Helt ärligt, vad gör man med fria initiala annex?

A Swedish main clause can be preceded by hanging topics: phrases in the left periphery without a resumptive in the following clause. This construction is labelled free-standing initial annexation (FIA) by the Swedish Academy grammar. However, FIA has received only limited attention in previous research – both in traditional grammar and in interactional linguistics. Furthermore, there seems to be little agreement on what FIA actually is. In this article I suggest a broad definition of FIA, based on formal as well as functional criteria. The functional variation of FIA is then investigated in a spoken language corpus, consisting of ten Swedish podcasts. From an interactional analysis, I distinguish eight different functions: navigate the conversation, announce the up-coming action, emphasize truthfulness, address a recipient, justify the next turn, set the stage, announce a topic for conversation, and mark a quote. From a turn-topological point of view, some FIAs are used as “contextualizers” for the main speech act of the turn. These FIA may overlap with other speech at turn transition relevant places, without the speaker repairing them. However, the topic announcing and stage-setting FIAs seem to not only contextualize the speech act but contribute to it, since the speakers tend to repeat these FIA if they overlap.