1756.4 Synchronic Correspondences
Looking at corpus frequencies (see Table 6.4 ), we see that admittedly is
much more common in British English than in American English. In their
study of speech act adverbs in ICE- GB, Simon- Vandenbergen and Aijmer
found admittedly to be of low frequency because it is “stylistically marked”
for the formal register and more frequent in writing than in speech (2007: 81,
192, 197). Confi rming their fi ndings, I found admittedly to be most frequent
in the Academic subcorpus in each corpus, 13.63 per million in the BYU-
BNC and 7.22 per million in COCA. It was also least common in the Spoken
subcorpus in COCA (2.34 per million) and in the Miscellaneous and Spoken
subcorpora in the BYU- BNC (4.90 and 5.32 per million, respectively). Swan
( 1988b : 469) suggests that the performative modal adverb class to which admit-
tedly belongs occurs only 37.5 percent in sentence- initial position. Table 6.4
shows admittedly being more common in medial position (59%– 77%) and rare
in fi nal position.
Examples of admittedly in Present- day English are given in (4):
(4) a. Admittedly the current burst of improvement dates back only to the
Renaissance, which was preceded by a dismal period of stagnation (1989
Dawkins, The selfi sh gene [BYU- BNC])
b. the honourable word “bound” should not be applied to a cased book, though
it is admittedly in general use (1986 Uden, Understanding book- collecting
[BYU- BNC])
c. Armscott Manor was vast and rambling, admittedly (1991 Ash, Love by
design [BYU- BNC])
6.4 Synchronic Correspondences
It is frequently pointed out that from a synchronic perspective, disjunct adver-
bials (Adv S) “correspond” syntactically to structures such as those given in
Table 6.4 Admittedly in the BYU- BNC and COCA aBYU- BNC COCA
Initial 282 (40%) 525 (22%)
Medial 408 (59%) 1811 (77%)
Final 6 (1%) 24 (1%)
Total 696 (100%) 2360 (100%)
Frequency per million 7.23 4.42
a. The search of the two corpora was undertaken March 20, 2016. Initial and medi al pos-
ition were determined by punctuation, searching for instances of admittedly either preceded
or followed by end punctuation (.?! : ;). All other instances were assumed to be medial.
Source: adapted from Laurel J. Brinton, “From performative to concessive disjunct: I/you
admit and admittedly ,” in Merja Kytö, John Scahill, and Harumi Tanabe (eds.), Language
change and variation from Old English to Late Modern English. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010,
p. 285; with permission.