Abstract
The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely anche, aussi and also – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.
Highlights
In a number of cross-linguistic studies on Additive Focus Adverbs ( AFAs) – which form a subgroup of Focus Adverbs ( FAs1) and include, among many others, Italian anche and pure, French aussi and également, Spanish también, English and too, German auch and Dutch ook – it has been shown that, albeit sharing a bundle of basic semantic and syntactic properties, these adverbs can still vary quite significantly at least in terms of their frequency of use and syntactic distribution
This paper is organized as follows: § 2 offers a brief semantic and syntactic characterization of the most commonly occurring AFAs in Italian, French and English; § 3 describes the options available to these AFAs to focus on the Subject of a canonical sentence; § 4 presents the results of our empirical study, firstly by describing the overall frequency of use of anche, aussi, in our corpus of online news and, in canonical sentences, and secondly by analyzing the contexts in which these AFAs focus on the canonical Subject; § 5 summarizes our main findings and points to some open questions to be addressed in future research
We indicate if in a given sentence slot the AFA takes a narrow scope over the canonical Subject, i. e. if it only associates with the Subject, or a wide scope (WS), i. e. if it can associate with the canonical Subject as well as other sentence constituents
Summary
In a number of cross-linguistic studies on Additive Focus Adverbs ( AFAs) – which form a subgroup of Focus Adverbs ( FAs1) and include, among many others, Italian anche and pure, French aussi and également, Spanish también, English and too, German auch and Dutch ook – it has been shown that, albeit sharing a bundle of basic semantic (expression of added element) and syntactic properties (mobility), these adverbs can still vary quite significantly at least in terms of their frequency of use and syntactic distribution. This paper is organized as follows: § 2 offers a brief semantic and syntactic characterization of the most commonly occurring AFAs in Italian, French and English; § 3 describes the options available to these AFAs to focus on the Subject of a canonical sentence; § 4 presents the results of our empirical study, firstly by describing the overall frequency of use of anche, aussi, in our corpus of online news and, in canonical sentences, and secondly by analyzing the contexts in which these AFAs focus on the canonical Subject; § 5 summarizes our main findings and points to some open questions to be addressed in future research
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