Almost certainly and most definitely: Degree modifiers and epistemic stance

The semantic and pragmatic closeness between the adverbs certainly and definitely is apparent from dictionary definitions, corpus data, questionnaire results and their earlier meanings as attested in the Oxford English Dictionary. The similarities and some of the differences between these two adverbs have been described in Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007a,b). It is the aim of the present article to sharpen the picture, focusing on the observation that the two adverbs have different preferences regarding their choice of degree modifiers. Based on data from the British National Corpus, this study shows that while both almost and most are used to premodify both adverbs, there is a clear preference for almost certainly and for most definitely. Drawing on the notions of boundedness and scale as configurations (Paradis, 2008), the article argues that the preferences of certainly and definitely for different degree modifiers can be explained from their semantic–pragmatic development. At the same time these collocations create new meanings.