This article studies you bet and related phrases when they are used as a parenthetical and as a free-standing response. Drawing on a range of corpora, we provide both contemporary and historical perspectives on the set of pragmatic expressions that has largely escaped scholars’ attention. Synchronically, we demonstrate that they are colloquial American pragmatic markers to express speaker certainty/affirmation or to respond to thanks. Diachronically, these markers are hypothesized to have developed out of main clause usage with a clausal complement (‘the matrix clause hypothesis’); however, our historical corpus evidence does not straightforwardly support this hypothesis. Instead, we suggest that multiple constructions might have been involved in the emergence of the pragmatic markers, namely, wh-interrogatives (e.g. what will you bet (that) …?), modal constructions (e.g. you may/can bet (that) …), and main clauses with a reduced complement (e.g. You bet I do).

中文翻译：

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“你打赌我是一个‘美国人’

本文研究了 you bet 和相关短语用作插入语和独立响应时的情况。我们利用一系列语料库，对一系列基本上没有引起学者们注意的实用表达方式提供了当代和历史的视角。同时，我们证明它们是美国口语语用标记，用于表达说话者的确定性/肯定或回应感谢。从历时角度来看，这些标记被假设是从带有子句补语的主句用法中发展而来的（“矩阵子句假设”）；然而，我们的历史语料库证据并不能直接支持这一假设。相反，我们认为，语用标记的出现可能涉及多种结构，即 wh 疑问句（例如，你将赌什么（那个）……？），