A Corpus-based Study of Synonymous Epistemic Adverbs Perhaps, Probably, Maybe and Possibly

Epistemic adverbs perhaps, probably, maybe, and possibly are near-synonyms, which share similar denotational meanings but differ in their usages. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as the analyzing tool, this study examines the usage differences among epistemic adverbs by conducting the analysis of concordance, n-grams, and word sketch difference. The results show that different functions of SkE can make different contributions to the discrimination of epistemic adverbs. At the end of the paper, the pedagogical implications of this study are discussed.