Evidential adverbs of clearly and obviously: a corpus-based analysis

Abstract

This paper explores the usage of the synonymous evidential adverbs clearly and obviously. It presents an analysis based on the data from Corpus of Contemporary American English by looking at both spoken and written context. Although clearly and obviously can be used interchangeably in contexts, the findings reveal some differences of the two. Both adverbs function as an epistemic adverb, however, its result reveals that the difference between the two is that clearly can also function as a manner adverb when collocated with several verbs. Regarding evidentiality of the two adverbs, clearly carries high evidentiality with truthfulness while obviously gives an evaluation of the information without guaranteeing truthfulness.