Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld’s Publications
- Tabula gratulatoria
- Bilingual Learners’ Dictionaries in the Lexicographic Landscape
- Feel Free To… A Comparative Study of Phraseological Borrowing
- What’s in a Name? Does the Proliferation of Pejorative Terms Such as Denglis(c)h and Similar Items in German Attest to Neo-puristic Attitudes Towards Anglicisms?
- English in Confrontation with Languages and Cultural Heritage of Asian Countries: Promotion or Threat?
- Slavic Dirъ in the Arab-Muslim Geographical Literature
- Linguistic Landscapes: The Multilingual Cityscape of Kraków
- On Russenorsk -om in Particular and on Etymology and Creolistics in General
- Ponglish in the British Isles: A Few Sociolinguistic Remarks on the Issue
- Language Contact and Identity: Three Possible Scenarios
- European Echoes of English, South African Style?
- Open Spelling of Nominal Compounds in Contemporary Swedish and the Question of English Influence
- To -s or Not to -s? Plural Marking on Anglicisms in Spoken German
- Classification of Pseudo-anglicisms in Japanese
- Underdeterminacy, Indeterminacy and Speaker’s Intentions
- Globalisation and the Linguistic and Cultural Changes in Poland Within the Last Seventy Years
- Playful Pleas(e): Formal and Functional Adaptations of English Please in Serbian
- Gustaf Peringer’s Karaim Biblical Material Revisited. A Linguistic Commentary on a Text Sample from 1691
- Yiddish Borrowings in American English: Slavic Connections
- Linguistic Trespassing: Observations on Multilingual Europe
- Why is He Who Tells the Truth Chased Out of Nine Villages: The Number Nine in Turkish Language and Culture
- English Cyber- Words Across European Languages
- Beliefs and Customs in the Phrasematics of the Podtatrze (Sub-Tatra) Region
- Graphic and Orthotypographic Aspects of Anglicisms in the Field of Sports
- Language Contact and Null Subjects: The Past Tense in Kashubian
- Slavic Languages in Contact, 3: The Methodological Importance of Balkan Slavic for Turkish Historical Dialectology, or Croatian and Serbian neimar, Bulgarian maimar(in) ‘Chief Architect’
- Indirect Language Contact and the Celtic Elements in Polish
- (I’m) Just Saying and (Tak) Tylko Mówię: A Parallel Corpus Study
- News on Instagram: The Use of the Social Medium by The Guardian and Gazeta Wyborcza
- Vowel Adaptation in English Words in Slovak
- Foreign Influences in Polish Dialectal Plant Names
- Hipsterskie fashionistki keżualowo drinkują na klabingu w Lądku… English Borrowings in Informal Polish and Their Lexical Fields
- On Maximality Modification in the Psych Domain: Evidence from Polish
- Formal Variance in Polish Adjectival Anglicisms
(I’m) Just Saying and (Tak) Tylko Mówię: A Parallel Corpus Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld’s Publications
- Tabula gratulatoria
- Bilingual Learners’ Dictionaries in the Lexicographic Landscape
- Feel Free To… A Comparative Study of Phraseological Borrowing
- What’s in a Name? Does the Proliferation of Pejorative Terms Such as Denglis(c)h and Similar Items in German Attest to Neo-puristic Attitudes Towards Anglicisms?
- English in Confrontation with Languages and Cultural Heritage of Asian Countries: Promotion or Threat?
- Slavic Dirъ in the Arab-Muslim Geographical Literature
- Linguistic Landscapes: The Multilingual Cityscape of Kraków
- On Russenorsk -om in Particular and on Etymology and Creolistics in General
- Ponglish in the British Isles: A Few Sociolinguistic Remarks on the Issue
- Language Contact and Identity: Three Possible Scenarios
- European Echoes of English, South African Style?
