Revisiting the multifunctionality of the adverbials of ACT and FACT in a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

The last two decades have seen a great rise of interest in the corpus-based contrastive studies on the multifunctional nature of modal adverbials and discourse markers. Most of the attention has been devoted to the multifunctionality of the “actuality and reality” (Biber et al. 1999) adverbs actually, in fact, really, indeed and truly and their meanings have been proved to be very much discourse, syntactic and social context-dependent both diachronically and synchronically (Schwenter and Traugott 2000; Aijmer 2003; Paradis 2003; Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2004; Lewis 2006; Aijmer 2007; Mortier and Degand 2009; Defour et al. 2010; Simon-Vandenbergen 2013). The description of the complex and dynamic relief of their functional and semantic-pragmatic potential has been mainly based on the translation paradigm analysis. The languages dealt with are either Germanic (English, Dutch, Swedish) or Romance (French, Spanish). The present paper aims to check how the semantic pragmatic meanings of the two English adverbials (actually and in fact) are expressed in Lithuanian, a Baltic language. With the focus on the scope of multifunctionality of the adverbials under study an attempt will be made to find out how Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) ‘mirror’ the English actuality adverbials, i.e. how much language-specific or resembling the English adverbials the Lithuanian TCs are in terms of form and meaning. The study will also look at the pragmatic functions Lithuanian TCs perform in academic discourse thus attempting to arrive at the description of their functional potential.