Introducing the unexpected: A Syntactic-Semantic Account of Actually and In Fact in a Corpus of Modern English

Abstract

Actually and in fact have been generally regarded as equivalent and interchangeable without leading to any significant differences in the meaning of the containing utterances: as a result, not many attempts have been made to discover potential differences between the two. The present study investigates the differences as well as the similarities between actually and in fact in their distribution and use in two corpora of American English. Based upon an analysis of tokens from the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English (FROWN) and from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), the article proposes that “unexpectedness” is the core meaning shared by actually and in fact, and that the difference between the two lies in the typical association of each with the various ways of signaling “unexpectedness”. The study also shows that in real discoursive contexts actually and in fact develop a number of different uses that are peripheral to core meaning.