Insisting on ‘my side’: Siis-prefaced utterances in Finnish

• Siis projects an emotive description and/or demonstration of speakers’ feelings.
• The emotive dimension is conveyed lexically, syntactically, and prosodically.
• The utterances following siis are used in the service of insisting on ‘my side’.
• Siis-prefacing comes in story frames, competitive positioning, Other interpretation.
• Its sequential location does not always lead to the creation of ‘empathic moments’.

This paper investigates the Finnish particle siis, roughly translatable as ‘therefore/so’ or ‘that is’, in its conversational use to preface strongly emotive utterances. We use data from the Finnish Conversational Data Archive at the University of Helsinki and apply the micro-analytic methods commonly employed in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. Our research questions are as follows: (a) When is siis used to preface an emotive utterance? (b) What is the utterance that follows a siis-preface like? (c) What does this kind of siis-prefaced utterance accomplish in conversation? The upshot of the discussion is that speakers use stance-related siis-prefacing when talking about A-events, those drawn from the biography of the speaker, which are known to the speaker but not necessarily to the interlocutor. This use of siis introduces talk about ‘my’ feeling, ‘my’ experience, ‘my’ position, often when it is not being adequately appreciated or supported by one's interlocutor or when it has been pre-empted by the interlocutor. In this sense these utterances could be said to be insistent. In conclusion, we discuss the emotive work that siis-prefaced turns accomplish and consider their capacity to evoke empathic moments in their respective sequential environments.