An Experimental Investigation of Epistemic Modal Adverbs and Adjectives

Abstract

This paper analyses epistemic modal adverbs and adjectives, both theoretically and experimentally, while addressing the prevalent conceptions of modality and context update. While modality is standardly viewed and represented uniformly, we show that epistemic modal adverbs and adjectives differ in various linguistic environments, and present experimental evidence that supports the claim that epistemic modal adverbs and adjectives differ in terms of cognitive processing. While context update is standardly viewed as a two-stage process composed of assertion and acceptance/rejection, we present experimental evidence that supports the claim that there is also a stage of evaluation, in which the hearer considers the content of the assertion and the implications of adding this content to the common ground.