Parenthetical "I'm telling you" as a marker of private evidence

Abstract

We present an analysis of parenthetical uses of the English expression I'm telling you as a discourse particle, i.e., an expression that conveys information about the epistemic states of discourse participants with respect to the propositional content of an utterance (Zimmermann 2011). The analysis connects I'm telling you to other discourse particles that mark the speaker's assumptions about whether the (evidence for the) asserted proposition is shared knowledge between the speaker and addressee and whether or not the (evidence for the) proposition is ``verifiable on the spot'', e.g. German ja (Kratzer 1999, 2004), Mandarin de (Soh 2018).