The acceptability of epistemic adverbs in intersubjective contexts: Consideration of epistemic de pronto in Colombian Spanish

Abstract

The present study employs an acceptability judgment task to determine the degree to which native speakers of Colombian Spanish accept three epistemic adverbs (de pronto, posiblemente, tal vez) in intersubjective contexts of speech act hedging. 85 native speakers of Colombian Spanish completed a 17-item contextualized acceptability judgment task in which they provided Likert ratings of the degree to which they accepted the three adverbs in contexts of epistemic commitment, representative speech act hedging (opinions, conclusions) and directive speech act hedging (suggestions). It was found that tal vez was accepted at moderately high to high rates for both types of hedging, while posiblemente was accepted at moderately high rates for contexts of hedging representative speech acts (specifically, the mitigation of conclusions), but was rated moderately low in contexts of hedging directive speech acts. De pronto was only moderately accepted in contexts of hedging directive speech acts and rated moderately low in contexts of hedging representative speech acts. This research contributes to the field by providing empirical description of the pragmatic capabilities of epistemic de pronto as well as experimental evidence of the variable use capabilities of otherwise synonymous adverbs. Additionally, the pragmatic restrictions observed in the more recently epistemic de pronto support existing theories of semantic change which note an increase in intersubjectivity over time.