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”.