This article focuses on free NPs, i.e. noun phrases that are grammatically not part of any clause but form units of their own. Using the methodology of discourse-functional and interactional linguistics, I analyze the morphosyntactic, interactional and prosodic features of free NPs in conversational Finnish. With its rich morphological marking, Finnish provides an interesting perspective on free NPs: since syntactic function is morphologically encoded, an NP can be identified as syntactically unattached on the basis of its morphological form. Free NPs serve various interactional functions, such as making assess­ments or disambiguating referents. These are functions which operate on something already established in the discourse. Free NPs, however, can also initiate some­thing new for example by making requests or introducing new topics. The prosodic analysis shows that the majority of free NPs show clear prosodic boundaries, marked for example by speaker change, coherent intonation contour, pause or pitch reset.