Often when a piece of rhetoric is being added for emphasis, we put "I might add" before or after or sometimes inside of it.
Martin Brice – my old and good friend who promised me we would not get in trouble and who, I might add, did not.
All of the definitions of "might" that I can find include an element of "possibility." Why, when Cosmo is definitely, not possibly, adding "[Martin Brice did not get in trouble]," does he still use the phrase "I might add?"
Best Answer
Might is a modal auxiliary verb. So is would. Modal and mood all refer to the same logical phenomena, so this is in the same semantic area as the subjunctive, conditional, or optative moods. English doesn't have moods, but it has lots of modal constructions to do the same job.
In general, modals are more polite than non-modals, just as the subjunctive mood is more polite in languages like Spanish that have a subjunctive mood. That's why we say
instead of
to make a question sound more polite.
The pragmatic tag I might add is a politeness marker. That's all.