Between commitment and certainty
A cognitive semantic approach to an I promise construction in English
Iksoo Kwon | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
In accord with Verhagen’s (1996) insights regarding epistemic uses of
the predicator promise (e.g., Tomorrow promises to be a fine day), this
paper identifies another type of these epistemic uses. It focuses on constructional cues in complex-clause utterances of the form
I promise X: whether or not the subject of the embedded clause X is congruent with ‘I’ in the main clause and
whether the tense of X is past or non-past. It investigates how it is used epistemically, especially in its colloquial uses; how
the constructional cues (the kind of subject and the tense information) influence its construal; and how the different conceptual
structures underlying the construals of the commissive and the epistemic modal senses of the construction can be modeled within
Mental-spaces theory. It also discusses that the conceptual structures may be differently reified cross-linguistically briefing on
the Korean constructs yaksokha- ‘(I) promise’ and cangtamha- ‘(I) assure’.
Keywords: the I promise construction, epistemic modal meaning, commissive speech-act, Mental Spaces Theory, English, Korean
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Preliminaries
- 2.1On the predicator promise
- 2.2Viewpoints and mental spaces
- 3.The I promise construction: Data and types
- 3.1When the embedded subject is a first person
- 3.2When the embedded subject is not a first person
- 4.Modeling conceptual structures behind construals
- 4.1The construal of the speaker’s commitment
- 4.2The construal of the speaker’s epistemic stance
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1Beyond the numbers: The conceptual relationship between commitment and certainty
- 5.2Cross-linguistic outlook: Equivalents in Korean
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Glossing abbreviations
-
References
Published online: 28 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00076.kwo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00076.kwo
References
Austin, J. L.
(1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cutrer, M. L.
(1994) Time and Tense in Narrative and in Everyday Language. Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, San Diego.
Dancygier, B. & Sweetser, E.
(1997)
Then in conditionals. Cognitive Linguistics, 8(2), 1–28. 
(2000) Constructions with if, since, and because: Causality, epistemic stance, and
clause order. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & B. Kortmann (Eds.), Cause, concession, contrast: Cognitive and discourse perspectives (pp. 111–142). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dancygier, B., & Sweetser, E.
(2005) Mental spaces in grammar: Conditional constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dowty, D. R.
(1985) On recent analyses of the semantics of control. Linguistics and Philosophy, 81, 291–331.
Fauconnier, G.
(1994) Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1997) Mappings in thought and language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fillmore, C. J., Lee-Goldman, R., & Rhodes, R.
(2012) The FrameNet constructicon. In I. A. Sag & H. C. Boas (Eds.). Sign-based Construction Grammar (pp. 313–363). Stanford: CSLI.
Goldberg, A. E.
(1995) Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(2006) Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kwon, I.
(2012) The Korean evidential marker -te revisited: Its semantic constraints and distancing effects in
Mental spaces theory. Constructions and Frames, 4(2), 152–185.
Langacker, R. W.
(1987) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume I: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
(1990) Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics, 1(1), 5–38.
(1991) Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Larson, R. K.
(1991) Promise and the theory of control. Linguistic Inquiry, 22(1), 103–139
Lyons, J.
(1981) Language and linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J., & Galera, A.
(2014) Cognitive modeling: A linguistic perspective. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sanders, T., Sanders, J., & Sweetser, E.
(2009) Causality, cognition and communication: A mental space analysis of subjectivity in causal
connectives. In T. Sanders & E. Sweetser (Eds.), Causal categories in discourse and cognition (pp. 19–60). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
(2012) Responsible subjects and discourse causality: How mental spaces and perspective help identifying subjectivity in
Dutch backward causal connectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(2), 191–213.
Searle, J. R.
(1989) How performatives work. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12(5), 535–558.
Sweetser, E.
(2000) Blended spaces and performativity. Cognitive Linguistics, 11(3), 305–333.
Traugott, E. C.
(1993) The conflict promises/threatens to escalate into war. In Proceedings of the 19th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 19 (pp. 348–358).
(1996) Subjectification and the development of epistemic meaning: The case of promise and
threaten
. In T. Swan & O. J. Westvik (Eds.), Modality in Germanic languages: Historical and comparative perspectives (pp. 185–210). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Verhagen, A.
(1996) Sequential conceptualization and linear order. In E. H. Casad (Ed.), Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The expansion of a new paradigm in linguistics (pp. 793–817). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
(2000) “The girl that promised to become something”: An exploration into diachronic subjectification in
Dutch. In T. F. Shannon & J. P. Snapper (Eds.), The Berkeley conference on Dutch linguistics 1997 (pp. 197–208). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.