On adverbial English - French faux amis: a contrastive view of actually and actuellement

The subject of the present thesis is a contrastive analysis of two formally similar adverbs, the English actually and the French actuellement, which despite their com- mon etymological origins nowadays render different meaning. The theoretical chapter deals with classification of the two adverbs; in particular their semantic roles and syntactic functions. The latter section of this chapter is concerned with the historical development of the semantic meaning and concentrates on the common etymological origins as well as on the possible interchangeability of the adverbs. The research part focuses on the detailed analysis of the two adverbs based on the examples excerpted from the synchronic monolingual corpora (British National Corpus for English and Lextutor-Parlé for French) and describes their semantic roles as well as syntactic functions. The second part of this chapter is an analysis of the translation equivalents of actually and actuellement. The material for this section was excerpted from the parallel corpus InterCorp (fiction Core and the subcorpus Europarl). This thesis aims to identify possible discourse functions developed in the French actuellement and explore the translation correspondences of the two adverbs. Key words: actually, actuellement, discourse functions, faux-ami