The semantic field of modal certainty

En savoir plus sur le livre

Despite extensive literature on modality in English, research on modal adverbs as a group remains limited. While individual adverbs have been studied, their semantic and pragmatic relationships are largely unexplored. This work closely examines modal certainty expressed by adverbs in English, focusing on frequent terms like certainly, indeed, and no doubt through corpus data. The analysis utilizes the International Corpus of English - Great Britain, supplemented by additional contemporary English corpora and questionnaires assessing native speakers' intuitions on nuanced similarities and differences among related adverbs. The methodology includes exploring cross-linguistic equivalents to reveal semantic-pragmatic relations, with translation corpora providing insights from Swedish, Dutch, French, and German. A detailed examination of these correspondences enhances the semantic-pragmatic profiles of each adverb, clarifying overlapping meanings and distinctions. The study employs the concept of semantic maps to illustrate these relationships. This comprehensive empirical analysis not only deepens understanding of English adverbs expressing certainty but also sheds light on the complexity of modal certainty and its connection to speakers' intentions and other semantic domains, paving the way for further empirical and theoretical exploration of modality.