This paper proposes a syntactic approach to the use and interpretation of the Finnish pronoun se 'it, s/he' in spoken texts. The analysis is concentrated on a particular context of use in which the host construction of the pronoun is an utterance that suspends another ongoing verbal construction, i.e. the pronoun points to a referent whose lexical description is unachieved in the context previous to its occurrences. Examples of this kind are different from a prototypical case of anaphora in which the pronoun is preceded by a full lexical antecedent. However, I will argue that the interpretation of the pronoun se 'it' takes place essentially inside the linguistic context, i.e. by establishing a connexion between its host constructions and the sequence suspended. In order to analyse this kind of use of the pronoun se, I take a viewpoint of production of verbal constructions in spoken discourse. My aim is to pay attention, on the one hand, to some characteristics of lexical naming processes and to show, on the other hand, that the pronoun se is an original referring expression: it can be used for picking out a referent with a minimum of descriptive content not only when lexical descriptions of the referent are already made, but also when they are still in progress or still being negotiated, and even when they are momentary unavailable.