- Open Spelling of Nominal Compounds in Contemporary Swedish and the Question of English Influence
- To -s or Not to -s? Plural Marking on Anglicisms in Spoken German
- Classification of Pseudo-anglicisms in Japanese
- Underdeterminacy, Indeterminacy and Speaker’s Intentions
- Globalisation and the Linguistic and Cultural Changes in Poland Within the Last Seventy Years
- Playful Pleas(e): Formal and Functional Adaptations of English Please in Serbian
- Gustaf Peringer’s Karaim Biblical Material Revisited. A Linguistic Commentary on a Text Sample from 1691
- Yiddish Borrowings in American English: Slavic Connections
- Linguistic Trespassing: Observations on Multilingual Europe
- Why is He Who Tells the Truth Chased Out of Nine Villages: The Number Nine in Turkish Language and Culture
- English Cyber- Words Across European Languages
- Beliefs and Customs in the Phrasematics of the Podtatrze (Sub-Tatra) Region
- Graphic and Orthotypographic Aspects of Anglicisms in the Field of Sports
- Language Contact and Null Subjects: The Past Tense in Kashubian
- Slavic Languages in Contact, 3: The Methodological Importance of Balkan Slavic for Turkish Historical Dialectology, or Croatian and Serbian neimar, Bulgarian maimar(in) ‘Chief Architect’
- Indirect Language Contact and the Celtic Elements in Polish
- (I’m) Just Saying and (Tak) Tylko Mówię: A Parallel Corpus Study
- News on Instagram: The Use of the Social Medium by The Guardian and Gazeta Wyborcza
- Vowel Adaptation in English Words in Slovak
- Foreign Influences in Polish Dialectal Plant Names
- Hipsterskie fashionistki keżualowo drinkują na klabingu w Lądku… English Borrowings in Informal Polish and Their Lexical Fields
- On Maximality Modification in the Psych Domain: Evidence from Polish
- Formal Variance in Polish Adjectival Anglicisms
Summary
Introduction
Adopting a usage-based approach, this chapter compares (I’m) just saying and related phrases in English with their Polish correspondences. The phrase (I’m) just saying, thought of by some as irritating and inflammatory, has recently gained currency in informal English, particularly in online environments, where anonymity encourages blatant statements. It also serves as a conversational filler enabling speakers to express their perspectives, even if what they said might not be liked by others. Additionally, (I’m) just saying has given rise to numerous online memes and its frequent use has been recorded by several dictionaries. Polish counterparts of the focal phrase, on the other hand, including standalone (tak) tylko mówię, seem to be less readily employed by speakers of Polish and they have not made their way into dictionaries yet.
To explore the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of (I’m) just saying and related phrases in English and Polish, in what follows, I examine aligned translated texts from the Paralela corpus. In doing so, I adopt the view that bilingual corpora can enrich the study of individual languages and, at the same time, raise our awareness of language features – and the discourse patterns in which they occur – which might go unnoticed if only monolingual data were analysed.
(I’m) just saying and related phrases in English
(I’m) just saying / Just sayin’
As noted by Brinton (2017: 191), say – the most common verb of speaking – is a rich source of comment clauses in English. In her diachronic account of pragmatic markers, she situates parenthetical (I’m) just saying / Just sayin’ alongside the related clauses All(’s) I’m saying (is) and What I’m saying (is), considering both their literal and non-literal uses. In brief, Brinton (2017) argues that (I’m) just saying serves as a metacomment on the speaker’s linguistic performance and that, being a negative politeness marker, it has a face-saving function (for a general characterisation, see Figure 1).
Elsewhere, (I’m) just saying has been described as a kind of “rhetorical backoff” (Lee-Goldman 2011: 77) by which “the speaker reaffirms his or her commitment to the truth of what was just said, but not to the implications that could be drawn from having made those claims”.
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- Languages in Contact and ContrastA Festschrift for Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld on the Occasion of Her 70th Birthday, pp. 427 - 446Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2020