Sentence adverbials: Defining the research object and outlining the research results

Anna-Maria De Cesare,Ana Albom,Marta Lupica Spagnolo,Doriana Cimmino

doi:10.13092/lo.92.4502

Abstract

The aim of this contribution – functioning as preface to the special issue of Linguistik online entitled Formal and functional perspectives on sentence adverbials in the Romance languagesand beyond – is to give a general overview of its research object and agenda. We start by providing a morpho-syntactic definition of the category of adverbials and then present a functional classification of these expressions, paying particular attention to the category of sentence adverbials. After having clarified the research object of this special issue, we present the content of the ten contributions collected, by identifying the lines of analysis which they address.

Highlights

The aim of this contribution – functioning as preface to the special issue of Linguistik online entitled Formal and functional perspectives on sentence adverbials in the Romance languages and beyond – is to give a general overview of its research object and agenda
Austin 1962; Benveniste 1966; Searle 1969), naturally-occurring human communication cannot be understood as a mere exchange of information related to events happening in a real or in an imaginary world, such as in ex. (1) and (2): 1. Mr Green is under arrest
We convey information regarding the very process of communicating, the ways we position ourselves towards others, how our text or discourse ought to be decoded etc. These pieces of information are generally not expressed by the main building blocks of a sentence, i. e. the verb and its arguments, functioning syntactically as subject, direct object and/or complements, and semantically as agent, patient, beneficiary, instrument etc