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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 165–184

Chapter 8
‘I think’

An enunciative and corpus-based perspective

| Université d’Avignon

This chapter focuses on the sequence ‘I think’ as a discourse marker, used in evidential or epistemic contexts. ‘I think’ is seen to assume a variety of different values, which Kaltenböck (2010), among others, identifies as “shielding”, “approximator”, “structural” or “booster” functions. I hypothesise that ‘I think’ is not inherently ambiguous, but that different values reflect specific configurations, which depend on identifiable contextual features. The present study explores this hypothesis, first with a corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities of the sequence, which reveals a number of characteristic environments. Secondly, I elaborate an enunciative description of ‘I think’ in terms of a basic schematic form, which undergoes certain controlled and calculable deformations to generate local “shapes” (Culioli 1990). I conclude that ‘I think’ in itself expresses neither evidentiality nor epistemic modality, but that these result from specific contextual configurations.

Keywords: evidentiality, epistemic modality, Theory of Enunciative Operations, schematic form, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1Where does ‘I think’ come from?
    • 2.2What does ‘I think’ mean?
    • 2.3How are multiple meanings derived?
  • 3.Corpus-based investigation of collocational affinities
    • 3.1 General considerations
    • 3.2Significant n-grams featuring ‘I think’
    • 3.3N-grams with cluster-initial ‘I think’
    • 3.4N-grams with final ‘I think’
  • 4. Modelisation within an enunciative perspective
    • 4.1The schematic form
    • 4.2 Knowing, believing, thinking
    • 4.3The position of ‘I think’
    • 4.4Configurations with initial ‘I think’
    • 4.5Configurations with final ‘I think’
    • 4.6 Configurations with medial ‘I think’
    • 4.7Summary
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.08ran
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