The english adverbs ‘evidently’ and ‘obviously’ as markers of epistemic evaluation in the american english language

Abstract

The paper discusses two English adverbs – ‘evidently’ and ‘obviously’, – which tend to be used not only as adverbs, but also as discourse markers of epistemic evaluation. The ongoing semantic shift in their meaning has lead to the appearance of multiple instances of their use as markers of evidentiality and epistemic evaluation. In other words, ‘evidently’ and ‘obviously’ can point to the source of information which lets the speaker consider the utterance completely true. The next step in the semantic shift is the use of ‘evidently’ and ‘obviously’ as markers of the so called problematic truthfulness of the utterance. The problematic truthfulness of the utterance is understood here as an epistemic stance of the speaker who, for some reason, cannot be completely sure about the truthfulness of the utterance. The data for the study was taken from The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the parallel subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. The contexts were divided into five chronological layers: 1800–1849, 1850–1899, 1900–1949, 1950–2000 and 2000–2017 (for the analysis of the last layer data from COCA were used). The analysis shows that the use of ‘evidently’ and ‘obviously’ as epistemic markers of speaker’s complete assuredness of the truthfulness of the utterance is explained by the original meanings of visual perception of the two adverbs, while their use as epistemic markers of problematic truthfulness becomes possible due to the semantic shift from visual perception to understanding.