294 Concluding Remarks: Pathways of Change
comment clauses that/ this (having been/ being) said , and having said that/ this.
Leaving aside the question of whether they ultimately derive (syntactically)
from full fi nite clauses, the chapter examines the intuitively plausible sugges-
tion that the full form this/ that having been said is the source of the “reduced”
forms that/ this being said and that/ this said , a direction of change which might
be assumed by a theory of grammaticalization. The historical study does not
confi rm this hypothesis of long form > short form. The most complete form –
that/ this having been said – is in fact a very late development, and still very
uncommon, thus clearly not the source of the shorter forms. While the shortest
form that/ this said is undisputedly the most common of the variants in Present-
day English, the historical data concerning its development vis- à- vis that/ this
being said and having been said are somewhat less clear, though they point to
the three forms arising roughly contemporaneously, with that/ this said per-
haps the fi rst of the three to appear. The infl uence of Latin his dictis , which is
translated by all three forms in Early Modern English, may serve to complicate
the picture.
10.4 The Rise of Disjunct Adverbials
A topic touched on in two cases in this work is the rise of disjunct adverbials
(which bear strong similarities to pragmatic markers). As discussed in Section
6.5.2, it has been proposed that there are two possible courses of develop-
ment for disjunct adverbials. One line of development is from manner/ degree
adverb (adjunct) > disjunct adverbial. The changes involved here are similar to
what we see in the development of pragmatic markers, including scope expan-
sion (from word modifying to sentence modifying), syntactic shift to (disjunct)
initial position, increased subjectivity and speaker focus and reference to the
discourse context (cf. Traugott 1995a on the development of pragmatic mark-
ers). The other line of development suggests that disjunct adverbials arise out
of a separate, higher structure It/ that be Adj/ Part that. As noted by Fischer
( 2007a , 2007b ), the form that will become a wide- scope disjunct adverbial
must originally occur in a separate predication (a preposition, a reduced clause
or a predicate clause followed by a that - complement clause). This separate
predication then undergoes ellipsis to create the disjunct adverbial, e.g., þæt
is sarlic þætte S ‘it is sad that S’ > sarlice S ‘sadly S,’ although the exact syn-
tactic mechanism for the change from It/ that be Adj/ Part that > Adv (disjunct)
remains to be explained, involving clause reduction or “adverbialization” of
an entire clause. We see here parallels to the matrix clause hypothesis , with a
reversal in syntactic hierarchy in which the subordinate S becomes the main
clause and the originally higher S is reduced to a disjunct adverbial.
Chapter 6 (see Sections 6.6.4 and 6.7 ) looks at the origin and development
of admittedly. Unlike most epistemic adverbs, admittedly does not occur as a