Adverbs of Certainty
Background
Recently I’ve been thinking about words like obviously and naturally. There are many similar words. In order of strength:
- definitely
- obviously
- naturally
- possibly
- maybe
I’d like to learn more about them to use them more effectively. Years ago, I’ve transitioned from using naturally instead of obviously. I also love using the word maybe. With regard to these types of words, I want to know:
- The name of their classification
- How they relate to the rest of linguistics
Research
After a bit of research, I’ve come to learn that these words are colloquially called adverbs of certainty. However, that doesn’t seem to be a linguistic term. Instead, modal adverbs seems to be what I’m looking for. It’s related to grammatical mood.
Modal adverbs are adverbs that express modality.
Modality refers to how language can express relationships to reality or truth. They include:
- Modal auxiliaries
- Model adjectives
The concept of modality can be broken up into flavors. Some include:
- Epistemic flavor: possibilities compatible with some body of knowledge
- Deontic flavor: possibilities which are required given laws or norms that are obeyed in reality
For the case mentioned in the introduction to this blog, the epistemic flavor applies the most.
Learnings
When I think about how the “world ought to be”, I should think about the epistemic flavor of modality.
When I think about an event, whether inherently probable, deduced from past facts, or an inference from external information, I should think about the deontic flavor of modality.
Very simply, modality can be thought of a type of modifier for some described event or fact.