THE IDENTIFICATIONAL AND SOCIAL-INDEXICAL FUNCTIONS OF MENTAL SUBSTANDARD VERBS IN DISCOURSE: AN ANALYSIS THROUGH A SYSTEM OF PRAGMATIC MARKERS

This article examines the identificational and social-indexical functions of mental substandard verbs in discourse, focusing on forms that originate in or remain semantically connected with cognition, knowledge, inference, understanding, remembering, and epistemic judgment. The analysis concentrates on colloquial and stylistically marked expressions such as I think, I guess, I reckon, you know, I dunno, figure, get it, and related pragmaticized patterns. Drawing on sociocultural linguistics, indexicality theory, stance analysis, and research on pragmatic markers, the study develops a qualitative framework for explaining how mental-verb forms move beyond propositional cognition and become resources for identity work. The findings show that their social meaning emerges through recurrent alignments between pragmatic function, register, interactional position, and participant relations. Mental substandard verbs may index informality, solidarity, tentativeness, authority, localness, generational positioning, conversational authenticity, or resistance to institutional formality. Their identificational force is not treated as a fixed lexical property but as an interactional achievement mediated by stance and style. The article proposes a layered model linking lexical mental meaning, pragmaticization, stance, indexical cues, identity positioning, and social interpretation, and discusses implications for discourse analysis, sociopragmatics, translation, lexicography, and second-language pragmatic competence.