We investigate the role of two Finnish deictically open personal
constructions, zero person and open second person singular, in the
organization of everyday face-to-face interaction. Combining
corpus-linguistic methods with approaches derived from interactional
linguistics and conversation analysis, we explore the distribution of
the zero person and open second person singular in conversational data
and analyze their interactional contribution in local contexts of use.
The focus is on two conversations in which the absolute frequency of the
focus constructions is high. In these conversations, zero person and
open second person singular are distributed relatively unevenly; yet the
two constructions often occur in similar contexts, as well as within
the same sequences. Despite certain similarities, zero person and open
second person singular have different interactional functions: zero
person is typically used to share a personal experience to which the
speaker has primary access, or to discuss a topic at a very general
level, while the open second person singular portrays the experience or
state of affairs being talked about as mutually accessible. We conclude
that both zero person and open second person singular are employed to
negotiate the referential framework, and thus to manage interpersonal
relationships in turns-at-talk.