Article published in:
The Rise and Development of Evidential and Epistemic Markers
Edited by Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:1/2] 2017
► pp. 134–159

The rise and development of parenthetical needless to say

An assumed evidential strategy

| University of Cantabria
| University of Santiago de Compostela
The article traces the diachronic development of the assumed evidential needless to say. This parenthetical expression allows the speaker to make certain assertions regarding the obviousness of what s/he is about to say, thus serving as an evidential strategy that marks the information conveyed as being based on inference and/or assumed or general knowledge. Parenthetical needless to say has its roots in the Early Modern English needless to-inf construction (meaning ‘it is unnecessary to do something’), which originally licensed a wide range of infinitives. Over the course of time, however, it became restricted to uses with utterance verbs, eventually giving rise to the grammaticalized evidential expression needless to say. In fact, it is only in Late Modern English that the evidential pragmatic inferences become conventionalized and that the first parenthetical uses of the construction are attested. In Present-day English, parenthetical needless to say occurs primarily at the left periphery with forward scope.
Keywords: needless to say , parenthetical, assumed evidentiality, (inter)subjectification, grammaticalization
Published online: 23 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.06bla
Primary sources

Primary sources

BYU-BNC: Brigham Young University-British National Corpus (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press) compiled by Mark Davies 2004– Available online at http://​corpus​.byu​.edu​/bnc/.
CLMET: The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0
compiled by Hendrik De Smet, Hans Jürgen Dillerand, & Jukka Tyrkkö Available online at https://​perswww​.kuleuven​.be​/~u0044428/
EEBOCorp: Early English Books Online Corpus 1.0
compiled by Peter Petré 2013 Available online at https://​lirias​.kuleuven​.be​/handle​/123456789​/416330/.
HANSARD: The Hansard Corpus
1803–2005, compiled by Marc Alexander & Mark Davies 2015– Available online at http://​www​.hansard​-corpus​.org/.
FRANTEXT: Base textuelle FRANTEXT
ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine. Available online at http://​www​.frantext​.fr/.
MED: Middle English Dictionary
. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, et al. eds. 1952–2001 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Available online at http://​quod​.lib​.umich​.edu​/m​/med/.
OED: Oxford English Dictionary Online
Oxford University Press. Available online at http://​www​.oed​.com/.
TILG: Tesouro informatizado da lingua galega
Santamarina, Antón coord. Available online at http://​ilg​.usc​.es​/TILG/

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