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

English adverbs of essence and

their equivalents in Dutch and French

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen

University of Ghent, Belgium

The adverbs basically, essentially and fundamentally are here referred to as

‘adverbs of essence’. Butler (2008a, 2008b, 2008c) has studied these adverbs and

their formal equivalents in four Romance languages in monolingual corpora.

This article takes a translation perspective and zooms in on the English adverbs

and their equivalents in French and in Dutch. By focusing on the translation

equivalents the study is able to examine Butler’s findings from a different and

complementary perspective. The results confirm Butler’s claim that from the

point of view of pragmatic development and in particular from the point of

view of intersubjectification, basically has advanced furthest, fundamentally

least, and essentially takes a middle position.

Keywords: adverbs of essence, basically, essentially, fundamentally, cross-

linguistic comparison, translation equivalents, English, French, Dutch

1. Introduction

This article takes a closer look at the English adverbs basically, essentially and fun-
damentally in Present-Day English. These adverbs are here referred to as adverbs
of essence because they have that notion as their core sense: they express the con-
cepts of ‘basis’, ‘essence’ and ‘foundation’, conveying that something is the case
in a basic, essential or fundamental way. These three adverbs have been studied
extensively by Butler (2008a, 2008b, and 2008c), both from a monolingual point
of view (using the British National Corpus) and a contrastive point of view, using
corpora in four Romance languages in order to compare the behaviour of the
formal equivalents which exist in those languages. This article focuses entirely on
English, but uses translations as its methodology. By looking at cross-linguistic
equivalents of these adverbs as they appear in a translation corpus, the study aims
to shed further light on the English items. It is meant as additional testing of the
conclusions which Butler was able to draw on the basis of the monolingual corpora