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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 20:1 (2020) ► pp.31–57

Domain adverbials in the news

A corpus-based contrastive study of English, German, French, Italian and Spanish

ORCID logo | University of Basel
| University of Basel
| University of Florence
| University of Basel
This article examines the functional category of domain adverbials (DAs), which arose fairly recently in the European languages and is claimed to occur frequently in the written press. In order to better understand this category, we investigate the form, use and meaning of DAs in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.
Keywords: domain adverbials, Germanic languages, Romance languages, journalistic prose, adverbial formation patterns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Domain adverbials: Function and form
    • 2.1The function of domain adverbials
    • 2.2Morpho-syntactic realizations of domain adverbials
      • 2.2.1Domain adverbials realized as adverbs
      • 2.2.2Domain adverbials realized as clauses
      • 2.2.3Domain adverbials realized as prepositional phrases
  • 3.Data and methods used to investigate domain adverbials in the news
    • 3.1The CONC corpus
    • 3.2Criteria used to identify domain adverbials in the corpus
  • 4.Domain adverbials in the news: Form and frequency in a cross-linguistic perspective
    • 4.1Quantitative and qualitative results
      • 4.1.1Morpho-syntactic realization of DAs
      • 4.1.2Types of domain adverbs
    • 4.2Discussion
      • 4.2.1Cross-linguistic preference for adverbs (ADV I) over CPs and PPs
      • 4.2.2Cross-linguistic differences between the frequency of domain adverbs in English/German vs Romance languages
      • 4.2.3Cross-linguistic differences between the types of domain adverbs in German vs the other four languages
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17005.dec
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