The goal of this study is to cast new light on one of the main defining properties of focus adverbials, namely their interaction with the focus structure of the sentence. Following the framework known as Language into Act Theory, we describe the interaction between It. anche and focal information,… read more
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,… read more
The goal of this contribution is to deepen our knowledge of French cleft sentences through the study of a special category of clefts called adverbial clefts. The issues that we will address concern their form, discourse frequency and boundaries with resembling structures. In order to shed light… read more
This contribution describes the functional properties of Italian sentence adverbs (SAs) occurring in the left periphery, i.e. in clause initial position, on the basis of a corpus-based analysis of articles drawn from online daily newspapers. We show that a qualitative analysis of the data found… read more
The aim of this paper is to offer a multi-layered analysis of adverbial clefts in Italian, French, and English. In particular, we intend to offer a corpus-based study of the syntactic category of the cleft constituent, its semantic type and, finally, the information structure of adverbial clefts.… read more
Many languages have an overabundant set of additive focus adverbs (AFAs), whose differences are mostly investigated in semantic (e.g. scalarity) or syntactic (scope phenomena and restrictions for specific domains of association) terms. The present study adopts a discourse perspective on the issue,… read more
The goal of this chapter is to reconnect with the research agenda of the “classic” studies on the so-called Focusing Modifiers (such as E. also, only, even) by tackling questions related to the intension (i.e. the defining properties) and the extension (i.e. the inventories) of the category. Since… read more
The goal of the present study is to illustrate the benefits of using a model of discourse units in describing and explaining the use of polyfunctional discourse markers. Specifically, the aim is to show that the so-called “Basel Model” of paragraph segmentation is a powerful tool in describing and… read more