PRAGMATICS AS IMPLICITNESS: AN ANALYSIS OF QUESTION PARTICLES IN SOLF SWEDISH, WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF PASSIVE CLAUSES AND THE LANGUAGE OF PERSUASION (COHERENCE, POLITENESS, FINLAND)

Solf Swedish is a dialect of Swedish spoken in Finland. Although questions in Solf can be formed by the standard Swedish means of subject-predicate inversion, very few questions in the conversational material analyzed for this study relied solely on inversion. Both in WH-questions and in yes-no questions, the Solf speakers make an abundant use of a number of sentence-final pragmatic particles. The most important of these particles are ta, da, ela, and na. None of these particles can, however, be regarded as fully grammaticized question particles. Still, a question without a particle is often regarded as an unacceptable way of requesting information or confirmation in an everyday face-to-face interaction.;The question particles in Solf have to be given a prototype definition over their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic behavior. I suggest the Level Analysis as a general format for the pragmatic analysis of language. Pragmatic aspects of language are to be seen in relation to the three parameters of Coherence, Politeness, and Involvement. Pragmatics is distinguished from semantics with reference to the concepts 'implicit' and 'explicit,' respectively. An implicit (i.e. pragmatic) choice is one that the speaker does not have to take responsibility for.;The Level Analysis is illustrated by an analysis of the question particles in Solf, and in brief discussions of the pragmatics of passive constructions, and of persuasive discourse.;Questions particles in Solf are also analyzed with respect to sociological variables like age and sex, and in a psychological experiment, which measured the amount of aggressiveness, friendliness, and politeness that the use of a particle communicates in a sentence. From a comparison with the use of question particles in Finnish, I suggest a typological difference between languages so that a language either tends to make use of prosodic means, or of particles to form questions. Solf is a borderline case between the two language types.