PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF SPANISH

PARENTHETICAL VERBS*

Stefan Schneider
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria)

Abstract

I examine parenthetical verbs in corpora of contemporary spoken

Spanish and classify them, as outlined in Caffi (1999, 2001), according
to their pragmatic scope and function. In the corpora, there are some
very frequent parenthetical verbs expressing speaker commitment that
have not been considered by Urmson (1952) and other contributions on
the matter. Another issue I touch on is the relationship between
performative verbs and parenthetical verbs, i.e. the distinction between
illocutionary force indication and modalization of speaker commitment. I
show that only few performative verbs actually occur as parentheticals.
In this case their illocutionary force indicating function is weakened and
their modalizing function strengthened.

* I am grateful to Claudia Caffi, Henri-José Deulofeu, Bruce Fraser, and Muriel Warga
for their helpful reviews of earlier drafts of this paper. I like to thank Georg Marko for his
careful stylistic revision. I also like to thank the students of the Facultad de Filología of
the Universidad de Sevilla for their comments on the prosody of Spanish parenthetical
verbs. Any errors that remain are of course my own responsibility.
1. What are parenthetical verbs?
Expressions such as those boldfaced in the following examples are
neither main clauses nor subordinate clauses, but are inserted into or
adjoined at the end of the sentence in the way sentence adverbs are used:

(1) Inf. - […] Son creo los … los dos que más me gustan […]
(hcm.4.74)
‘They are, I believe, the two I like most’
(2) <H1> Tendrán ustedes, supongo, periodistas corriendo por ahí
ya, ¿no? (corec.bent027b)
‘You have, I suppose, already journalists running there, isn’t it?’
(3) I: […] 52 goles en contra, siete a favor, me parece. […]
(husnp.1.24)
‘52 goals in disadvantage, seven in favour, it seems to me’

Their position is free and there is no overt syntactic link between them
and the host sentence or parts of it; nevertheless they appear to be
implicitly connected to the sentence. Like adverbials, they are optional,
i.e. they can be added as well as dropped freely without endangering the
grammatical acceptability of the sentence. They also occur as main
clauses governing a declarative noun clause introduced by que ‘that’.
The most familiar name for these expressions is parenthetical verbs,
proposed by Urmson (1952):1

A verb which, in the first person present, can be […] followed by ‘that’
and an indicative clause, or else can be inserted at the middle or end of
the indicative sentence, is a parenthetical verb. (1952: 481)

1 Benveniste (1966 [1958]) calls them verbes d’opération, Bolinger (1968) postposed
main phrases, Hooper (1975) uses the term assertive predicates, Cornulier (1978) speaks
about incises progressives, Quirk, Greenbaum, et al. (1985: 1112ff.) and Biber,
Johansson, et al. (1999: 197) call them comment clauses, for Vigara Tauste (1992: 397ff.)
they are incisos de opinión.
Urmson’s understanding of parenthesis is an unusually broad one:
sentence-final verbs and even sentence-initial governing verbs are
included. Rather than to define their exact place in the sentence, he tried
to capture their pragmatic function, which, in his eyes, is the same in all
positions and is comparable to that of sentence adverbs. He therefore
frequently uses the expression parenthetical use when referring to this
specific function.
Since Urmson (1952), it has not been clear anymore if parenthesis is
a discourse-functional concept or just a notion referring to word order
and syntax. Although I focus on the group of parenthetical verbs as
originally defined by Urmson, I use parenthetical, very much like
incidental, only as syntactic term. My formal and semantic definition of
these verbs is both narrower and broader than Urmson’s. Sentence-initial
verbs are excluded, but non-epistemic verbs or verbs in forms other than
the first person singular of the present indicative are taken into account.
In what follows I am presenting the first results regarding spoken
Spanish of a research on Romance parenthetical verbs. I have carried out
two similar pilot studies on Italian parenthetical verbs (see Schneider
1997, 1999: 53-76).

