Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: comment clauses, parentheticals, and pragmatic markers
- 2 Semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers
- 3 Processes of change
- 4 Comment clauses with say
- 5 I mean
- 6 Comment clauses with see
- 7 If you will and as it were
- 8 Comment clauses with look
- 9 What's more and what else
- 10 Epistemic/evidential parentheticals – I gather and I find
- 11 Concluding remarks
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
5 - I mean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: comment clauses, parentheticals, and pragmatic markers
- 2 Semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers
- 3 Processes of change
- 4 Comment clauses with say
- 5 I mean
- 6 Comment clauses with see
- 7 If you will and as it were
- 8 Comment clauses with look
- 9 What's more and what else
- 10 Epistemic/evidential parentheticals – I gather and I find
- 11 Concluding remarks
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
In Present-day English, clause-initial I mean followed by a declarative clause without that is ambiguously a matrix clause or a parenthetical (Biber et al. 1999:1076), as in:
As it was he sold the goddamned things at my racket club. I mean he was only a member because of my husband (1991 Cody, Backhand 105 [FLOB]).
According to Stenström, however, I mean is rarely a main clause and serves “almost exclusively” (85% of the time) as a parenthetical (1995:296, 297, 299). The description of parenthetical I mean in the OED as “a filler, with no explanatory force” (s.v. mean v. 1, def. II6e) betrays its status as a pragmatic marker, as do descriptions of it as a “fumble” (Edmondson 1981), a “pragmatic expression” (Erman 1986; 1987), a “discourse marker” (Schiffrin 1987), a “discourse particle” (Goldberg 1980), or a “comment clause” (Stenström 1995:291).
This chapter explores the semasiological and syntactic development of parenthetical I mean. In her study of I mean in Present-day English, Schiffrin (1987) points out that the development of the pragmatic functions of I mean seems fairly transparent, as they can be traced back to the two primary senses of mean, namely, ‘to intend to convey or indicate’ and ‘to have as an intention’: “the literal meaning of the expression ‘I mean,’” she says, “suggests that I mean marks a speaker's upcoming modification of the ideas or intentions of a prior utterance” (302, 317–318).
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- Information
- The Comment Clause in EnglishSyntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development, pp. 111 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008