Subjective or objective evaluation? Prediction in Academic Lectures

This paper considers the way in which academics express their position in argumentation and looks at expressions of certainty and uncertainty in lectures. A distinction is made between when a speaker makes an objective prediction on the basis of scientific evidence and when they use a more subjective assessment. Two words with evaluative significance are selected; the adjective likely and the adverb probably and investigated using the MICASE corpus. The analysis shows that likely expresses likelihood when the prevailing semantic prosody is objective and scientific while probably expresses a similar meaning in more interactive discourse where there are largely subjective semantic prosodies.