2. The scopes of mitigating devices

Caffi (1999, 2001) has proposed a heuristically useful distinction for the
scope of mitigating devices. I have to mention in advance that in Caffi’s
framework the pragmatic notion mitigation assumes a broad sense,
unlike its original narrow sense initially proposed by Fraser (1980), 2
linked not only to face-threatening acts and politeness, but comprising all
macro- and micro-strategies by which the speaker tries to avoid the risks
arising during linguistic interaction. One of these risks may be, for
example, that the speaker is held responsible for what he or she is
asserting.

2 Fraser (1980), however, takes into account mitigating devices such as parenthetical
verbs.
 According to their scope, mitigating devices can be grouped into
three types. Extending Lakoff’s (1972) fortunate botanic metaphor, Caffi
(1999, 2001) calls them bushes, hedges, and shields. Bushes focus on the
propositional content, e.g. by minimizing or rendering less precise a
referent. In the following example taken from Caffi (1999: 892, 2001:
309) the Italian diminutive suffix -ino attached to un problema ‘a
problem’ mitigates the doctor’s diagnosis:

(4) D: ma quello è un problemino. – non è mica un problema grosso.

‘but that’s a problem+Dim. – it’s not a big problem’

The inventory of Italian devices that function as bushes comprises

diminutive suffixes (see Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994), as well as
expressions like un po’ ‘a bit’, una specie di ‘a kind of’, un certo ‘a
certain’. They operate, in Hare’s (1970) terms, on the phrastic.
Hedges center on the illocutionary force indication and/or on the
speaker’s commitment. Caffi (1999: 893, 2001: 279ff., 311) refers as
examples the Italian hedged performative (see Fraser 1975) direi che ‘I’d
say that’, the parenthetical mi sembra ‘it seems to me’, and the modal
adverb probabilmente ‘probably’:

(5) D: probabilmente è - dove c’è l’attaccapanni – probabilmente è

una conseguenza di un problema intestinale che è cominciato con
l’influenza eh.
‘probably it is – where the clothes-stand is – it is probably a
consequence of an intestinal problem: that began with the flu eh’

In commenting on Caffi writes:

Here the scope of the mitigation is (that aspect of the illocution which is)
the speaker’s epistemic commitment to the propositional content.
Probabilmente weakens the speaker’s degree of certainty about the
proposition […]. (Caffi 1999: 893)
The illocutionary-centered hedges operate, in Hare’s (1970) terms, on the
tropic and/or the neustic.
In shields the mitigating operation takes place by shifting the deictic
center of the utterance, e.g. by ascribing it to a source other than the
actual speaker (Caffi 1999: 896, 2001: 314f.):

(6) D: c’è un’iperplasia estrogenica – c’è scritto qui.

‘there’s an estrogenic hyperplasia – it is written here’

The deictic displacement may be due to a lexicalized expression as well

as to operations affecting syntax, as in passive transformations, and
morphology, as in the shift from first person singular pronouns to other
person pronouns.

3. Classification of Spanish parenthetical verbs

3.1. Bushes
The most frequent Spanish parenthetical verb operating on the
propositional content by affecting the precision of a referent is digamos
‘let’s say’:

(7) Inf. - […] se la debe dar a la mujer una autonomía, digamos de

tipo económico ¿no? […] (hcm.4.68)
‘one has to give to women an autonomy of, let’s say, economic
type’

