A Cognitivist Approach to I promise and I guarantee Constructions

Abstract

This paper compares the constructional and functional properties of I promise (you) + X and I guarantee (you) + X constructions, whose construal revolves around the speaker’s commitment to making a situation happen and/or to vouching for the validity of the embedded clause X. Taking a usage-based perspective, it analyzes 563 spoken tokens of I promise constructions and 398 tokens of I guarantee constructions from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca). Three types of construals were identified: commissive, epistemic modal, or both. While the I promise construction can have any of the three, the I guarantee construction never has the commissive construal alone. Working within mental-spaces theory, this paper contends that the speaker’s commitment to the occurrence of the focal situation is necessarily involved in the default conceptualization of I promise constructions, but not of the other. The frequency data indicate that the distinctive conceptual structures motivate their functional distributions.