Adverbs of essence 101
subjectivity. Such co-occurrence is found to be “only a very weak tendency” in the
case of essentially while “fundamentally does not pattern at all like basically” in this
respect (Butler 2008b: 59). The translation data confirm the intermediate position
of essentially: there is one instance of an approximator equivalent in French and it
shares the equivalent eigenlijk (‘actually’) with basically in Dutch. Fundamentally
does not have any such translation equivalents in our corpus.
The second development which is shown very clearly in the translation data is
that of fundamentally into an amplifier, a marker of strong force. This is a develop-
ment which is not mentioned by Butler and which is indeed hard to see in a mono-
lingual corpus. But the development is not illogical: if something is emphasized
as being true ‘in a fundamental sense’ this may easily lead to an interpretation of
heightened commitment. The same process has taken place with really, which has
become a degree modifier with the force of an intensifier (see Quirk et al. 1985:
§8.99; Bolinger 1972: 95). Thus if one says that ‘He’s really intelligent’ this means
both ‘it is the reality that he is intelligent’ and ‘he is very intelligent’. In the same
way, ‘It is fundamentally wrong’ means ‘it is wrong in a fundamental sense’ and
can be interpreted as ‘it is very wrong’.
When we compare the developments towards a softener (basically) and
towards an amplifier (fundamentally) they seem to be contradictory at first sight.
The question arises how we can explain them. The core senses of the two adverbs
seem to be very similar: a ‘basis’ and a ‘foundation’ are semantically related. What
seems to be happening is that two different pragmatic implicatures are fore-
grounded and being conventionalised. If something is said to be ‘true in principle’
the implicature may be that it is not completely true. It is this pragmatic implica-
ture which is foregrounded when basically marks ‘more or less’, hence a lessening
of commitment. However, another implicature of saying that something applies
‘in principle’ may be that it applies in a prototypical, hence a strong sense. This is
foregrounded when fundamentally means ‘to a large extent’.
To conclude, this article has adduced evidence for the semantic and pragmatic
similarities and differences between three closely related adverbs via translation
data. This methodology has both confirmed tendencies arrived at by Butler on the
basis of monolingual corpora and provided some additional information. It needs
to be emphasized that the translation database used in this study is very small. The
tentative conclusions in this article need to be checked in a larger database. Special
attention should then be given to back-translations: if we find for instance that
basically is a translation of a Dutch amplifier, we should be able to check whether
this amplifier is also used as a translation of basically. In this way a more complete
picture can be arrived at.