Adverbs of Certainty

This lesson is on adverbs of certainty adverbs of certainty answer the question How sure.

So they tell us how certain or sure we are about something and they are placed after the helper or modal verbs.

But before other verbs and if we look at negative sentences without verbs of certainty they can seem a bit strange at first but we look at examples of all of these they usually place before the verb as in Jane definitely went to work today Ted clearly needs a lesson in manners.

I certainly need a shower after going to the gym and in all cases the adverb is in italics to make it easy to see.

But their place after helper or modal verbs and the verb to be so I would certainly be upset if you forgot my birthday.

the train will probably arrive late again Martin is undoubtedly the smartest one here John has certainly forgotten our appointment if we look at negative sentences for adverbs of certainty they can seem to look a bit odd or even break the rules so we’ll have a look at this if we take the following sentence it will definitely rain tomorrow.

We want to make that a negative so what do we do it won’t definitely rain tomorrow or it it will not definitely rain tomorrow.

Now first there’s two there’s two main problems with this.

Firstly people don’t actually say this.

And also if they did say it it wouldn’t be what we want it to say so the opposite of it will definitely rain tomorrow where we’re certain that it will rain we want to indicate a certainty that it’s going to be dry not rain so the meaning of the sentence it will not definitely rain tomorrow actually means it won’t definitely rain but it might and that’s not what we want to say.

So we have to do something else and we can’t use this construct the preferred and correct way would be to say it will definitely not rain tomorrow.

But what people will say and people love their contractions people often say it definitely won’t rain tomorrow which seems to go a little bit against the rules that we’ve just stated but it is what people say and it is what you will hear a lot.

Now we’ve looked at a handful of adverbs of uncertainty.

There are really many more and they can be ordered so if we look at this table we have some adverbs of certainty ranging from definitely through probably maybe probably not and definitely not and by definitely we can attach a certainty of 100 percent to that and by definitely not we can attach a certainty of 0 percent and we can look at the examples and you can sort of see maybe on a pause the video here and just look through the examples and make sure you’re happy with them but the question is what sort of certainty do we attach to the adverbs between 0 and 100 almost put might say well maybe is 50 50 so maybe might be 50 percent probably some people might say 70 sometimes at 80 some might say 90.

In other words the whole point is is very subjective between zero and a hundred and you really have to take from context and know the people to know kind of when they say probably or maybe how kind of certain they mean it.