84 Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen
and thus as further evidence arrived at via alternative routes. Section 2 looks at the
main findings reported on in Butler’s studies. Section 3 illustrates the behaviour of
the three adverbs in Present-Day English with examples from the British National
Corpus (BNC). Sections 4 and 5 examine the adverbs from a translation perspec-
tive and discuss to what extent Butler’s conclusions are thereby confirmed and
to what extent additional aspects of their meaning come to the surface. Section 6
draws conclusions about the status of the three adverbs in Present-Day English.- Main findings in Butler (2008a, 2008b, 2008c)
While a brief summary cannot do justice to the richness of data and interpretations
provided by Butler’s studies, I shall in this section try to single out those findings
which directly concern English (to the exclusion of the Romance cognates) and
which seem to me to be the most important ones for establishing semantic and prag-
matic similarities and differences between the three adverbs in Present-day English.
Butler refers to Greenbaum (1969) for a pioneering study of English adverbs
which classifies basically, essentially and fundamentally as one semantic group
because they “assert that what is being said is true in principle, despite minor
qualifications that might be made” (1969: 206). Butler further points out that dic-
tionaries give very similar definitions of the three items, often even defining them
in terms of one another. Butler’s work was therefore intended to shed further light
on what they share and on how they differ.
Firstly, in terms of relative frequency there is a clear difference between the
adverbs. Butler’s Table 1 (2008a: 151) indicates that in the BNC (approximately
100m words) the proportion between the adverbs is as follows: basically accounts
for 41%, essentially for 48% and fundamentally for 11%. This seems to mean that
essentially takes up nearly half the number of occurrences of the adverbs, closely
followed by basically while fundamentally is marginal in terms of frequency. The
picture becomes clearer, however, if spoken and written language are split up.
Fundamentally remains relatively infrequent in writing (14%) but drops to only
2% in speech. But the most spectacular shift takes place in the relative frequency
of basically, which accounts for 81% in speech, while essentially drops to 17%.
It appears then that basically is much more frequent in speech than in writing,
that at the other extreme fundamentally is practically absent in speech, and that
essentially is in the middle (17% in speech, 57% in writing). The latter is the most
frequent adverb of the three overall, but clearly more typical of written language.
The differences in distribution over speech and writing may be partly explained
as resulting from differences in formality, but Butler (2008a and especially 2008b)
shows that there is another explanation as well.