Abstract
This article presents a contrastive study of the discursive performance of the adverbs of probability peut-être, forse and poate in three Romance languages (French, Italian and Romanian). These adverbs are first discussed in terms of their historical evolution and then their use is synchronically studied. The data used for the study are spoken and written texts in the three languages: for French, the study examines the BFM, CLAPI, Frantext and 88milSMS databases; for Italian, the data stem from the CLaVo, LIT 2006 and TLIO databases; for Romanian, we studied interviews from various websites and the CoRoLA database