This article is a study of a grammatical construction consisting of a content word or a semantically heavy phrase (X), followed first by a pronoun (P) and then a finite form of the verb kalla ‘call’ (K). There may also be a som ‘as’ between X and P. The component PK, with or without a subordinator, is interpreted as a comparative clause lacking the obligatory object of the corresponding standard Swedish construction (X (som) de/man kallade det ‘X (as) they/one called it’). The main data studied are occurrences of the construction in old dialect recordings. In addition, a number of instances found in dialect dictionaries and in written Swedish are analysed.
The analysis shows that XPK usually forms a single prosodic unit. This is an important reason for regarding the expression as a distinct grammatical construction. In the dialects focused on here, XPK is a routinised utterance format, a semi-lexicalised phrase.
Pragmatically, the construction involves PK being tagged onto words or expressions that are considered noteworthy, for example because they are hard to understand or dialectal. According to the author, the ‘tag’ serves to underline that there is something remarkable about them.
The construction appears to be typical of colloquial, informal styles. It is considerably more common in spoken than in written usage, and presumably also more frequent in traditional dialects than in varieties closer to standard Swedish.