Prosody and function of English comment clauses

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of 830 instances of spoken comment clauses (e.g. I think, I suppose) in the British component of the International Corpus of English and shows that their communicative functions depend to a large extent on prosodic realisation of the comment clause (CC). Four different prosodic patterns are identified, viz. left-bound, right-bound, left-right bound, and prosodic independence. It is shown that prosodic binding to the left or right, together with positioning in the host, can narrow the scope of CCs to phrasal rather than clausal constituents. Unlike clausal CCs, which function as epistemic shields (Prince et al. 1982), phrasal CCs typically have approximative function. On the other hand, prosodic integration (especially left-right binding) is linked to high-frequency CCs and semantic weakening to the extent that they are used mainly as pleonastic elements for the structuring of text. Prosodic independence, finally, may give the CC an assertive or boosting function. It is argued that the wide range of communicative uses is the result of an ongoing grammaticalisation (pragmaticalisation) process, which involves semantic bleaching and a development from epistemic shield to approximator and, finally, structural device.