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6 I/ Y ou Admit and Admittedly
6.1 Introduction
Admit is a “relatively common” speech act verb, occurring with a that - clause
complement and optional to - phrase, expressing the content and recipient of
some act of communication (Biber et al. 1999 : 663; Huddleston and Pullum
2002 : 860, 959; OED: s.v. admit , v., def. 2d). Admit is generally seen as non-
factive, that is, as not presupposing the content of the following that - clause^1
(Hooper 1975 : 93):
(1) a. I admit that I did this, mea culpa, let me try to help fi gure this out. (2009
CBS FacNat [COCA])
b. I admit I’ve lied to you before, but I ain’t lying now. (2010 Read [COCA])
c. I admit to you this depressed me. (1993 Ind Linbaugh [COCA])
Evidence in COCA shows that the optional to - phrase is very rare, and that that
is omitted in the majority of cases.^2
First- and second- person constructions with admit ( I/ you [modal] admit )
often function as parenthetical disjuncts, or comment clauses :
(2) a. Having to mix a new batch of this laundry formula from time to time is, I
admit , a bit inconvenient (1990 Mother Earth News [COCA])
b. My heart is racing, alert to danger and also, I have to admit , an inexplicable
excitement (2000 Michigan Quarterly Review [COCA])
c. There is currently a Nintendo ban on school nights, which, I must admit , was
not arrived at by consensus (2000 Todays Parent [COCA])
1 Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1008) argue that admit – like confess , regret , or resent – presup-
poses its complement but does not entail it.
2 A search of COCA on March 20, 2016 produced 428 examples of Pronoun + admit + Pronoun
- verb ([p] admit [p] [v]) compared with 152 examples of Pronoun + admit + that +
Pronoun + verb ([p] admit that [p] [v]), i.e., 73.8% of the time without that and 26.2% of
the time with that. When admit is followed by to , it occurs with a gerund (106 examples) rather
than an infi nitive (1 example). Use of to + NP to indicate the recipient of the act of admitting is
rare; a search of COCA using the search string I|you admit to [p*] yielded only 22 examples (of
you , myself , yourself , yourselves , them , me ).