Examples:
It's cold, I know.
She's awesome, I know.
Are these comma splices? If not, what is the name of the I know clause?
Is there a name for the whole structure?
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It's just a stylistic variation on the more normal sequence "I know it's cold". It's definitely not a "comma splice", which basically means trying to use a comma instead of a full stop to separate two sentences.– FumbleFingersSep 6, 2012 at 16:53
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2 Answers
When you invert the normal order of the sentence
I know it's cold.
you need a comma to make the sense clear:
It's cold, I know.
So while these appear to be two independent clauses, the first is actually a relative clause with an omitted that. Here is how the sentence would read if we were to put the that back in.
I know that it's cold.
And if we were to invert that, we would have
That it's cold, I know.
But that sounds a little stilted to the modern ear, so we just say
It's cold, I know.
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1+1 Incidentally, the inversion does shift the emphasis from "it's cold" to "I know".– KrisSep 7, 2012 at 7:03
In those examples, I know is a ‘tail’, a feature of speech which reinforces what is being said.
answered Sep 6, 2012 at 17:34
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+1 You have put it better, what I was trying to express in my comment above.– KrisSep 7, 2012 at 7:04
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@Kris: It's a term used in functional grammar, along with 'head' for a similar feature at the start of an utterance. Sep 7, 2012 at 7:06