A corpus-driven analysis of certainty stance adverbs: Obviously, really and actually in spoken native and learner English

Abstract

This paper examines the most frequent certainty adverbs in the extended LOCNEC (Aguado et al. 2012) and their frequency and use in three datasets of the LINDSEI (Chinese, German and Spanish LINDSEI components). Our analysis of certainty adverbs yields a complex picture. Obviously was fundamentally used by English speakers while really was used significantly more frequently by German speakers. The frequency of actually was not significantly different between the English native speakers and two of the learner language datasets, but Germans also showed significant differences with the English and the other two non-native groups. NSs and Chinese frequencies of use for actually and really were not significantly different, which reinforces the notion that, quantitatively, these two groups of speakers approached the picture task in ways that diverged from the German and Spanish speakers. An examination of the pragmatic contexts of use of the certainty adverbs revealed that both NSs and NNSs restricted their semantic choice to classic epistemic meanings with few instances of more complex pragmatic meanings. However, the position of those adverbs was different in the English data.