The Epistemic Marker Určit Ě in the Light of Corpus Data

Abstract The paper presents a pilot study for a research project on epistemic modality and/or evidentiality markers in Czech. The study focuses on the expression určitě. Although, this marker is typically considered to signal high certainty, the dictionary of standard Czech (Slovník spisovné češtiny, SSČ) also offers an alternative meaning of probability, indicating a lower degree of certainty. We use parallel data from the InterCorp v15 corpus to determine whether the probability meaning can be identified unequivocally in real language data and whether it correlates with specific translation equivalents, linguistic features, or lexical context. Based on our findings, we propose an alternative method for distinguishing between different shades of meaning based on the communicative functions of the utterances, and we draw conclusions regarding the relevance of individual grammatical and lexical clues in context for future annotations.