RT Journal Article
T1 The rise and development of parenthetical needless to say: An assumed evidential strategy
A1 Blanco Suárez, Zeltia
A1 Serrano Losada, Mario
K1 Needless to say
K1 Parenthetical
K1 Assumed evidentiality
K1 (Inter)subjectification
K1 Grammaticalization
AB The article traces the diachronic development of the assumed evidential needlessto say. This parenthetical expression allows the speaker to make certain assertionsregarding the obviousness of what s/he is about to say, thus serving as anevidential strategy that marks the information conveyed as being based oninference and/or assumed or general knowledge. Parenthetical needless to say hasits roots in the Early Modern English needless to-INF construction (meaning ‘it isunnecessary to do something’), which originally licensed a wide range ofinfinitives. Over the course of time, however, it became restricted to uses withutterance verbs, eventually giving rise to the grammaticalized evidentialexpression needless to say. In fact, it is only in Late Modern English that theevidential pragmatic inferences become conventionalized and that the firstparenthetical uses of the construction are attested. In Present-day English,parenthetical needless to say occurs primarily at the left periphery with forwardscope
PB John Benjamins Publishing
YR 2017
FD 2017
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/31780
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/31780
LA eng
NO Zeltia Suárez-Blanco & Mario Serrano Losada. 2017. Rise and development of parenthetical needless to say: An assumed evidential strategy. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7(1/2): 134-159
DS Minerva
RD 30 abr 2026