The multifunctionality of ‘possible’ modal adverbs: A comparative look

The principal concern in this study is to provide a detailed discussion of the pragmatic properties of ‘possible’ modal adverbs, mainly by comparing conceivably with perhaps. First, we identify two factors regarding the occurrence patterns of these modal adverbs: their cooccurrence with modal verbs and their position in the clause, both of which are pragmatic-related characteristics. Two techniques were employed: analysis of manually coded corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and analysis of questionnaire data (from a completion test). The combined results demonstrate that the two adverbs display opposite functional characteristics, and that the factors influencing the use of these adverbs are strongly associated with the contexts of modality and discourse.