Simon-Vandenbergen (2000: 61) concluded her study of I think in political discourse by noting the importance of further study of its prosodic realisation. Consequently, I investigate the prosodic realisations of I think in political debates. At the same time, I examine the lexico-grammatical form of the construction, and its surrounding co-text. My exploration confirmed that I think is frequent in political speech, and revealed that it projected four types of meanings. Three of the meanings occurred irrespective of the intonational choices, though prosody influenced the likelihood of the occurrence of a particular meaning. There was a greater likelihood of the speaker expressing a tentative statement if think was prominent/tonic. Intonational prominence on I explicitly warranted the source of the evaluation. When the construction did not contain an intonational prominence it tended to signal commitment to a proposition, or if followed by a filled pause or rhythmic disjunction a hesitation marker.

中文翻译：

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政治演讲中的“我认为”

西蒙·范登伯格（Simon-Vandenbergen）（2000：61）指出了进一步研究其韵律实现的重要性，从而结束了我对政治话语中我思想的研究。因此，在政治辩论中，我研究了我认为的韵律实现。同时，我研究了结构的词汇语法形式及其周围的共文本。我的探索证实了我认为在政治演说中经常出现，并揭示出它暗示了四种类型的含义。尽管韵律会影响特定含义出现的可能性，但无论国际选择如何，都会出现其中三个含义。如果认为突出/有声调，发言者更有可能发表临时声明。我在国际上的突出地位明确保证了评估的来源。