220 Forms of Say
I only say is used to undercut the presumed threat to the addressee’s negative
face by the command “take care.” The speaker notes that this is not a “threat”
but only a statement (“saying”).
However, it would seem that the full development of this form depends on
two coinciding factors: the rise of adverbial just and the subjective function of
the progressive. Nevalainen ( 1991 : 151– 152) sees the “exclusive meaning” of
just ‘no more than, only’ – a meaning arising out of the “particularizer” mean-
ing ‘exactly, precisely’ – as occurring for the fi rst time in the late seventeenth
century but remaining rare. However, “once established, the exclusive use of
just spreads quite rapidly in LModE” and in the late nineteenth century “it has
reached the relative frequency of such other, well- established exclusives as sim-
ply and merely” (1991: 153). In COHA, we see an almost fourfold rise in the
frequency of adverbial just between 1810 and 1910, with a bump in frequency in
1910 (compared to 1900 and 1920),^30 that is, during the period we assume that
I’m just saying developed. The semantics of just – more so than those of the other
exclusives – are suited to the downtoning and politeness meaning expressed by
I’m just saying. According to the OED (s.v. just , adv., defs. 6a and 6c), just can
be used in a weakened sense to mean ‘neither more nor less than, no other than,
simply, merely’ and “to weaken the force of the action expressed by the verb and
so to represent it as unimportant.” Nevalainen also points out that the use of just
can be related to negative politeness; for example, in I’ll just say < he’s not easy
to get on with >, just serves as a hedge on the maxim of quantity because not as
much information, or not as precise information, is being provided as might be
expected. Contrasting only , merely , and just in her Natural Semantics frame-
work, Wierzbicka ( 1986 ) says that although all of them have the meaning ‘it is
not more than X’ and ‘one could think that it would be more than that,’^31 only
is neutral, but merely has an added ‘depreciative’ meaning (‘it is not much, it is
not something special’) whereas just has a mildly positive meaning (reassuring,
defensive, apologetic) with the sense ‘X is a good word to say about it.’ Thus,
in It just happened like that, just implies that it is nothing more than a ‘hap-
pening’ (it was not pre- planned) and happened is the right word to use under
the circumstances. Likewise, we might interpret I’m just saying as meaning that
one is doing nothing more than ‘saying’ (it is not a criticism, a rebuke, etc.) and
thus saying is the right word to use. I’m merely saying would have the effect of
undercutting the importance of what one is saying, whereas one wants to lessen
30 Search string: just .[r*] (August 18, 2015).
31 The notion of “unmet expectations” has also been used to explain the meaning of exclusives,
namely, that they express a suffi cient condition for rejecting an expectation raised by a prior
utterance (see Nevalainen 1991 : 79– 81). Thus, in the case of an utterance such as That wasn’t
a wise choice. I’m just saying , “That wasn’t a wise choice” expresses the expectation that one
could have made a better choice. But “I’m just saying” rejects this expectation.