A Behavioral Profile of weak epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish

Abstract The present study employs the Behavioral Profile approach to better understand the distribution and use of weak epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish. Tokens of six synonymous adverbs ( a lo mejor , de pronto , posiblemente , quizá , quizás , tal vez ) were extracted from Corpus del Español (Web/Dialect) and coded for seven syntactic and semantic variables. The results of multiple hierarchical configural frequency analyses found that, while the adverbs share a common core profile, there are distributional differences related to clause position, grammatical mood, and temporal reference. The synchronic results are argued to align with previous diachronic research on epistemic adverbs. Namely, it was found that adverbs that entered the language more recently as epistemic ( a lo mejor , de pronto ) had less syntactic freedom, mainly appeared with verbs in the indicative, and showed a slight preference for future-oriented contexts – features seen in the earlier developmental stages of epistemic adverbs.