Nominated actions and their targeted agents in Finnish conversational directives

• Directive actions can be done with a display of stronger or weaker deontic rights.
• Zero-person forms display weaker deontic rights than explicit personal forms.
• Zero-person turns with modals can be treated as directives or epistemic judgments.
• Recipients can nominate themselves as agents or co-judge the nominated action.
• Zero-person forms construe social relationships as more symmetric than asymmetric.

In this paper, we explore how future actions are nominated as well as how agents (performers) of future actions are targeted in Finnish conversational directive sequences. The question of agency is particularly worth exploring in Finnish, where subjects need not always be expressed and where special constructions, e.g. with zero-person forms, exist for leaving personal reference open. When used in directive action sequences, the zero-person construction has consequences for the degree of certainty with which the action is nominated, because a modal verb of necessity or desirability is typically involved. Modal constructions in first-position turns have the property that they can be interpreted either as directives, i.e. as having consequences for the behavior of the interlocutor, or as epistemic judgments. Recipients of modal-construction turns with zero-person forms thus have the option of treating the prior turn as a directive by nominating themselves as agents, or as an epistemic judgment by co-evaluating the necessity/desirability of the nominated action. Zero-person forms and modal constructions in both initiating and responsive positions serve as resources for Finnish speakers to locally negotiate the distribution of deontic rights and agency.