Digamos is neither an epistemic verb nor is it in the first or third person

singular of the present indicative. For this reason, traditional works on
parenthetical verbs did not take into account let’s say or comparable
Romance expressions. It is a bush, but indirectly also a hedge, that is, by
making a reference that is only vague the speaker reduces his or her
commitment and responsibility. Since digamos enlarges the deictic origin
of the utterance it is also a shield. Rather than reducing directly the
commitment to the truth of a statement, in digamos reduces the
commitment to the appropriateness of a word or formulation, that is, it
marks the fact that the expression or formulation in its scope is not
deemed completely appropriate by the speaker (see Fuentes Rodríguez
1990: 105; Guillén Sutil 2001: 110). This and other functions of digamos
correspond closely to those Authier-Revuz (1995: 183ff., 650ff.) has
found for the French equivalent disons and Bazzanella (2001: 250f.),
Caffi (2001: 280, 293, 449), and Hölker (2003) for the Italian equivalent
diciamo. The Spanish parentheticals podríamos decir ‘we could say’ and
podría decir ‘I could say’ (only up to a certain point since it cannot
function as a shield) may assume a comparable function.
Occasionally not the referring expression in the scope of digamos
may be deemed inappropriate or vague, but the referent itself, i.e.
digamos may be equivalent to aproximadamente ‘approximately’ (see
Fuentes Rodríguez 1990: 105; Hölker 2003):

(8) Inf. - […] eso ha sido durante muchos años … V … el … el

modo que el … se ha planteado el matrimonio en España, en
Italia, en Francia, en todos los países … desde … hace unos
treinta años, digamos (hcm.4.69)
‘this has been during many years the way how marriage has been
set up in Spain, in Italy, in France, in all countries for some thirty
years, let’s say’

In the utterance above not the formulation unos treinta años, but its
meaning ‘some thirty years’ is vague.
With digamos (as with supongamos ‘let’s suppose’) the speaker may
also indicate that the expression in its scope is intended as a hypothesis
or an example (see Hölker 2003):

(9) Inf. - […] una persona, digamos más, más o menos culta ¿eh?,
entonces … V … que le guste el arte de la lectura, entonces va a,
por ejemplo, una traducción de “Archipiélago Gulag” y ve que es
muy mala ¿no? […] (hcm.17.296)
 ‘a person, let’s say, more or less learned, eh?, then, who likes to
read, then takes, for example, a translation of the “The Gulag
Archipelago” and sees that it is very bad’

3.2. Hedges
The boldfaced verbs in - all operate on the neustic, that is, they weaken
the speaker’s epistemic commitment to the truth of the proposition.
According to Urmson (1952) and others (e.g. Benveniste 1966 [1958];
Bolinger 1968; Hooper 1975; Borillo 1982; Venier 1991), this is the
basic function of parenthetical verbs:

[...] the whole point of some parenthetical verbs is to modify or to

weaken the claim to truth which would be implied by a simple assertion
p. (Urmson 1952: 484)

The analysis of corpora of spoken Spanish shows that the set of verbs
used for this purpose constitutes a relatively closed group of stereotyped
forms based on a few verbs: creer ‘believe’, parecer ‘seem’, pensar
‘think’, and suponer ‘suppose’. Apart from the forms present in - , I
found creo yo and yo creo, both meaning ‘I believe’, parece ‘it seems’,
me parece a mí ‘it seems to me’, parece ser ‘it seems to be’, pienso, yo
pienso, and pienso yo, all meaning ‘I think’. Parentheticals based on other
verbs, e.g. me imagino ‘I imagine’or me temo ‘I fear’ are rare:

(10) – Sì. Bueno, y a los niños les gustan, sobre todo los caballitos, y
la ola, etcétera, de la Calle del Infierno, me imagino, no? (husnc.
c2v3.129)
‘Yes. Okay, and the children like, above all the horses+DIM, and
the wave, and so forth, of the Calle del Infierno, I imagine, isn’t
it?’

