Romanische Bereichsadverbien an der Schnittstelle von Semantik, Syntax und Pragmatik: Kontextuelle Bedeutungsanpassung und syntaktische Polyfunktionalität

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Abstract The present paper provides a comprehensive model of the various syntactic functions displayed by Romance domain adverbs (DAs), such as Fr. politiquement ‘politically’ or It. economicamente ‘economically’, as well as of the semantic and pragmatic side-effects of realizing DAs in different structural environments. It will be shown that – like their lexical bases, i.e. relational adjectives, from which they are formed by categorial transposition (political → politically) – DAs represent a special class of semantically underspecified modifiers whose function in context is to restrict the extension of their modifee by relating it to the extra-linguistic domain they denote (i.e. to conceptual frames such as politics or economy). Yet what follows from the fuzzy nature of this conceptual relation is that the interpretation of a DA is systematically enriched by certain grammatical and encyclopedic features of the syntactic context in which it is realized, in particular the [dynamicity/stativity] feature of the given modifee. In a first step, these observations allow us to describe typical effects of contextual adaptation, such as the preference for method or means readings of DAs modifying agentive (necessarily dynamic) verbs (to treat surgically). Moreover, the proposed interface approach helps to keep apart the pragmatic effects of contextual enrichment from the proper level of adverbial syntax, where different positions of DAs have to be formally and functionally distinguished even if they do not go along with intuitively diverging interpretations of the adverbial modifier. This will be shown to be the case for those syntactic environments where the DA’s function consists in restricting the validity of the – syntactically twofold and semantically stative – relation between a “predicator” and a “predication base”: Such predication relations actually can be modified by DAs on at least three distinct syntactic levels, to wit (i) within an expanded noun phrase (economically powerful province), (ii) within the Small Clause of a copular construction (The province is economically powerful) or, most interestingly, (iii) at the discourse level, where the function of a left-peripheral DA is to restrict the applicability of the proposition it frames (Economically, the province is powerful) to a particular aspect of the Question under Discussion (QUD). The function of this particular type of discourse-pragmatic “delimitation” (Krifka/Musan 2012) will be described by analyzing examples and corpus data from Italian and French.