Sentence-initial I think (that) and I believe (that)

Abstract

Sentence-initial pronoun-verb combinations such as I think, I believe are ambiguous between main clause use on the one hand and adverbial or discourse use on the other hand. We approach the topic from a prosodic perspective. Based on corpus data from spoken British English the prosodic patterns of sentence-initial I think and I believe are analysed and related to their interpretation in context. We show that these expressions may function as main clause (MC), comment clause (CC) or discourse markers (DM) and that the speaker's choice is reflected in the prosody. The key feature is prosodic prominence: MCs are reflected by accent placement on the pronoun, CCs by an accent on the verb, while DMs are unstressed.

The diachronic development of zero complementation: A multifactorial analysis of the that/zero alternation with think, suppose, and believe

“…Dehé and Wichmann (2010) argue that there are rhythmic factors constraining the presence or absence of that. They point out that the explicit use of that may be motivated by a desire to create a more regular stress pattern in which that provides an additional unstressed syllable.…”

“…An additional avenue for future research would be to look beyond familiar local conditioning factors that are of a strictly structural nature. Priming effects, as in Jaeger and Snider's (2008) study of the syntactic persistence of complementation patterns and prosodic information (Dehé and Wichmann 2010) could be incorporated into the logistic regression model. One drawback to the study of prosody and its effect on that/zero use from a diachronic point of view is the absence of audio recordings of older corpus data.…”

“…A further criticism regarding reanalysis concerns the necessity of that omission to the use of I think (and similar epistemic phrases) as discourse formulas. Both Kearns (2007a) and Dehé and Wichmann (2010) argue that complement-taking predicates followed by that, e.g., I think that, may also be analyzed as discourse formulas, the whole sequence having become routinized as a whole. In addition to providing prosodic evidence for this position, Dehé and Wichmann (2010: 65) remark that this view is supported by the historical origins of that as a demonstrative pronoun (see the discussion of Brinton 1996 andFischer 2007 earlier).…”

“I think” in political speech

“…Dehé (2014: 188). Dehé and Wichmann (2010a) note that I think occurring in the prehead functions as a discourse marker. It is noticeable however, that the prehead use of I think declines across the debates from 63 in debate 1 to 53 in debate 2 and to 24 in debate 3.…”

Pragmaticalisation du marqueur discursiftu vois. De la perception à l’évidence et de l’évidence au discours

“…Les unités linguistiques qui nous intéressent ont fait l'objet de nombreuses études et ont récemment été désignées, bien que de façon non strictement équivalente, entre autres par les termes français de propositions parenthétiques ou marqueurs discursifs propositionnels (Andersen, 1997(Andersen, , 2007, énoncés parenthétiques (Debaisieux, 2008), constructions à verbe recteur faible (Blanche-Benveniste & Willems, 2007 ;Gachet & Avanzi, 2009), ou par les termes anglais de (reduced) parenthetical clauses (Kaltenböck, 2005 ;Schneider, 2007), epistemic parentheticals (Dehé & Wichmann, 2009a ou comment clauses (Kaltenböck, 2007;Brinton, 2008).…”