5.7 Conclusion 167be hard to quantify – and on the fact that epistemic parentheticals are by nature
subjective and hence do not undergo subjectifi cation (2007b: 308).
5.7 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that I gesse , I trowe , I woot , and similar know -
parentheticals are already fully developed as “epistemic, evaluative, or evi-
dential stance” (Thompson 2002 ) pragmatic markers in Middle English.
A detailed examination of their use in two Chaucerian texts ( The Canterbury
tales and Troilus and Criseyde ) shows that they occur most frequently in evalu-
ative contexts, but serve somewhat different pragmatic functions in discourse
(dialogue) and in narration. Their use in dialogue mimics their use in natu-
ral oral discourse: They are subjectively epistemic and serve the interpersonal
uses of involvement and politeness. In narrative, they occur in more restricted
contexts, such as metacomments or inexact expressions of temporal and spatial
measurement; they assist the narrator or speaker in establishing intimacy with
the audience, involving the audience in the construction of the discourse, and
achieving a favorable reception from the audience.
The existence of fi rst- person parentheticals cannot be established in Old
English, which has only limited marking of epistemicity. Nor do the paren-
theticals derive from matrix clauses followed by nominal that - complements
(e.g., I believe that the world is fl at ) – the so- called matrix clause hypothesis
which has been postulated to account for I think/ guess in Present- day English –
by a reversal of the relationship of subordination, deletion of that , and extra-
position or interposition of the original matrix clause (to give, e.g., The world
is fl at, I believe or The world is, I believe, fl at ). Rather, the source of the ME
parentheticals in Old English is an adverbial clause with þæs (þe) and swa ‘so,
as’ referring anaphorically to the adjoined clause (e.g., The world is fl at, as
I believe ), with increasing independence of I believe concomitant with loss of
the adverbial complementizer. Semantically, the epistemic meaning of these
parentheticals derives from an original evidential meaning, by the convention-
alizing of the inference of uncertainty attached to the mental mode of know-
ing/ source of information. Finally, the chapter argues that these parentheticals
should be understood as arising via grammaticalization, not lexicalization.