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Adjective Adverb Interfaces in Romance
Edited by Martin Hummel and Salvador Valera
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 242] 2017
► pp. 81–109

Chapter 3
Before the complementizer

Adverb types and root clause modification

| University of Vienna
| University of Vienna

In this paper we investigate the distributional, morphosyntactic, and semantic properties of a particular construction found in Romance, as well as in other languages such as English. This construction involves a class of elements that appear in sentence-initial position and that are followed by a complementizer introducing a root clause (a CP in generativist terms). This class may comprise underived attributes (adjectives) and derived attributes (adverbs), depending on the specific language. We claim that these adverbial constructions, as a result of grammaticalization, can be analysed as structurally equivalent to other constructions with similar speaker-oriented meanings, such as quotative and reportative constructions. A further or alternative process of grammaticalization, instead, has yielded new adverbial forms which morphologically include the complementizer.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Typology of adverbs before the complementizer
  • 3.Pragmatic adverbs: Grammaticalization towards discourse
  • 4.Pragmatic function and silent predicates
    • 4.1Truth predicate and root clause modification
    • 4.2Hearsay, quotatives and reported speech
  • 5.Back to sentential adverbs: Type-C adverbs
  • 6.Conclusions and final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.242.04cru
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Cruschina, Silvio & Eva-Maria Remberger
2018. Speaker-oriented syntax and root clause complementizers. Linguistic Variation 18:2 ► pp. 336 ff. DOI logo
Kocher, Anna
2017. From verum to epistemic modality and evidentiality. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:1-2 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo

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