Whereas the hedges we have seen so far express a reduced neustic

and imply an assertive tropic, yo diría ‘I’d say’, a parenthetical hedged
performative, makes explicit both utterance components:
(11) <H1> […] Esto refleja yo diría una cierta psicosis eh ... un cierto
miedo. […] (corec.bdeb039a)
‘This reflects, I’d say, a certain psychosis eh … a certain fear’

The difference between a bush, which operates on the propositional

content, and a hedge, which operates on the neustic, is evidenced in the
following two examples, where yo creo que ‘I believe that’ is combined
once with parenthetical digamos and once with parenthetical creo:

(12) <H3> [...] yo creo que es más aplicable a las personas, digamos,
espabiladas, oportunistas, listas [...] (corec.bent027a)
‘I believe that it applies more to, let’s say, sharp, opportunistic,
clever persons’
(13) E: [...] yo creo que en esta zona hay menos problemas que en
Las Candelarias, creo. (husnp.21.479)
‘I believe that in this zone there are less problems than in Las
Candelarias, I believe’

Whereas in governing verb and parenthetical have different scopes, in

they operate on the same scope.

3.3. Shields
There are a number of Spanish parentheticals which allow the speaker to
ascribe the utterance to a source other than him- or herself, thus
alleviating his or her burden of responsibility. Typical are dicen ‘they
say’ and se dice ‘one says, it is said’, which do not report a statement
actually made by a particular person, but describe in an unspecific
manner the source of the statement:

(14) Inf. A. – […] Es que es un veneno, dicen, la montaña; y más que

la montaña es la escalada. […] (hcm.19.352)
‘The mountain, they say, is a poison; and more than the mountain
it is the climbing’
(15) <H1> […] El final será la economía de mercado, se dice.
(corec.adeb002b)
‘The end will be the market economy, one says’

Expressions of this type are called evidentials, because they specify what
kind of sensory evidence the truth of the asserted proposition relies on.
Albeit indirectly, dicen and se dice also express speaker commitment,
since the quality of evidence indicates what kind of responsibility the
speaker is able to assume for his statement.3
The sources of the evidence on which a statement is based are direct
observation, hearsay, and the speaker’s inferences (see Ifantidou 2001;
Squartini 2001). Although not normally treated as such, expressions that
indicate (one’s own) memory as source of information are also
evidentials (see Ifantidou 2001: 6f.). Me acuerdo ‘I remember’ is one of
the few Spanish parenthetical evidentials in the first person singular of
the present indicative:

(16) I : [...] Hubo cierto momento que hubo uno, me acuerdo, que
tenía necesidad, por cuestiones familiares, de ir a su pueblo, [...]
(husnp.19.421)
‘At a certain moment there was one, I remember, that had to go,
because of family matters, to his village’

As far as its scope is concerned, it certainly resembles shields. It is,

though, questionable if it can be considered a mitigating device.
Postposed verbs of speaking used in direct speech are also shields.
The utterances in which they occur have two deictic centers, one
pertaining to the quoting expression, the other one pertaining to the
quoted sentence:

3
“Más que significar ‘enunciar’ o ‘expresar el pensamiento con palabras’ parece ser que el
verbo toma aquí otro valor como es el de ‘opinar’”, as Guillén Sutil (2001: 103) remarks
regarding dicen.
(17) <H1> [...] “Después de ducha...” ¡Oooh! “... me pongo túnica
mora”, ha dicho su mujer. (corec.alud007a)
‘“After the shower”, oh!, “… I put on the black tunic” said his
wife’

4. Indication of the tropic or modalization of the neustic?

It may be a useful heuristic, but Hare’s (1970) distinction between
phrastic, tropic, and neustic overstresses the differences between
indication of illocutionary force and modalization of illocutionary force.
Although in standard speech act theory there is no place in illocutionary
force for variation in the strength, e.g., of speaker’s commitment, it has
been pointed out (see Sbisà 1990; Caffi 2001: 62-65) that the relationship
between mitigation or reinforcement and illocutionary force is very
close. Epistemic parenthetical verbs modalize the neustic and by being
limited to a certain tropic also imply it.4 In the case of such illocution-
bound mitigators (see Caffi 1999: 886, 2001: 297), specialized for a
certain illocution, it is convenient to treat mitigation not as superficially
adjoined to an independently indicated illocutionary force, but as closely
connected to or even identical with it (see Sbisà 2001).
But what about non-epistemic verbs, for example verbs of speaking
or performative verbs in general? Urmson (1952) and Benveniste (1966
[1958]) were the first to stress that both classes of verbs are used
primarily in the first person present indicative form and do not describe
psychological states or actions. This similarity has led to some confusion
(e.g. Lakoff 1969; Palmer 1986: 167ff.), but also stimulated a debate on
the distinction between the two classes of verbs. Instead of the syntactic
(see Cattel 1973: 620ff.; Hooper 1975: 102ff.) and semantic differences

