Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

92 Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen

Finally, Example (19) illustrates the typical collocation of fundamentally with neg-

ative evaluations (see Butler 2008a), while Example (20) shows that this adverb

also collocates with positive evaluative words. The observed preference for nega-

tive contexts may simply be the result of a general tendency for negative evalua-

tions to be more frequently expressed than positive ones.

(19) Now I think that approach to health care is fundamentally wrong (...)

(BNC, spoken, meeting)

(20) The package does seem to be put together in in in one way that seems to be

fundamentally fair. (BNC, spoken, lecture)

3.4 Summing up

The three adverbs are semantically close together in that they share the sense of

‘essence’: something is said to be true in essence. The paraphrase using ‘in prin-

ciple’ (Greenbaum 1969; Quirk et al. 1985) suggests the pragmatic implicature ‘even

though there are exceptions’. Such contexts of contrast are found with all three

adverbs. The main differences, as found by Butler (2008a, 2008b) have to do with

preferences of collocation (though here also they share lexico-semantic environ-

ments) and the development of a strongly subjective meaning in the case of basi-

cally. The above description also found that of the three fundamentally is closest

to its core sense and still behaves like a manner adverb in many contexts, which

is not the case with the other two. Further, fundamentally has a stronger force and

expresses stronger commitment to the truth value than basically , while essentially

takes a middle position there. In Section 4 I describe the results of a translation

approach in order to see whether translations corroborate these findings from

monolingual data and whether any other similarities and/or differences are revealed.

4. Equivalents of the adverbs in French

Butler (2008c) examines the differences between the English adverbs and their

formal equivalents in four Romance languages. I restrict myself to French. French

has only two of the three forms, viz. essentiellement and fondamentalement (Butler

2008c: 112). In terms of frequency English and French behave similarly in that

fundamentally/fondamentalement are least frequent. In the present article the

focus is on English and I am less interested in the behaviour of the formal equiva-

lents in French than in the semantic equivalents in French as well as in Dutch,

in the belief that they can throw more light on the semantics and pragmatics

of the English adverbs. The corpus used for this part was the trilingual Namur