Talk:I'd say

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Not really an interjection, but what is it? Equinox ◑ 14:49, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

My take: PoS=Phrase. (In the sense shown it could be said to function as a modifier of a clause, so Adverb is defensible.) For the current sense: category:English non-constituent. For an additional sense: non-gloss: indicating agreement: Categories: English sentences, English responses. (Some would categorize it as an English pro-sentence, but I think all but the most stilted responses are pro-sentences.)

But does it meet CFI in the only sense now shown? It's not really a set phrase as "say" could be modified by a number of adverbs. The rationale for keeping it would seem to be the extra pragmatic function that the modal expression has in the first person as a politeness construct (aka weasel word on WP). I don't think that carries over to uses of "would say" with other subjects (except some uses of "we"). DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 15:20, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Syntactically, it's part of an interesting group of expressions that sometimes subordinate a clause:

I'd say that_opt he needs an ambulance.

and at other times act as a kind of adverbial (tag?) nested inside, or appended to the end of, the clause (which is apparently no longer subordinate):

He needs an ambulance, I'd say.

The person who really needs an ambulance, I'd say, is you!

The thing is, this group of expressions seems to form a very broad class, such that I'm not sure it's something that can be covered lexicographically.

—Ruakh_TALK 18:59, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Interesting? I'll say. As a subjunctive/conditional, it implies the existence of a condition, which might be made explicit as "If I were the one permitted/supposed/forced to make a decision/diagnosis/statement". If this were being said of another person, I think you would be more likely to lay out the condition.

There are an arbitrarily large number of ways of expressing this kind of speech-actish thing, which undermines the Pawley logic of including all speech-act expressions. Even with an attestation requirement, there are quite a large number. With "I'd", "say" is by far the most common verb to make up a parenthetical between punctuation, but other verbs include "imagine", "think", "wonder"; "suggest", "advise", "argue"; "guess", "estimate"; "wager", "bet", "venture". Interestingly, too, all of these could be used to give some kind of qualified affirmative response. Some of them can be used similarly with "I'll" to make a more definite response.

No OneLook reference has "I'd say" or "I would say". In contrast, the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms has I'll say. DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 19:56, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Re: "If this were being said of another person, I think you would be more likely to lay out the condition": Not necessarily. Consider, for example, "Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?" —Ruakh_TALK 05:03, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

I was not thinking of second-person questions. They would be a normal part of discourse and might require politeness. I have sympathy for Dan Polansky's recurring wish for more support for encoding, though I agree with you that lexical inclusion of an English SoP expression would not seem to offer much help. As I understand his problem, in both Czech and English an expression might exist meaning something like, say, "I'd say". In both languages it might be SoP and excluded. Thus Wiktionary offers no help.

The recurrence of this issue is frustrating. To me it seems that the best we can do is have a phrasebook for simple expressions and explain in appendices some of the more complicated aspects of how English speakers/writers use the language to accomplish various functions. I am not sure that WP is likely to do a very good job on such matters, but longish articles don't seem to be our forte either. What would the appendix for the current case be called ? DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 09:50, 2 January 2010 (UTC)