234 Two Politeness Parentheticals
one says so, the monkeyfl ower is a lovely specimen and the outfi t is fetching
(although their description as “lovely” or “fetching” depends on the subjective
opinion of the speaker). If I may/ might say so is an example of what Quirk et al.
describe as an “indirect condition.” An indirect condition is “dependent on the
implicit speech act of the utterance” (1985: 1089, 1095), thus something like:
That’s a fetching outfi t, if I might say so = ‘ I’m saying to you , if
I may, that that’s a fetching outfi t’Syntactically, an indirect conditional is a “style disjunct,” not an adjunct (1089,
1095) and thus “implicitly refer[s] to the circumstances of the speech act”
(1072). Quirk et al. identify a number of functions of indirect conditions (1095–
1096), including politeness , metalinguistic, and epistemic functions. Citing if
I may say so as an example, they say that an indirect condition is a “conven-
tional expression of politeness which makes the speaker’s utterance seemingly
dependent on the permission of the hearer” (1095) “though the fulfi lment of
that condition is conventionally taken for granted” (1089). They also point to a
metalinguistic function of indirect conditions which suggests “that the wording
is not quite precise or that it should not be misunderstood in some sense not
intended by the speaker” (1095).^3 An indirect condition may also express the
speaker’s epistemic uncertainty about the hearer’s interpretation of the wording
All0.4510746 443590.4
0.35
0.3
0.25Frequency per million0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
Spoken Fiction Magazine Newspaper Academic
Figure 8.1 Distribution of if I may/ might say so by subcorpus in COCA
(Searched March 20, 2016.)3 See Brinton ( 2014a ) on the metalinguistic (and politeness) functions of if you choose/ like/ pre-
fer/ want/ wish and Brinton ( 2008 : 161– 172) on if you will.