96 Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
small database shows up equivalents of fundamentally in this semantic class as well
as – to a lesser extent – of basically and essentially. Let us first look at basically since
at first sight this sense contradicts the tendency towards downtoning.
(26) Behind the complicated title of this directive amending a directive, etc. there
lies a basically simple operation. (DEP, D source)
Ce titre compliqué pour cette directive portant modification etc. cache en
réalité une operation très simple lancée par la Commission.
In (26) the use of basically was clearly triggered by the opposition between ‘com-
plicated’ and ‘simple’: the essence is simple while the surface is complicated; in
other words the complicated surface hides the simple essence. The French word
très (‘very’) does not convey essence but rather highlights the contrast by express-
ing that ‘simple’ applies to a high degree. This implicature is stronger in funda-
mentally because the latter does not have the weakening sense that basically has
developed. Example (27) illustrates this.
(27) The council’s common position indeed differs fundamentally from the
Commission’s original proposal and from what we debated in the first reading.
(DEP, D source)
En effet, la position commune du Conseil diffère très fortement de la propo-
sition d’origine de la Commission et du texte que nous avons discuté ici en
première lecture.
It should be noted that the Dutch source item is in grote mate (‘to a large extent’,
‘considerably’) and that the French translation thus follows the source closely. The
English translation, however, shows that the translator found fundamentally to
render that sense in the context. Consider also Example (28) from the Unesco
Courier (UC):
(28) Both felt that the modern age fundamentally shifts the boundaries of the
sacred. (UC)
Tous deux ont senti – (...) – que l’ère moderne déplace massivement les limites
du sacré.
In the UC corpus the source is not known. What we see is that the Dutch text
has op grote schaal (‘on a large scale’), which suggests that either French or Dutch
was the source language, and that fundamentally is a translation. There is also a
translation equivalent which was labelled ‘other’ in Table 1 which actually renders
the same sense of amplification: