Laurel J. Brinton, The comment clause in English: Syntactic origins and pragmatic developments (Studies in English Language). Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. xvii-280

This book takes a diachronic approach to a variety of forms commonly subsumed under the notion of COMMENT CLAUSE (CC). It explicitly excludes some of the most frequent, well-known and widely studied CCs, for example I think and I guess, which have been discussed elsewhere by the same author (Brinton 1996). At the same time, it includes some less widely studied examples, such as CCs with see, say and look among others. The book resembles Brinton's (1996) study in organization and spirit. It is made up of eleven chapters, the first three of which establish the theoretical background and review the relevant literature. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the central notion of the study – the comment clause – and delineates it from related categories. Chapter 2 focuses on the semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers. Chapter 3 addresses the processes of change 'that have been variously seen as accounting for the development of pragmatic markers' (p. 22), among them grammaticalization. These first three chapters are followed by seven chapters (chapters 4 to 10) devoted to case studies of (sets of) individual CCs. Each of these seven chapters begins by detailing the use and semantic–pragmatic functions of the relevant CCs in Present-day English. Second, starting from Old English, the historical development of their semantic–pragmatic functions and of their syntactic forms is studied, in order to 'determine when and in what syntactic contexts these functions first arose and how they were related to one another' (p. 19). Third, the development is situated in the context of grammaticalization and related concepts. The empirical work reported in these chapters is based on a variety of online and electronic corpora for the periods of English from Old English (OE) to Present-day English (PDE) (see p. 20). While 'frequency and distribution of comment clauses across corpora [is taken as] evidence for their semantic and syntactic development' (p. 19), the approach is qualitative rather than quantitative. Several case studies are based on previous work by Brinton, including the chapters on (I) say (chapter 4), I mean (chapter 5), CCs with look (chapter 8), and what's more (first half of chapter 9). Chapter 11 of the present monograph serves as a summary, conclusion and outlook. I will now look in more detail at the analysis. Chapter 1, 'Introduction: comment clauses, parentheticals, and pragmatic markers', begins with a definition of pragmatic marker as 'a …