100 Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
- Discussion and conclusions
The first and modest aim of this article was to see whether findings on the similari-
ties and differences between the semantically very close adverbs basically , essen-
tially and fundamentally reported on by Butler (2008a, 2008b and 2008c) would
be corroborated by translation corpora. The idea behind this methodology is that
cross-linguistic equivalents obtained via translation corpora can throw light on the
meaning and especially on subtle contextual shades of meaning of items in one
of the languages involved (see e.g. Johansson 2007: 28–30). It appears that Butler’s
findings are indeed corroborated. The following meaning aspects emerged from
the translations. First, the core sense of ‘essence’ is expressed in several equivalents
in both French and Dutch, words referring to the ‘core’, ‘the foundation’, ‘sub-
stance’. This is the first part of the definition of the adverbs as given by Greenbaum
(1969), who says that they “assert that what is being said is true in principle”. The
second part of Greenbaum’s definition, “despite minor qualifications that might
be made” is a pragmatic implicature which has become conventionalized: speakers
say that something is true ‘in principle’ in cases where they want to highlight or at
least recognize that it may not be true or less applicable in some other aspects or
cases. This meaning aspect is brought out explicitly in French and Dutch equiva-
lents of the adverbs which convey the senses ‘mainly’, ‘especially’, ‘to a large extent’.
The particularizers as it were forestall objections by building in the possibility of
non-applicability of the assertion.
Then there are two developments which seem not to be shared (to the same
extent) by all three adverbs. The first is the result of a process of intersubjectifica-
tion. Butler pointed out that basically has developed into a highly intersubjective
marker which has functions similar to such routinised items as I think, you know,
I mean, i.e. to tone down the force of the utterance for reasons of face and polite-
ness. This development is typical of basically but not of the other two, Butler claims
(2008b: 59). The translation data corroborate this. The approximators express that
something is true in an approximate sense only, not in an exact sense. Obviously,
intersubjective basically predictably occurs most typically in casual conversation,
which is not represented in the translation corpus. There is however indirect cross-
linguistic evidence. The Dutch adverb eigenlijk occurs as an equivalent of basically
in the translation corpus (see Table 2) but it is also the prototypical equivalent
of actually as a pragmatic marker (see Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2004).
Further, monolingual research on Dutch eigenlijk (Moerman 2009) shows that it
is also used as a discourse marker with functions close to those of actually. We
can conclude that basically has developed a highly intersubjective function which
comes close to that of actually. Butler (2008b) found that the strongly subjective
meaning of basically is shown by its frequent co-occurrence with other markers of