Cover not available
Part of
Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 165–184

Chapter 8
‘I think’

An enunciative and corpus-based perspective

 | Université d’Avignon
This chapter focuses on the sequence ‘I think’ as a discourse marker, used in evidential or epistemic contexts. ‘I think’ is seen to assume a variety of different values, which Kaltenböck (2010), among others, identifies as “shielding”, “approximator”, “structural” or “booster” functions. I hypothesise that ‘I think’ is not inherently ambiguous, but that different values reflect specific configurations, which depend on identifiable contextual features. The present study explores this hypothesis, first with a corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities of the sequence, which reveals a number of characteristic environments. Secondly, I elaborate an enunciative description of ‘I think’ in terms of a basic schematic form, which undergoes certain controlled and calculable deformations to generate local “shapes” (Culioli 1990). I conclude that ‘I think’ in itself expresses neither evidentiality nor epistemic modality, but that these result from specific contextual configurations.
Keywords: evidentiality, epistemic modality, Theory of Enunciative Operations, schematic form, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Where does ‘I think’ come from?
    • 2.2What does ‘I think’ mean?
    • 2.3How are multiple meanings derived?
  • 3.Corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities
    • 3.1 General considerations
    • 3.2Significant n-grams featuring ‘I think’
    • 3.3N-grams with cluster-initial ‘I think’
    • 3.4N-grams with final ‘I think’
  • 4. Modelisation within an enunciative perspective
    • 4.1The schematic form
    • 4.2 Knowing, believing, thinking
    • 4.3The position of ‘I think’
    • 4.4Configurations with initial ‘I think’
    • 4.5Configurations with final ‘I think’
    • 4.6 Configurations with medial ‘I think’
    • 4.7Summary
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.08ran
References (27)
References
Aijmer, Karin. 1997. ‘I think’ – An English modal particle. In Modality in Germanic Languages, Toril Swan & Olaf J. Westvik (eds), 1–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions [Topics in English Linguistics 19]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. & Nichols, Johanna. 1986. Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Culioli, Antoine & Desclés, Jean-Pierre. 1981. Systèmes de représentations linguistiques et métalinguistiques. Les catégories grammaticales et le problème de la description de langues peu étudiées. ERA 642.Google Scholar
Culioli, Antoine. 1990. Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation, Vol. 1. Gap: Ophrys.Google Scholar
. 1999. Pour une linguistique de l’énonciation: Formalisation et opérations de repérage, Vol. 3. Gap: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Fletcher, William H. 2003. Phrases in English. <[URL]>
Hoey, Michael. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian, Evert, Stefan, Smith, Nicholas & Lee, David. 2008. Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb: A Practical Guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1990. Hedges and boosters in women’s and men’s speech. Language & Communication 10(3): 185–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2009a. English comment clauses: Position, prosody, and scope. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 34(1): 49–75.Google Scholar
. 2009b. Initial ‘I think’: main or comment clause? Discourse and Interaction 2(1): 49–70.Google Scholar
. 2010. Pragmatic functions of parenthetical ‘I think’. In New Approaches to Hedging, Wiltrud Mihatsch, Stefan Schneider & Gunther Kaltenböck (eds), 237–266. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2003. Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on ‘I think’ [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 115]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York NY: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Lohmann, Arne & Koops, Christian. 2016. Aspects of discourse marker sequencing: Empirical challenges and theoretical implications. In Outside the Clause. Form and Function of Extra-clausal Constituents [Studies in Language Companion Series 178], Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann (eds), 417–446. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Palander-Collin, M. 1999. Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: ‘I think’ and Methinks in Middle and Early Modern English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Ranger, Graham. 2018. Discourse Markers: An Enunciative Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ross, John R. 1973. Slifting. In The Formal Analysis of Natural Languages, Maurice Gross, Morris Halle & Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (eds), 133–172. The Hague: Mouton.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 2000. The functions of ‘I think’ in political discourse. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10(1): 41–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. & Mulac, Anthony. 1991. A quantitative perspective on the grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. 2: Types of Grammatical Marker [Typological Studies in Language Vol. 19(2)], Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds), 313–329. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Urmson, James Opie. 1952. Parenthetical verbs. Mind 61(244): 480–496. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Bogaert, Julie. 2010. A constructional taxonomy of ‘I think’ and related expressions: accounting for the variability of complement-taking mental predicates. English Language and Linguistics 14(3): 399–427. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. ‘I think’ and other complement-taking mental predicates: a case of and for constructional grammaticalization. Linguistics 49(2): 295–332.Google Scholar
Ziv, Yael. 2002. This, I believe, is a processing instruction: Discourse linking via parentheticals. In Proceedings of Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics 18, Yehuda N. Falk (ed.). <[URL]>