A contrastive English-German-Dutch analysis of modal adverbs of epistemic possibility: ENG perhaps/maybe, GER vielleicht/womöglich, DUT misschien

Previous research has shown that the epistemic uses of the modal verbs ENG may/might, GER können/könnte and DUT kunnen do not correspond to each other: while in English, the modal verb might can be (more or less) regarded as the default form of expression for subjective epistemic possibility, in German and Dutch the epistemic adverbs (especially GER vielleicht and DUT misschien) take over a considerable part of the functions that are fulfilled by the modal verb in English (Mortelmans, in prep.). This observation suggests that modal verbs and modal adverbs in these languages should be considered under the same premises (contra Leiss 2009, Diewald 1999, Doitchinov 2001, but along the lines of Nuyts 2001). 

In my contribution, I will therefore focus on modal sentence adverbs of epistemic possibility from a contrastive perspective, thereby also taking into account the English modal adverbs perhaps and maybe (cf. also Suzuki 2018). More specifically, I will address the following questions:

1. In German, not only vielleicht, but also womöglich (and to a lesser extent möglicherweise) regularly function as modal sentence adverbs of epistemic possibility. Vielleicht is often said to be highly polyfunctional (Péteri 2013): it can also be used in various types of directives (e.g. to mitigate a request, Ramat & Ricca 1998: 193), and it can be embedded under both factive and non-factive verbs (Ehrich 2010). The question arises as to whether womöglich and möglicherweise exhibit the same polyfunctionality.
2. In Dutch, there is only one sentence adverb of epistemic possibility (misschien, see van der Auwera 1983). To what extent does its use correspond to the one of German vielleicht and/or English perhaps/maybe? The analysis will show that misschien very strongly resembles vielleicht in its polyfunctionality, on the one hand, and its scope and positional preferences, on the other.
3. For English, it can be questioned whether there is a kind of distribution of labour between the modal verbs (might/may) and the modal adverbs (perhaps/maybe)? It remains unclear under which conditions epistemic modal adverbs are favoured over epistemic modal verbs, although corpus studies indicate that embedded clauses favour modal verbs (I think she might be an x vs. I think she maybe is an x). I will show how scope and sentence position are crucial factors in the use of maybe/perhaps, also differentiating them from German vielleicht and Dutch misschien. 

The analysis is based on a self-created contrastive corpus of present-day crime fiction novels – whereby original texts in UK English, Dutch and German will be compared with their translations in the respective languages.