6.6 Historical Evidence 1796.6 Historical Evidence for the Rise of I/ Y ou Admit and Admittedly
The verb admit was borrowed from Anglo- Norman admettre , admitter , amitter
(from Latin admittere ) (see OED, s.v. admit , v.). Based on the Latin root mittere
‘to send,’ admit belongs to one of the four sources for speech act verbs iden-
tifi ed by Traugott ( 1991 ), namely, dynamic locative verbs, or ‘motion through
space’ (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 202). The original meaning of admit is ‘to
allow to enter, receive, accept’; it could also be used in a fi gurative sense ‘to
agree or consent’ or ‘to admit (sth.) to be true or valid.’ Admit thus shows a
semantic change from non- speech- oriented to speech- oriented meaning and
from nonsubjective to subjective meaning (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 203).
However, as the meaning ‘to acknowledge (as true)’ is found already in post-
classical Latin sources (see OED: s.v. admit , v.), it would appear that both the
literal and speech act meanings were available from its earliest appearance in
Middle English (see MED: s.v. admitten (v.), defs. 1 and 3).
The following sections examine the use of admit as a performative verb,
the development of the comment clauses I/ you (modal) admit , and the rise
of the related disjunct adverbial admittedly. The postulated developments and
synchronic correspondences described above ( Sections 6.4 and 6.5.1 – 2 ) are
examined critically vis- à- vis the diachronic data. Because admit is a relatively
low- frequency item, I have used a large variety of historical sources. In ad dition
to the quotation databases of the OED and MED, I examined a number of
Chadwyck- Healey text collections ( English drama [ED], Eighteenth- century
fi ction [ECF], EEBO), UofV, HC, CED, Lampeter, CLMET3.0, COHA, and
TIME.^12
6.6.1 Rise of Performative I Admit and You Admit
Examples of admit followed by a fi nite clause complement in Middle English
are extremely rare (8a), with NP or NP + infi nitive complements being regu-
lar.^13 Admit occurs frequently in the passive (8b). Only two examples with a
fi rst- person subject and several with a second- person subject (8c– d) occur in
the MED database, with NP complements, and the meaning ‘allow to enter’ or
‘accept as true.’
(8) a. If eny man aske whi y wole not admytte ... þat all menal moral vertues ...
be in þe iiije table oonli ... (c1454 Pecock, The follower to The Donet (Roy
17.D.9) 200/ 17 [MED])
‘if any man asks why I will not admit ... that all ancillary moral virtues ... are
in the fourth table only ...’
12 Google Books was used in several cases to supplement the corpora.
13 The OED (s.v. admit, v., def. 2d) lists the fi rst example with a clausal complement as dating
from 1529.