INITIAL I THINK: MAIN OR COMMENT CLAUSE?
INITIAL I THINK: MAIN OR COMMENT CLAUSE?

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the use of 200 occurrences of clause-initial I think in a corpus of spoken English with a view to establishing whether they are best classified as main or comment clauses. It investigates two formal cues for signalling prominence of I think and hence a possible hierarchical difference between the two clauses: (i) the presence or absence of the that-complementizer as an explicit marker of syntactic subordination and (ii) prosodic prominence. The corpus data show that a difference on the structural level, i.e. that vs. zero, does not correspond with different prosodic behaviour. Both constructional types exhibit a similar distribution of the three prosodic patterns identified: they are both most frequently realised as heads, less frequently as pre-heads, and only rarely with a separate nuclear accent. From a cognitive-functional perspective, which associates superordinate status with relative prominence, initial I think therefore only rarely qualifies for main clause status. Moreover, the corpus data suggest that in spoken language the that-complementizer is not so much used as a marker of subordination but rather as a filler used to give weight to I think or for rhythmical purposes.

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