“I think this is I mean perhaps this is too erm too tough a view of the world but I often think …”. Redundancy as a contextualization device

This contribution examines the connectedness between the qualification of a conversational contribution with cognitive-verb-based parentheticals regarding force and commitment and the theory and practice of redundancy in discourse in the social context of political discourse. The methodological framework adopted is an integrated one based on the Gricean cooperative principle (Grice, 1975) supplemented by interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1996). The focus is on their form, function and distribution, especially on I think, accommodating (1) a paradigmatic description accounting for possible functional synonyms, such as possibly or perhaps, (2) a syntagmatic description accounting for possible collocates, such as I don’t think, I should think or but I think, and (3) their distribution in discourse regarding the local linguistic-context phenomenon of pre- and post-posed position, and its more global distribution in communicative genre.A single coding of epistemic modality infringes on the maxim of quality, signifying subjectification. Multiply coded epistemic modality from one semantic category infringes on quantity, intensifying epistemic commitment and pragmatic force, and multiply coded epistemic modality from different semantic categories infringes on manner, generating a particularized conversational implicature.