EPISTEMICITY OF WORDS DENOTING CERTAINTY / UNCERTAINTY
Keywords:
epistemic words, epistemicity, confidence / uncertainty, utterances, semanticsAbstract
The article explores epistemic nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that convey different levels of confidence/uncertainty. The material of the study was a selection of fiction texts of modern English literature for 1 million words. The epistemic nature of words used to indicate certainty / uncertainty is studied. Epistemicity is defined as the property of words to manifest epistemic properties and is calculated as the ratio of the number of epistemic words (EW) to the total number of words for indicating certainty / uncertainty in the selection according to the formula Eep÷Et*100%, where Eep is the number of epistemic uses of the word, Et is the total number of uses of this word in the selection.
The place of EWs in utterances was considered and EWs were separated from non-epistemic ones. Epistemic verbs, adjectives, and nouns occur in affirmative, negative, and interrogative object-determining utterances before the subordinate part of the statement. Epistemic verbs in interjections and epistemic adverbs occur in any part of the utterance, marking it epistemically. EW are not considered in the past and future tenses and in phrases with personal pronouns other than I, we in positive utterances and you in questions. We also study epistemic adjectives and nouns in impersonal expressions. EW cannot be adjectives of adjacent words, discursive markers, and adverbs of action.
The analysis of 28 epistemic verbs showed that for verbs, epistemicity ranges from 0‒95%, and the most used epistemic verbs are think, seem, know, see. For 21 epistemic adjectives, epistemicity ranges from 0‒75%, and the most used epistemic adjectives are sure, impossible / not possible, certain, possible. Adverbs show the highest level of epistemicity (50‒100%), and among the 25 epistemic adverbs maybe, really, probably, kind of, sort of, perhaps are used most often. Nouns show the lowest epistemicity in the range of 0‒50%, and among 17 epistemic nouns, fact, feeling, doubt, idea, chance are most often used.
