53By indicating shared familiarity, it creates solidarity between the poet or a
character and his or her audience. The use of hwæt serves to establish a good
relationship between speaker and addressee: With deference and respect, it
establishes the credibility of the speaker or narrator as conveyer of information,
and the status of the addressee or audience as recipient of that information.
Hwæt also invokes a favorable reception for the information which follows.
Hwæt solicits special cooperation from the audience in two instances: when it
is used in its attention- getting function as the fi rst word of a poem, and when it
is used to request the audience’s sanction for the poet to continue his narrative
(as in 3).^12
Hwæt never precedes clauses expressing mainline events of the narrative in
Old English, but always precedes those containing explanatory material neces-
sary for understanding the following discourse. Thus, its function is strongly
evaluative: It comments upon the narrative.^13 The commentary may be pro-
vided by the poet (as in 1 and 3) or by a character within the story (as in 2, 4, 5,
and 6). Not only does hwæt provide evaluation; it also serves as what Enkvist
( 1986 : 304, 306) calls a “foregrounding ‘dramatizer’.” Because it occurs with
material which is normally backgrounded, it brings this material forward and
calls attention to its relevance in the text. In a sense, then, it foregrounds the
material.
Hwæt in Old English is similar to you know in Modern English in almost all
respects: It indicates knowledge shared by speaker and addressee or common
to all; it presents new information as if it were old; it establishes either inti-
macy or distance between speaker and addressee; it solicits a favorable recep-
tion for the following information; it is an attention- getting device; it provides
evaluation of the narrative point; and it makes explanatory material salient.
2.3.2.3 Evidential Implications of Hwæt. You know is among a set of
pragmatic markers, including I know , I guess , and I think (see Section 5.2.3 ),
which are understood as expressing evidential meaning. That is, they refer
to “the kinds of evidence a person has for making factual claims” (Anderson
1986 : 273– 274); they denote the “information source,” and serve as “linguis-
tic means of indicating how the speaker obtained the information on which
s/ he bases an assertion” (Willett 1988 : 55– 57). In the case of you know – as an
indicator of common knowledge – the information source is “indirect,” that is,
12 This same function of evoking audience involvement has been attributed to the interjections of
Old and Middle English (Taavitsainen 1995a : 463, 1995b : 205; Hiltunen 2006 : 110).
13 This function is consistent with the more predominantly verb- fi nal word order of hwæt clauses
(see Cichosz forthc.). She also remarks that the relatively lower percentage of verb- fi nal
clauses with hwæt þa than with hwæt clauses is likely related to the function of the former in
denoting mainline events (see below).
2.3 Exclamatory Hwæt in Verse