Epistemic adverbs, like other markers of epistemic modality, are concerned with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of the proposition. In other words, they indicate that the speaker considers certain situations as possible, impossible, probable, certain, or uncertain. At the same time, they signal the author's presence in the text, and invite the reader to make his/her own conclusions and interpretations. The use of modal markers has been demonstrated to differ across academic disciplines, but the specific differences concerning the use of epistemic adverbs have not been studied systematically. This paper investigates the use of epistemic adverbs in research articles representing six disciplines belonging to three different branches of science: the humanities (linguistics and literary studies), the social sciences (law and sociology), and the natural sciences (physics and medicine), with the aim of establishing discipline-specific tendencies in their use. The study is based on a corpus of 160 research articles compiled by the author. It begins with an attempt at delimiting the category of epistemic adverbs in English. After that, a list of the most frequent epistemic adverbs in the subcorpora of all the disciplines is established and discussed. The study demonstrates that frequent use of epistemic adverbs is largely a property of research articles in the humanities and social sciences. Medical and physics research articles use them significantly less often. The most frequent epistemic adverbs in the research articles under analysis include indeed,

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It has frequently been noted that non-native speakers of English find it difficult to express their views with the appropriate degree of conviction. However, many of the problems which non-native speakers have with specific modal expressions are still waiting to be identified. The aim of this paper is to compare native and non-native (student) uses of two English epistemics: "surely" and "for sure". The students' uses are mostly examined with reference to PICLE (the Polish subsection of the International Corpus of Learner English), while native uses are analyzed on the basis of two corpora of texts written by native speakers of English available at the PICLE website, the British National Corpus, and scholarly publications concerning the two particles. The study demonstrates that Polish students tend to wrongly assume the functions of surely and for sure to be identical with the functions of the Polish expression "na pewno" (a literal equivalent of "for sure" with a broader range of uses). In consequence, they use the challenging and pressure-building particle "surely" in contexts which require neutral epistemic adverbs, such as "clearly". They also tend to put "for sure" in positions characteristic of epistemic adverbs, and use it in formal discourse.