ADVERBS as RESPONSE TOKENS – English Grammar Profiler

When you ‘listen’ to someone speaking in a conversation, you can respond with short phrases that add to the conversation. These utterances carry information such as ‘certainty‘ and sometimes a single word like an adverb is all you might say or just add the negative version with ‘NOT‘.  Here is a negative example:

Absolutely not.
No way, no more blind dates.

listen

Here is a list of the most frequent one-word (adverb) responses to questions.

This list came from a search in the iWeb corpus, and then it had manual removal of any adverbs that clearly have no possibility of being related to certainty.  To some degree being related to certainty requires context.

? _RR .

*not all are to do with certainty.

1 ? ABSOLUTELY. 7012

Do I find identity and comfort in this realization? 

Sure.

Now, do I envy and hate all you truly creative people?

Absolutely.

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*In the above example it is a rhetorical question answered by the same person.  Also, note ‘sure‘ is an adjective, but it still is a short response token that refers to certainty.

2 ? MAYBE. 5786

Are they unquestionably, and undeniably stupid?

Maybe.

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3 ? SURE. 5764 4 ? PROBABLY. 2954 5 ? PERHAPS. 2500 6 ? HARDLY. 1647 9 ? DEFINITELY. 1412 10 ? POSSIBLY. 1326 15 ? EXACTLY. 959 17 ? CERTAINLY. 852 18 ? SERIOUSLY. 774 22 ? REALLY. 312 24 ? INDEED. 250 26 ? UNDOUBTEDLY. 180 27 ? TOTALLY. 171 31 ? OBVIOUSLY. 141 35 ? APPARENTLY. 85 41 ? POTENTIALLY. 65 43 ? NATURALLY. 58 44 ? SOMEWHAT. 55 45 ? KINDA. 54 47 ? SURELY. 48 48 ? MOSTLY. 45 51 ? COMPLETELY. 41 57 ? PRECISELY. 36 59 ? LITERALLY. 35 62 ? EXTREMELY. 32 65 ? UNQUESTIONABLY. 31 67 ? PARTLY. 27 68 ? QUITE. 27 70 ? BARELY. 25 77 ? CLEARLY. 19 78 ? EVENTUALLY. 19 81 ? ARGUABLY. 17 82 ? JUST. 17 83 ? PARTIALLY. 16 87 ? UNDENIABLY. 14

88 ? SLIGHTLY. 14