforskande. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Saari, Mirja. 1984. Några pragmatiska partiklar i svenskt talspråk. In: Lars Huldén (ed.). Festskrift till Åke Granlund 28.4.1984. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 213–221. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696–735. SAG = Teleman, Ulf, Staffan Hellberg and Erik Andersson. 1999. Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Svenska Akademien (distr. Norstedts ordbok). SAOB = Ordbok över svenska språket, utg. av Svenska Akademien. 1898–. Lund. (Available at http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/). Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Turn organization: one intersection of grammar and interaction. In: Elinor Ochs et al. (eds). Interaction and grammar. (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 13.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 52–133.

236 Jan Lindström and Camilla Wide

Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steensig, Jakob. 2001. Sprog i virkeligheden. Bidrag til en interaktionel lingvistik. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Thelander, Kerstin. 2003. “Och ni sade du till mig!” Något om tilltalsskicket i svenska dramer under 1800-talet. In: Siv Strömquist (ed.). Svenska på scen. (Ord och stil, Språkvårdssamfundets skrifter 34.) Uppsala: Hallgren & Fallgren, 93–109. Þráinsson, Höskuldur. 1994. Icelandic. In: Ekkehard König and Johan van der Auwera (eds). The Germanic Languages. London and New York: Routledge, 142–189. Wessén, Elias. 1956. Svensk språkhistoria III. Grundlinjer till en historisk syntax. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Wollin, Lars. 1983. Svensk latinöversättning II. Förlagan och produkten (Lundastudier i nordisk språkvetenskap, Serie A Nr 35.) Lund: Walter Ekstrands förlag.

Authors’ address Jan Lindström Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature P.O. Box 24 FIN-00014 Helsinki University Finland [email protected].fi

Camilla Wide Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland Riddaregatan 5 00170 Helsingfors Finland camilla.wide@sls.fi

About the authors Jan Lindström is a university lecturer and docent at the Department of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Helsinki. He is currently (2000–2005) involved in a bilateral Swedish–Finnish project on Grammar in Swedish conversations (GRIS) where he has studied the joint syntactic and interactional organisation of turns in interaction. His interests in linguistics focus on pragmatics, interactional linguistics and Swedish grammar. Camilla Wide is currently (2003–2006) coordinating a project on the syntax of the Swedish spoken in Finland at the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. She is also a part-time lecturer at the Department of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Helsinki. In her doctoral dissertation (2002) she studied the form and functional potential of the Icelandic perfect vera búinn að + inf. Her research interests focus mainly on interactional linguistics and Construction Grammar.