250 Two Politeness Parentheticals
(24) a. Robin, you don’t need anyone. But for what it ’ s worth , I’m your friend.
(1969 Susann, Love machine [COHA])
b. But for what it ’ s worth , I think you’re wrong, Daniel. (2006 Fantasy &
Science Fiction [COCA])
Thus, the literal (and metaphorical) meaning of for what it is worth can be said
to be absent, and it is the subjective and intersubjective meaning which has
become the coded meaning.
8.4 Conclusion
The comment clauses if I may say so and for what it’s worth are used to preface
expressions of speaker opinion or suggestion and serve to mitigate the attack
on the hearer’s negative face. They serve hedging and politeness functions. For
what it’s worth has an additional pragmatic function in implying that what is
said will fail to satisfy the hearer in some way (e.g., it is said too late, it is too
little) or will not be believed by the speaker – a ‘below expectation’ reading.
While if I may say so is declining in contemporary English, for what it’s worth
would seem to be slowly increasing and is clearly recognized as a feature of
colloquial English. The decline in if I may say so is very likely connected to
the general loss of may and its restriction to epistemic meaning. Both construc-
tions are, or compare with, “indirect conditions,” which relate to an implied
speech act verb: “if I may, I will say/ tell you ...”; “For what is worth, I tell
you ....” In their syntactic independence from the neighboring clause, both
constructions also resemble insubordinated clauses. This chapter has explored
whether it is historically possible to reconstruct the implied speech act clauses,
as suggested both by synchronic approaches to indirect conditionals and by
theories of the origins of insubordinated clauses in full biclausal structures.
The attested evidence seems to point to a negative response in both cases.
Diachronically, if I may say so appears fully formed in the sixteenth century,
and biclausal forms with verbs of communication are rare. So too are biclausal
forms with for what it’s worth. Rather, there appear to be two sources for the
second parenthetical: constructions in which for what it’s worth serve as a
complement (the “take it for what it’s worth” construction) and constructions
in which it serves as an adjectival complement (the “my opinion, for what it’s
worth” construction). The latter lead to indeterminate structures which may be
interpreted as adjuncts with narrow scope or parentheticals with wide scope.
This is the “bridging context” (Evans and Wilkins 2000 : 550) necessary for
grammaticalization. Semantically, both if I may say so and for what it’s worth
undergo a loss of content meaning and a concomitant acquisition of procedural
and pragmatic meaning. In both cases we also see an increase in both subject-
ivity and intersubjectivity, with politeness and ‘below expectation’ meanings
becoming the conventional meaning.