Olguín Martínez, Jesús & Stefan Th. Gries. 2026. Syntax in Social Interaction: Syntax, Conversation, Discourse-Pragmatics, Lexicon, and Mode in if you ask me Constructions. Corpus-based studies across humanities (published online). https://doi.org/10.1515/csh-2025-0025
The study analyzes the syntax of if you ask me (e.g., she’s not ready for that kind of responsibility if you ask me) in a sample of 789 constructions from The Corpus of Contemporary American English. Special attention is paid to how the order of the protasis interacts with other domains in language use: speaker, function, lexicon, and type of communication mode. Using a predictive-modeling approach, we demonstrate that when the next turn’s speaker is different from the current speaker, it is very likely that if you ask me will appear in preposed position in spoken and written discourse. On the other hand, when the speaker is the same, it is very likely that if you ask me will appear in postposed position. However, there is a significant difference between speaking and writing such that postposed position in spoken discourse is likely, but postposed position in written discourse is more likely. We also discuss prototypes of each position of if you ask me for which there seems to be an intriguing interaction between speaker, lexicon, and type of communication mode. We argue that these findings provide important implications for previous research on turn-taking and the semantic coherence principle.