158 Epistemic Parentheticals
b. For wel I woot Ø thy pacience is gon. (1387– 1400 Chaucer, CT D.WB 839)
‘For well I know your patience is gone’
c. That Grekis ben of heigh condicioun/ I woot ek wel ” (1380– 86 Chaucer, TC
V 967– 68)
‘That Greeks are of high character I know also well’
d. “I have no cause, I woot wel , for to sore ...” (1380– 86 Chaucer, TC I 670)
‘I have no cause, I know well, to soar ...’
Examination of a corpus of Chaucerian English (consisting of CT and TC )
provides rather mixed results concerning the presence or absence of that and
person of the subject with know - verbs. Table 5.5 contains the personal con-
structions and Table 5.6 the impersonal constructions. Each table shows the
number of times the particular verb occurs parenthetically in the fi rst person
(medially or fi nally only), the number of times it occurs with a fi rst- , second- ,
or third- person subject or oblique pronoun followed by a bare sentential com-
plement (Ø S), and the number of times it occurs with a fi rst- , second- , or third-
person subject or oblique pronoun followed by a that- sentential complement
( that S); additionally, Table (5.6 ) shows the number of instances in which the
Table 5.5 Personal know - verbs in Chaucer
Ø S that SVerb Parenthetical 1st 2nd a 3rd 1st 2nd 3rd
believe 1 0 0 0 2 0 1
deem 3 1 1 1 5 3 5
doubt 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
guess 33 (34) b 1 (0) 0 0 3 0 1
know 4 1 0 0 9 18 10
leve 5 0 0 0 1 0 0
suppose 6 0 0 0 3 1 0
think 1 1 1 3 3 3 11
trow 15 (20) 31 (26) 0 0 12 1 3
understand 4 0 4 0 3 30 8
undertake 11 0 0 0 0 0 0
wene 2 1 2 1 4 5 14
woot 17 (32) 39 (24) 16 10 8 18 8
Total 103(125) 75 (54) 24 15 53 79 61
a. Included with second- person subjects are imperative uses of the verbs.
b. I have followed Thompson and Mulac’s method of categorization in excluding all subject– verb
sequences in initial position from the category of parenthetical, placing them instead in the matrix
Ø S category. Numbers in parentheses indicate how the results would differ if the editor’s punctu-
ation of certain initial sequences as parenthetical – i.e., with a following comma – were accepted.
Source: adapted from Laurel J. Brinton, Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and
discourse functions. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, p. 248; with permission.