The Swedish connective så att ‘so that’: from subordinator to discourse marker
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Gudrun Rawoens [1]
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[1] Ghent University
Ghent University
Arrondissement Gent, Bélgica
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- Localización: New Directions in Grammaticalization Research / coord. por Andrew D. M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale, Richard Waltereit, 2015, ISBN 9789027259318, págs. 51-66
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This study accounts for the synchronic profile and the recent history of the Swedish sentence connective så att ‘so that’. In Modern Swedish, this connective allows for a variety of syntactic and semantic patterns that entail particular pragmatic functions. One aim of this study is to find evidence for the claim that there is a syntactic shift away from subordinator to coordinator (as has been noticed in conversational data by Lindström & Londen 2008). Even though så att ‘so that’ is traditionally described as hypotactic (SAG II: 733), it can indeed be found in more recent formations reflecting paratactic relations. A second aim relates to the semantics and pragmatics of så att and is to find support for the fact that the multi-word connective is developing from a connector to a discourse marker. In certain contexts, e.g. when occurring in sentence final positions, så att is used with a highly salient discourse function. Starting from empirical data combining written (newspaper texts) and so-called ‘semi-written/spoken’ (blog texts) corpus data, it is shown that the multi-word conjunction så att has become more of a non-compositional form and that the more recent developments witnessing of shifts in syntactic behaviour are accompanied by semantic and pragmatic shifts as well, to wit the shift from subjunction > conjunction > pragmatic marker. The study is conducted within the framework of pragmaticalization (e.g. Diewald 2011).
