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 (Aguadoet al. 2012) and their frequency and use in three datasets of the LINDSEI (Chinese, Germanand Spanish LINDSEI components). Our analysis of certainty adverbs yields a complexpicture. Obviously was fundamentally used by English speakers while really was usedsignificantly more frequently by German speakers. The frequency of actually was notsignificantly different between the English native speakers and two of the learner languagedatasets, but Germans also showed significant differences with the English and the othertwo non-native groups. NSs and Chinese frequencies of use for actually and really were notsignificantly different, which reinforces the notion that, quantitatively, these two groups ofspeakers approached the picture task in ways that diverged from the German and Spanishspeakers. An examination of the pragmatic contexts of use of the certainty adverbsrevealed that both NSs and NNSs restricted their semantic choice to classic epistemicmeanings with few instances of more complex pragmatic meanings. However, the positionof those adverbs was different in the English data.