132 Epistemic Parentheticals
singular subjects are common (28% of all subjects). Moreover, they are used most
frequently with verbs of cognition, with 86 percent of all fi rst- person present-
tense verbs of cognition consisting of the formulaic expressions I think , I (don’t)
know , and I guess (67). Past- tense I thought also occurs in signifi cant numbers.
These combinations of I with verbs of cognition are “not used to inform par-
ticipants of the speaker’s cognitive activities” (67), but are crucially expressing
epi stemicity and hence subjectivity: “For [fi rst- singular] utterances, subjectivity
often manifests epistemically” (115).
5.2.3 Evidential Meaning
Parentheticals such as I think / believe have also been described as being “eviden-
tial” (see Urmson 1952 : 485– 486; Chafe 1986 : 266; Biber and Finegan 1989 : 98,
119– 120; Chafe 1986 : 266). Evidentiality may be defi ned as follows (see also
Section 2.3.2.3 ).
the functional category that refers to the perceptual and/ or epistemological basis for making
a speech act. In traditional classifi cations, evidentiality is divided into direct and indirect
evidentiality. Direct evidentials are used when the speaker has witnessed the action while
indirect evidentials are used when the speaker has not witnessed the action personally but
has either deduced the action or has heard about it from others. When the action is deduced,
we are talking about inferentials; when information about the event is conveyed through
others, they are called hearsay markers, report(at)ives or quotatives. (Cornillie 2009 : 45)
Based on their lexical meanings, know - verbs would seem to qualify as eviden-
tial since they make reference to the cognitive bases used for making assertions.
They belong to the subcategory of evidentiality that Chung and Timberlake
( 1985 : 244) call mental “construct,” the source of knowledge being thought,
belief, or fantasy, to the category that Anderson ( 1986 : 274, 310) describes as
“reasoned expectation from logic and other facts” or “logical deduction – no
evidence,” or to the category that Willett ( 1988 : 57) calls “reasoning” (a divi-
sion of the category of the indirect information source called “inferring”).
First- person epistemic parentheticals meet three of the criteria of eviden-
tials recognized by Anderson ( 1986 : 274– 275). First, they “show the kind of
justifi cation for the factual claim” (in this case, ‘knowing,’ ‘believing,’ ‘guess-
ing,’ ‘supposing’). Second, they “are not themselves the main predication
of the clause, but are rather a specifi cation added to a factual claim ABOUT
SOMETHING ELSE”;^7 we saw above that fi rst- person epistemic parentheti-
cals do not denote an act of cognition but merely serve to mitigate or intensify
the utterance to which they are attached. Third, they are “free syntactic forms.”
However, Anderson ’s criterion that evidentials have evidential meaning “as
7 Boye and Harder ( 2009 ) make a similar argument, namely, that evidentials are coded as