In:New Directions in Grammaticalization Research
Edited by Andrew D.M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale and Richard Waltereit
[Studies in Language Companion Series 166] 2015
► pp. 51–66
The Swedish connective så att ‘so that’
From subordinator to discourse marker
Published online: 8 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.166.03raw
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.166.03raw
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).
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