The aim of this paper is to propose a comparative analysis of the two French sentence adverbs franchement and personnellement , within a polyphonic framework ( see Anscombre- Ducrot 1983). Our claim is that each of these adverbs qualifies the utterance in which it occurs in a different way: while the first one modifies the act of saying , the second works as a modal operator, more specifically, as a domain adverb of the speaker’s assumption carried by the proposition. As we shall see, both syntactic and semantic lexical properties of these adverbs provide two different types of polyphonic structures, that is to say, franchement and personnellement both work as polyphonic markers that express different kinds of relations between the speaker of an utterance and the discursive roles it convokes: these relations are exactly what we are intending to account for here.