Adverbs of essence 93
Corpus, consisting of Debates of the European Parliament, Fiction and the Unesco
Courier.^1 All three sub-corpora have text fragments in English, French and Dutch,
with all three languages functioning as source texts and as target texts. I searched
for English basically, essentially and fundamentally both as source items and as
translations from a French or a Dutch source. The total number of instances of
basically was 15, of essentially it was 31, and of fundamentally 8. Table 1 gives the
French equivalents.
Table 1. French equivalents of English basically, essentially, fundamentally
Equivalents basically essentially fundamentally
ESSENCE
en principe (‘in principle’) x
essentiellement (‘essentially’) xx xx
par essence (‘by definition’) x
pour l’essentiel (‘essentially’) xx
essentiel (adj.) (‘essential’) x
fondamentalement (‘fundamentally’) x xx
au fond (‘at bottom’) xx xx
en soi (‘in itself ’) x x
PARTICULARIZERS
principalement (‘mainly’) xx x
particulièrement (‘particularly’) x
surtout (especially’) x
en grande partie (‘largely’) x
en substance (‘in the main’) x
APPROXIMATORS
dans l’ensemble (‘in general’) x
généralement (‘generally’) x
environ (‘about’) x
AMPLIFIERS
très (‘very’) x
très fortement (‘very strongly’) x
massivement (‘massively’) x
largement (‘substantially’) x
TRUTH EMPHASIZERS
vraiment (‘truly’) x
OTHER x
ZERO xx x
- For a description of the Namur Corpus see http://www.kuleuven-kortrijk.be/~hpauluss/NC/
NC_descr.html