The Swedish connective så att ‘so that’

This study accounts for the synchronic profile and the recent history of the Swedish sentence connective så att ‘so that’. In Modern Swedish, this connective allows for a variety of syntactic and semantic patterns that entail particular pragmatic functions. One aim of this study is to find evidence for the claim that there is a syntactic shift away from subordinator to coordinator (as has been noticed in conversational data by Lindström & Londen 2008). Even though så att ‘so that’ is traditionally described as hypotactic (SAG II: 733), it can indeed be found in more recent formations reflecting paratactic relations. A second aim relates to the semantics and pragmatics of så att and is to find support for the fact that the multi-word connective is developing from a connector to a discourse marker. In certain contexts, e.g. when occurring in sentence final positions, så att is used with a highly salient discourse function. Starting from empirical data combining written (newspaper texts) and so-called ‘semi-written/spoken’ (blog texts) corpus data, it is shown that the multi-word conjunction så att has become more of a non-compositional form and that the more recent developments witnessing of shifts in syntactic behaviour are accompanied by semantic and pragmatic shifts as well, to wit the shift from subjunction > conjunction > pragmatic marker. The study is conducted within the framework of pragmaticalization (e.g. Diewald 2011).