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Article published In:
Models of Discourse Units in Romance Languages
Edited by Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga, Vahram Atayan and Sybille Große
[Revue Romane 53:1] 2018
► pp. 96–120

Italian sentence adverbs in the left periphery

Modeling their functional properties in online daily newspapers

| University of Basel

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 in our corpus (albeit relatively small) using the Basel model for paragraph segmentation allows to substantially refining our understanding of the information and discourse properties of these items. Our data suggests that there are important differences in the information properties of two classes of SAs, thereby confirming a classification of the category of SAs in at least two main categories. Finally, the data analyzed allows further refining our taxonomic model of Sentence Adverbials.

Keywords: (written) Italian, sentence adverb(ial)s, information structure, discourse functions, Basel model for paragraph segmentation, corpus-based analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sentence adverbs
    • 2.1Sentence adverbs vs Predicate adverbs
    • 2.2Classification of sentence adverbials (SAials)
  • 3.Corpus-based description of sentence initial -mente-derived Sentence Adverbs
    • 3.1Corpus data and methodology
    • 3.2Tokens and types of SAs in sentence initial position
  • 4.Functional properties of clause initial -mente-derived Sentence Adverbs: A corpus-based description
    • 4.1The organization of written paragraphs according to the Basel Model (BM)
      • 4.1.1Utterances and information units
      • 4.1.2Defining the content and boundaries of IUs within an utterance
    • 4.2Functional properties of sentence initial SAs in online news
      • 4.2.1Sentence initial SAs2 in the Frame IU
      • 4.2.2Sentence initial SAs1 in the Frame IU and linearized at the beginning of the Nucleus
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.00007.dec
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