Taking a stance with pragmatic borrowings: English response tokens in Finland-Swedish podcast conversations

Abstract This article contributes to research on pragmatic borrowings through its exploration of their prosodic features in interactional turns. The pragmatic borrowings focused on are actual or enacted responses that demonstrate a stance towards the interlocutor’s previous turn. The data are drawn from podcast conversations in Finland Swedish. The qualitative exploration of the data, which draws on principles from Interactional Linguistics and uses sequential and acoustic analyses, focuses on an in-depth analysis of four examples of response tokens. Our analysis illustrates that borrowed response tokens are not used frequently, but when they are used, they are marked by speakers prosodically, rendering them stylistically salient within the context of the interaction. The borrowed response tokens demonstrate specific interactional meanings, such as affect, humor, farce and upgrading. These findings demonstrate that, like other pragmatic borrowings, responses are integrated into the overall repertoire of the receiving speech community, serving as stylistic variants alongside heritage forms.