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Part of
Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries
Edited by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325] 2021
► pp. 327–350

Chapter 12
The diachronic origin of English I mean and German ich meine

ORCID logo | University of Trier
ORCID logo | University of Hamburg
The pragmatic markers ich meine in German and I mean in English are similar, though not equivalent, in the main aspects of their meaning and function. Both have also been widely studied, yet research on German ich meine has focused on modern data and functions. From a diachronic perspective, we investigate whether the matrix clause function, as claimed in the literature for spoken modern German, is a likely origin of the pragmatic marker or whether, as in English, a derivation from I mean followed by a phrasal complement seems more likely. Furthermore, we assess how well the origins of the pragmatic functions of I mean can be sufficiently described as constructionalization rather than grammaticalization and what role the left periphery plays in this constructionalization process.
Keywords: diachronic linguistics, German, English, Construction Grammar
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.I mean and ich meine in modern English and German
    • 3.1I mean in modern English
    • 3.2Ich meine in modern written and spoken German
  • 4.The diachronic development of I mean and ich mein(e)
    • 4.1The development of the pragmatic marker I mean
    • 4.2The development of the pragmatic marker ich meine
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora and online dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.325.12kol
References (60)
Corpora and online dictionaries
BNC = British National Corpus, here: Sebastian Hoffmann and Stefan Evert. BNCweb (CQP-Edition; [URL])
Bosworth-Toller = Ondrej Tichy and Martin Rocek. 2019. Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. ([URL])
Cambridge Dictionary = Cambridge University Press 2020. ([URL])
COHA = Davies, Mark. 2010. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810–2009. ([URL])
DOEC = Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, compiled by Antonette diPaolo Healey with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang. (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project 2009).Google Scholar
DWDS = DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache) Kernkorpus 1900–1999 ([URL])
HiFoS = Database of the Research Unit “Historische formelhafte Sprache und Traditionen des Formulierens (HiFoS)/Diachronic Formulaic Language and Traditions of Communication.” ([URL])
Lexico = Oxford University Press 2020. Lexico. Powered by Oxford. ([URL])
MEG-C = Middle English Grammar Corpus, version 2011.1, compiled by Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, Simon Horobin, and Jeremy Smith, March 2011, University of Stavanger. ([URL])
OED = OED Online. Oxford University Press 2020. ([URL])
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2023. Die formale und funktionale Entwicklung vonbitte. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 51:1 ► pp. 152 ff. DOI logo

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