Subordination in Conversation

Book excerpt: The articles in this volume examine the notion of clausal subordination based on English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German and Japanese conversational data. Some of the articles approach 'subordination' in terms of social action, taking into account what participants are doing with their talk, considering topics such as the use of clauses as projector phrases and as devices for organizing the participant structure of the conversation. Other articles focus on the emergence of clause combinations diachronically and synchronically, taking on topics such as the grammaticalization of clauses and conjunctions into discourse markers, and the continuum nature of syntactic subordination. In all of the articles, linguistic forms are considered to be emergent from recurrent practices engaged in by participants in conversation. The contributions critically examine central syntactic notions in interclausal relations and their relevance to the description of clause combining in conversational language, to the structure of conversation, and to the interactional functions of language.