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.
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?
*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?
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
C1 adverbs: partially, respectively, somewhat, unquestionably
C2: undeniably
A search for the negative responses in NOW corpus:
? _RR not .
1 ? PROBABLY NOT. 6390
even though I asked you to.
2 ? ABSOLUTELY NOT. 2613
3 ? MAYBE NOT. 1345
4 ? CERTAINLY NOT. 692
5 ? PERHAPS NOT. 641
6 ? DEFINITELY NOT. 493
7 ? APPARENTLY NOT. 485
8 ? SURELY NOT. 439
9 ? OBVIOUSLY NOT. 309
10 ? CLEARLY NOT. 182
11 ? POSSIBLY NOT. 170
12 ? WHY NOT. 167
13 ? LIKELY NOT. 124
14 ? UNFORTUNATELY NOT. 95
15 ? HOPEFULLY NOT. 74