Restrictive focus adverbs in contemporary varieties of Italian and European Spanish: A contrastive, corpus-based study

Abstract

This paper investigates the uses of Italian and Spanish restrictive focus adverbs, concentrating on the three cognates solo, solamente and soltanto / tan solo. Our aim is to highlight the discourse similarities and differences between these cognates in contemporary varieties of Italian and European Spanish through a contrastive corpus-based analysis. A further aim is to shed light on the factors that explain the differences from both an intra- and a cross-linguistic perspective. Our data is drawn from existing monolingual Italian and Spanish corpora as well as a self-assembled comparable corpus of academic texts written in Italian and Spanish.