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This article is a contribution to the discussion of linguistic aspects of turn organization, especially from the point of view of Swedish grammar and conversational language. I propose a general model for interactionally sensitive turn organization and relate it to topological syntactic descriptions of the Swedish clausal structure. The results of this comparative examination suggest that there are remarkable points of connection between the syntactic and interactional organization of turn constructional units (TCUs). Syntactic evidence helps one understand the motivation of appositionals as different from genuine sentence starts as well as what may count as the beginning-and indeed, a nonbeginning-of a contribution. I show how the beginning edge of transition space may be defined by syntactic means and which diverse syntactic practices may be exploited in the production of postpossible completion increments. A study of Swedish, which is a language with a fixed verb-second word order, may help reveal certain patterns of interactionally sensitive turn design in the very syntactic array of constituents in turn units. Important examples of such syntactic-interactional interplay are provided by an optional appositional coding of adverbs (i.e., disjuncts or conjuncts) when used as discourse markers, by an optional appositional coding of action projecting clauses when used as TCU initial markers,

In this introduction to the special issue on 'Grammar and negative epistemics in talk-in-interaction' we discuss the current state of research on the use of negative mental verb constructions such as I don't know, I don't understand, I don't remember in social interaction. We scrutinize, in a cross-linguistic perspective, the grammatical and interactional features that emerge from existing research in the field, and spell out the specific contribution of the studies collected in this issue. We discuss how the cumulative evidence provided by these studies across a set of different languages, several of which are typologically unrelated, contributes to studies of talk-in-interaction and to the newly emerging field of Pragmatic Typology. We argue that the findings point to universal interactional motivations for the grammatical properties and the grammaticization of the constructions studied, and suggest that these motivations arise out of the basic requirements for intersubjectivity in social interaction.

This study examines positive low-and high-grade assessments in service encounters between customers and salespersons conducted in Swedish and recorded in Sweden and Finland. The assessments occur in a regular sequential pattern as third-turn moves that complete request-delivery sequences, longer coherent requesting sections, or request sequences in a pre-closing context. The positive valence of the assessments coheres with the satisfactory outcome of task completion, but their function is primarily pragmatic, used for segmenting the flow of task-oriented institutional interaction. The assessments stand as lexical TCUs, and their delivery is characterized by downgraded prosody and the speaker's embodied shift away from the other. The analysis reveals distributional differences in the interactional practice: Customers produce task-completing assessments more often than the salespersons, and high-grade assessments are more frequent in the data from Sweden than from Finland. The data are in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish with English translations. Assessing has been found to be a social activity that displays characteristic patterns of sequential organization and is connected to the more overarching social principle of preference organization (e.g., Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987; Pomerantz, 1984), but assessing is also linked to factors like epistemic stance and agency (see, e.g., Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Thompson, Fox, & Couper-Kuhlen, 2015, p. 144). The study we report on here contributes to the body of work on assessing in social interaction by taking a specific type of institutional activity to the foreground: service encounters in a commercial setting (see, e.g., Felix-Brasdefer, 2015; Fox, 2015). In such interactions, both customers and salespersons engage in the exchange of information, delivery of goods, and other services. The customer wants to buy a product or receive information related to the product, and the staff requests relevant documents and payment at certain stages of the commercial exchange. The participants also position themselves relative to one another in displaying shared understanding, agreement, and orientation to their differential rights and obligations in the asymmetrical institutional context. We have specifically investigated the social organization of box office encounters in Swedish and observe a recurrent sequential pattern around different forms of task completions in these activities. A typical sequential trajectory hereby involves (a) a (general) requesting action, (b) delivery of the

This study explores the usage and demand for local languages and English in a range of universities in Nordic countries. The University of Helsinki is in focus because of its bilingual status with two national languages, which have an official but not an equal position in practice. This research site was compared with five other universities working on a unilingual or multilingual basis. The study reveals tensions between official language policies and grassroots practices; language choice also creates tensions between national and global sciences. While official language policies may be soft steering instruments, they safeguard the presence of a non-default language. However, the increasing presence of English challenges traditional university language policies, calling for a reevaluation of them.