Chapter 1 Introduction This chapter describes the background of this study, identifies aspects concerning adverbs of certainty that have not been examined closely so far and thus rationalizes the purpose. The anization of the paper is presented at the end of the chapter. Research background In addition municating ideas, native speakers normally “qualify their commitment to assertions, soften and hedge their judgments and orders, boost and strengthen the expression of their feelings and opinions in a variety of ways. In other words, they use linguistic devices to modify the information they convey: to express their attitude to the content of their utterance and to reflect their perceptions of their relationship to those listening”(Holmes, 1982: 9). To ensure that their expressions are native-like, second language learners need to learn how to express mitment to an assertion, as well as conveying their attitudes in a variety of social contexts. Yet learning to express and interpret the degree mitment and attitudes is not an easy task for EFL learners. One important reason why this is difficult is the wide range of devices available to express degree of certainty and conviction. Holmes (1982:16) identifies a full range of lexical devices used to express degree of certainty in a variety of written and spoken texts. The linguistic devices employed by native speakers include modal auxiliaries, modal nouns, adjectives, adverbs and lexical verbs. It is useful for the EFL learners to be familiar with the adverbs for expressing certainty and conviction. This dissertation focuses on adverbs of certainty in particular. Previous literature on English adverbs of certainty includes parts of influential grammars (Quirk et al.., 1985; Biber et al.., 2000; Huddleston and Pullum, 2002), parts of books on adverbs and adverbials (Greenbaum, 1969), monographs on the 1 combination between modal auxiliaries and adverbs (
