Approaching epistemic modality in English and Spanish: a Corpus-based. Contrastive study of probably and probablemente

Abstract

Modality is a broad and fuzzy area and modal meanings are mapped in quite different ways cross-linguistically. This paper is an attempt to describe the expression of epistemic modality in English and Spanish by focusing on the most commonly employed epistemic adverbs in these languages: probably and its cognate probablemente. This paper reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of these adverbs, which analyses issues related to their syntactic function, placement, and the co-occurrence of these adverbs with other modal markers, mainly modal verbs in English and tense, mood and lexical verbs in Spanish. Empirical data are extracted from two large monolingual corpora of contemporary English and Spanish, Cobuild/Bank of English and CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual), in order to carry out the analysis on authentic instances of language in use. The results not only provide a description of the use of the two adverbs, but also a general picture of the different grammatical resources associated to the expression of epistemic modality in English and Spanish. The future applications of the results lie in areas related to interlinguistic communication involving the two working languages, in particular in foreign language teaching and translation