Adverbs of essence 91
3.3 Fundamentally
An important syntactic difference between basically and essentially on the one
hand and fundamentally on the other is that the latter is still used as a manner
adverb. This is illustrated in (15) below.
(15) Will it [the Federal Republic of Germany] be ready to accept demiliterisation,
adopt a neutral status, and fundamentally restructure its economic and other
relations with Eastern Europe? (BNC, written, newspaper)
The meaning in (15) is ‘will the FRG restructure its relations in a fundamental
way?’. This implies the negation of ‘in a superficial way’. As the sense ‘not super-
ficially’ leads to ‘profoundly’, ‘to an important extent’, fundamentally acquires the
meaning of ‘very (much)’, ‘considerably’. This is most clearly the case when it
functions as a premodifier. Example (16) illustrates this.
(16) It was the one time in my life I’ve gone to pieces –; lost my mind, I suppose.
That was the effect you had on me. I was fundamentally hurt and hitting back.
I couldn’t bear to see you again. (BNC, written, fiction).
In (16) basically would have a weakening instead of a strengthening effect, and
hence not be a contextually appropriate option, while essentially would tend to
evoke that there was a sense in which the speaker was ‘not hurt’. Due to its close-
ness to its core sense of ‘in a fundamental way’, fundamentally is at the other end
of a scale from weak to strong force:
Weak Strong
basically essentially fundamentally
The greater closeness of fundamentally to its core semantic sense is also evidenced
by the fact that it occurs in the comparative and superlative forms, unlike the other
two adverbs. Examples (17) and (18) show this:
(17) This submission appears to us unsound on several grounds. First, because rule
14A in any event expressly provides for the court to order otherwise if appropri-
ate. More fundamentally, however, because the suggested analogy at once breaks
down when it is recognised that the public interest immunity in question is not,
at least not principally, confidentiality-based. (BNC, written, academic)
(18) These concern: the subject; the issue of how critical resistance to dominant
codes ever develops in the absence of an adequate conception of the subject;
and, perhaps most fundamentally, the traditional problem facing any philosophy
seeking to reduce knowledge to interests tout court, of using rational arguments
to prove the limits on rationality. (BNC, written, academic)