5.6 Development 159impersonal verb occurs with no oblique pronoun (indicated by Ø), either par-
enthetically or followed by a complement clause.^28
The Middle English data do not show the clear correlation that Thompson
and Mulac found in Present- day English, although they are suggestive. Guess ,
suppose , trow , woot , and thynketh occur more often with fi rst- person subjects or
experiencers than with second- or third- person ones. Trow , woot , and thynketh
are frequently used as parentheticals; guess is almost exclusively parenthet-
ical. These fi ndings would seem to conform loosely to Thompson and Mulac ’s.
However, that - complements are more frequent than that - less complements in
the case of the most frequent parenthetical, guess , while that - less complements
are more common in the case of the next most frequent parentheticals, trow and
woot , and the two types of complements are equally common with thynketh.
Undertake , which is also common as a parenthetical, is never used as a main
verb. Guess , leve , and undertake seem to be most fully developed as parentheti-
cals by the Middle English period. The data on woot are confounded by the fact
that woot , as well as understand and know , is used quite often in the second
person in a variety of ‘you know’ parentheticals (29 times in my corpus).
In general, the rates of that - deletion continue to be quite low in Middle
English (Rissanen 1991 ). In a survey of a number of studies of that - deletion,
Torres Cacoullos and Walker ( 2009 ) fi nd the rate to range from slightly over
10 percent to only 40 percent in the period 1350– 1500.
Therefore, although the development that Thompson and Mulac ( 1991 )
suggest for Present- day English is intuitively appealing, there seems to
be fairly restricted quantitative evidence in Middle English for either high
rates of that- deletion or overwhelming use of these verbs in the fi rst person.
Perhaps more importantly, the fact that fi rst- person epistemic parentheticals
of the type found in Middle and Modern English do not occur in Old English
also argues against the historical validity of Thompson and Mulac ’s account.
28 I am ignoring cases in which these verbs are followed by interrogative clauses: 2 times follow-
ing doubt , 1 time following guess , 1 time following know , 1 time following leve , 1 time follow-
ing think , 1 time following trowe , 15 times following understand , and 32 times following woot.
Table 5.6 Impersonal know - verbs in Chaucer
Ø S that SVerb
Paren-
theticalØ Paren-
thetical1st 2nd 3rd Ø 1st 2nd 3rd Øseemeth 3 6 0 0 0 4 5 1 4 25
thynketh 11 (12) 1 7 (6) 1 3 0 8 1 3 0
Total 14 (15) 7 7 (6) 1 3 4 13 2 7 25
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.