This paper argues for a conceptual distinction between epistemic modality and discourse
strategy, and aims to disentangle both notions by showing how they relate to each other on
the basis of corpus data. The meanings of six Galician epistemic adverbs are studied using
samples taken from an electronic corpus. 1800 observations were coded for the relevant
meaning categories, including epistemic modality, mitigation, strengthening and other
strategic and non-strategic uses, such as tendency and dynamic modality. The results reveal …