242 Two Politeness Parentheticals
In the parenthetical examples in (15), removal of for what it is worth does
not alter the meaning of the host sentence, which is complete in itself. The
prosodic independence of for what it’s worth is shown (inexactly) by comma
punctuation. Its “non- restrictive” meaning can be understood otherwise as its
pragmatic meaning (see Section 8.1 ) and is shown as well by its similarity to
indirect conditions. As noted above, for what it’s worth is syntactically mobile.
Only feature (e) does not seem to apply here as for what it’s worth is not
elliptical.
For what it’s worth in its parenthetical use resembles the indirect condi-
tionals discussed in 8.2.2 which are dependent upon an implicit speech act.
For example, the parenthetical use of the construction in (15b) might be par-
aphrased as follows, where “for what it is worth” relates to the understood
speech act of communication “I am telling you this” and not to “his daughter
sounds fairly reasonable”:
For what it’s worth, his daughter sounds fairly reasonable =
I am telling you this for what it is worth, his daughter sounds fairly
reasonable.Thus, for what it’s worth relates to the situation or context of discourse, not
to the adjoined clause and is “non- restrictive” in the sense of Kaltenböck
et al. ( 2011 ). It is likewise analogous to an insubordinated clause (see Section
8.2.2.2 ; also Section 4.4.1 ) in its independence and occasional occurrence as a
separate utterance:
(16) a. And I know that I can’t begin to fi ll the void that Greenlee left, but you have
a daughter in Paris. For what it ’ s worth. (2009 AMC [SOAP])
b. “Yes, we have a copy of that,” Charles said impatiently. “ For what it’s
worth. I didn’t expect he would bother to look further.” (1992 Michaels,
Vanish with the rose [COCA])
8.3.1.1 Frequency of For What It’s Worth in Present- Day English.
The overall frequency of for what it’s worth in contemporary English is low,
only 0.33 per million in COCA (see Figure 8.3 ). Its highest frequencies are in
Spoken, the most colloquial of the subcorpora. In contrast, the overall frequency
of for what it’s worth in the SOAP corpus is much higher, 7.14 instances per
million: There are 713 examples of for what it’s worth , 3 examples of for what
it is worth , and none of for what it may be worth. Presumably, the writers for the
soap operas perceived this form (implicitly) as a feature of colloquial English.
In a random sampling of 200 examples of for what it’s worth from the SOAP
corpus, there were no literal uses of this construction. A total of 195 of the
examples were parenthetical uses, 3 were complement uses (2 examples of