4 In the literature about epistemic parenthetical verbs, illocutionary force indication is

rarely mentioned as function of these verbs. A rather early exception is a remark by
Wackernagel (1897: 23f.): “Eine Bitte oder eine Aussage kann man in einem (sic)
Nebensatz geben, der von einem Verben (sic) des Bittens oder des Sagens oder Meinens
abhängt. Giebt (sic) man sie aber in einem (sic) Hauptsatz und schiebt das Verbum des
Bittens u.s.w. ein, so erhält dieses oft sehr schwachen Ton und nähert sich seinem Wesen
nach einer die Satzart anzeigenden Partikel”.
(see Venier 1991: 137-143), I want to address two questions which have
also been raised: 1) May performative verbs be used in parenthetical
position? 2) And if so, do they indicate the tropic or do they modalize the
neustic?
Regarding the first question, most, if not all, researchers assume that
performative verbs may occur in parenthetical position (e.g. Urmson
1952; Holdcroft 1978: 64; Récanati 1984: 347; Fava 2001: 45ff.;
Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001: 37). Lyons (1977: 738) proposes to modify
Urmson’s definition of parenthetical verbs in order to comprise
parenthetically used performatives. In his opinion, the semantic and
grammatical relation between the following pairs of sentences is exactly
the same:

(18) She’s in the dining-room, I think.

(19) I think (that) she’s in the dining-room.
(20) I’ll be there at two o’clock, I promise you.
(21) I promise (that) I’ll be there at two o’clock.

Although the examples invented by Lyons and others are grammatically

acceptable, the performative verbs they cite almost never occur as
parentheticals in corpora of spoken Spanish. Even if they occurred, their
intonation would be different from that of creo ‘I believe’, supongo ‘I
suppose’, and me parece ‘it seems to me’ (see Reinhart 1983: 179; Ziv
1985: 181f.; Cruttenden 1986: 43f., 78; Voghera 1992: 117, 146f.), i.e.
parenthetical performatives would form intonation groups of their own,
separated from the host sentence by a pause and with a separate tonic
syllable. However, I found a few exceptions. Besides digo ‘I say’ (see
below) there is one parenthetical I like to mention:

(22) <H1> […] ¿Y por qué será, me pregunto, que los tenistas todos
habláis tan poquito y sois tan tímidos? [...] (corec.aent009b)
‘And why is it, I ask myself, that you tennis players all talk so
little and are so shy?’
According to tests with native speakers, me pregunto ‘I ask myself’ may
be used prosodically just like creo, supongo, and me parece.
Regarding the second question, Urmson expresses the view that
performative verbs express speaker commitment rather than illocution
when used as parentheticals. He says that we cannot treat the following
sentences as a guarantee or a bet, respectively (see Urmson 1952: 494):

(23) He’ll come to a bad end, I guarantee.

(24) He’ll forget to come, I bet.

The illocutionary force indicating function of a performative is certainly

weakened when it occurs in parenthetical position (see Venier 1991: 66).
As shows, though, this function does not disappear completely. There
me pregunto quite explicitly indicates a questive tropic5 (and modalizes a
questive neustic?).
In the Spanish corpora there is yet another performative (digo ‘I say’)
occurring in parenthetical position. When governing an indicative clause,
digo acts as performative for assertions, when governing a subjunctive
clause, it introduces directives. Based on Urmson’s (1952) reasoning,
Venier (1991: 66f.) writes that in the following Italian sentence dico ‘I
say’ expresses speaker commitment not illocutionary force:

(25) È proprio così, dico.

