The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development by Laurel J. Brinton

This book is about the historical development in English of comment clauses. The author defines comment clauses as pragmatic markers that are parenthetical and that comment on the clause to which they are attached in the sense of expressing speaker attitude or stance. A pragmatic marker is “a phonologically short item that is not semantically connected to the rest of the clause but serves pragmatic or procedural purposes” (p. 1). Many pragmatic markers are single words, like well, okay, and now, and are often called discourse markers (e.g. Schiffrin 1987) or discourse particles. Comment clauses are clausal in nature, and have been much less studied. Chapter 1 situates comment clauses within the larger categories of sentence adverbial, disjunct and parenthetical, and argues that comment clauses should be understood as pragmatic markers. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the syntactic and semantic development of comment clauses and other pragmatic markers historically, focusing especially on controversial aspects of the former. Brinton argues that comment clauses, like pragmatic markers in general, follow the clines of Traugott and Dasher (2002):