1716.2.3 I/ You Admit as a Comment Clause
In addition to its performative use, I/ you admit can occur parenthetically (see
examples 2 and 3). Urmson ( 1952 ) includes admit among what he calls “par-
enthetical verbs” that serve to “prime the hearer to see the emotional signifi -
cance, the logical relevance, and the reliability of our statements” (1952: 484).
Specifi cally, he notes that when one says I admit , “one is not reporting the
occurrence of a bit of admitting, whatever that may be supposed to be” but is
signaling “how the statement is to be taken as fi tting logically into the discus-
sion” (1952: 485). Admit has thus lost its performative or speech act meaning.
What admit has acquired in its place is modal meaning. For this reason, many of
Urmson ’s fi rst- person “parenthetical verbs” have subsequently come to be known
as “epistemic parentheticals ” (Thompson and Mulac 1991 ). They belong within
the larger class of “comment clauses ” (Quirk et al. 1985 : 1112ff.; cf. Brinton
2008 ), which are clausal parentheticals that function either as content disjuncts
expressing “the speakers’ comments on the content of the matrix clause” or as
style disjuncts conveying “the speakers’ views on the way they are speaking”
(1112). Comment clauses with admit serve as content disjuncts and belong to
Quirk et al.’s “type (i)” comment clauses, which are like the matrix clause of a
main clause. Quirk et al. identify both fi rst- and second- person comment clauses
with admit (1985: 1114– 1115), explaining their meaning as follows:
(a) I (must) admit is used to express speaker certainty; it also conveys conces-
sive force, and
(b) You must admit is used to claim the hearer’s attention and/ or agreement.
The certainty and concessive meanings arise out of the speech act meaning,
where admit is understood as expressing not only the meaning ‘acknowledge
as true’ but also the meaning of allowing or conceding an adversary’s point of
view (see Section 6.2.1 )
6.2.4 Corpus Findings
The frequency and distribution of I/ you (modal) admit in corpora of Present-
day English – the British national corpus (BYU- BNC) and the Corpus of con-
temporary American English (COCA) – are presented in Tables 6.1 – 6.3.
As shown in Table 6.1 , in the majority of instances, admit occurs with a
modal or semi- modal (50%– 74% of the time). In the fi rst person, British
English strongly prefers must (67%), while American English favors have to
(47%), but less strongly. In the second person, both dialects prefer have to
(41% in British English; 67% in American English).^5 Will forms a distant third
5 The preference for have to over must in North American English (especially Canadian English )
is well known (see, e.g., Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007 ); on the loss of must generally in con-
temporary English, see Mair ( 2006 : 100– 108).
6.2 Admit in Present-Day English