‘It is just like that, I say’

This also seems to be the case in the following Spanish example with
sentence final digo yo:6

5For a similar invented example in English see Quirk, Greenbaum, et al. (1985: 1114).
6
“[…] la fórmula digo yo […] pretende atenuar lo anteriormente dicho y reducirlo al
ámbito de lo opinable por el hablante. Equivale a ‘eso es lo que pienso’, ‘en mi opinión’”,
as Fuentes Rodríguez (1990: 112; see also 1998: 154) writes.
(26) <H2> […] bueno, cirujano de ovejas o cirujano de ... de mujeres.
Porque si ha mata<(d)>o a una mujer será cirujano de mujeres,
digo yo. (corec.pent007d)
‘okay, surgeon for sheep or surgeon for … for women. Because,
if he has killed a woman, he must be a surgeon for woman, I say’

Yet, as in , the illocutionary force indicating function has not completely

disappeared. In performatives the indication of the tropic and the
modalization of the neustic are always combined, that is, digo governing
an indicative clause indicates the assertive tropic and reduces (less than
yo diría ‘I’d say’) the assertive neustic. In parenthetical digo yo, since it
never occurs in subjunctive clauses, the tropic indicating function is less
important, but not completely redundant, as can be seen in the following
sentence, which formally resembles a directive:

(27) <H3> Oye, ¿no sería mejor que en estos casos ...?, digo yo, ¿eh?
¿te pusieran un hombre más experto, más veterano, que te
pudiera contar cosas [...]? (corec.cent001a)
‘Look, wouldn’t it be better that in these cases?, I say, eh?, they
put you with somebody more experienced, older, that could tell
you things?’

The context and the reaction of the interlocutor suggest that H3 expresses
an advice not a question, a fact also underlined by digo yo.
Other parenthetical uses of the first person singular of the present
indicative of decir ‘say’, though, concern neither the modalization of the
neustic nor the indication of the tropic, but one of the felicity conditions
of assertions, i.e. that the procedure must be executed correctly and
completely (see Austin 1976 [1962]: 15; Caffi 2001: 450):

(28) Inf. B. - […] Como Marga, que se ha metido en Literatura

italiana, bueno, en Filología italiana, digo (hcm.20.392)
‘Like Marga, who has begun with Italian literature, okay, with
Italian philology, I say’
5. Conclusions
The study shows that Caffi’s (1999, 2001) classification of mitigating
devices can fruitfully be applied to Spanish parenthetical verbs and that it
advances the comprehension of their pragmatic function. In addition to
those epistemic verbs considered by Urmson (1952) and others, there are
forms based on decir ‘say’ that occur with high frequency in parenthetical
position and that also express speaker commitment. In corpora of spoken
Spanish, very few of those verbs commonly considered performatives
occur as parentheticals. Again, the most frequent form is based on decir,
i.e. digo yo ‘I say’, which serves both as (weakened) illocutionary force
indicating device and as assertion modalizer.

Corpora

corec = Corpus oral de referencia del español contemporáneo

http://www.lllf.uam.es/~fmarcos/informes/corpus/corpusix.html
hcm = El habla de la ciudad de Madrid
Esgueva, M. & Cantarero, M. (eds.) 1981. El habla de la ciudad de
Madrid. Materiales para su estudio. Madrid: Consejo superior
de investigaciones científicas - Instituto Miguel de Cervantes.
husnc = Encuestas del habla urbana de Sevilla. Nivel culto
Pineda, M. Á. de (ed.) 1983. Sociolingüística andaluza 2. Encuestas del
habla urbana de Sevilla. Nivel culto. Sevilla: Secretariado de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla.
husnp = Encuestas del habla urbana de Sevilla. Nivel popular
Ropero, M. (ed.) 1987. Sociolingüística andaluza 4. Encuestas del habla
urbana de Sevilla. Nivel popular. Sevilla: Servicio de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla.
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