Epistemic Disjuncts in Early Modern English

This paper offers a description of epistemic disjunct adverbs in Early Modern English. Section I outlines the development of epistemic disjuncts in the history of English, concentrating on the kinds of comment they could lexicalise.. Briefly, OE epistemic adverbs only encoded the speaker's comment on the high probability or importance of the proposition they related to. ME allowed a new type of comment, namely on the low probability of the adjoined proposition. In the second section, the data drawn from the computarised Helsinki Corpus suggest that though Early Modern English is a transitional period in epistemic disjunct development, it shows greater semantic diversification than OE and ME. Syntactic and distributional features are considered in every case. Finally, sociolinguistic variables and the registers and text types which favour the occurrence of these adverbs are also specified.