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Article published In:
Revue Romane
Vol. 59:1 (2024) ► pp.78–112
articles linguistiques

Investigating pan-Romance prepositional adverbials

A methodology for field research in Romance

ORCID logo | University of Franche-Comté | University of Graz

Complex adverbials built with the pattern ‘Preposition + Adjective (PA)’ such as Portuguese em especial ‘especially’ or Romanian de sigur ‘for sure’ display a remarkable frequency and pan-Romance consistency. Nevertheless, this pattern has been largely neglected by research. The ‘Third Way’ project intends to fill this gap, arguing that PAs are a relevant third way of constructing adverbials, aside with short adverbs and adverbs in -mente. It subjects prepositional adverbials to a historico-varietal analysis in a comparative pan-Romance approach to trace their trajectory from Latin up to now. This article presents an enquiry design for field research that allows examining the adverbials’ current usage and ongoing change in substandard varieties of all major Romance languages. The results are meant to help reconstruct the diachrony of PAs in Romance, especially in view of the spoken vernacular tradition.

Keywords: prepositional adverbials, Romance languages, historical sociolinguistics, field research, methodology
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The items under scrutiny
  • 2.Investigated areas
  • 3.Research design
    • 3.1Data-collection methods for comparable language data in Romance
    • 3.2An interactional approach
    • 3.3Interview constellation
    • 3.4Validity and representativeness
  • 4.Sampling: Selecting speakers
    • 4.1Local adult speakers
    • 4.2A stratified speaker sample
    • 4.3Speaker profiles
    • 4.4Speaker sample size
  • 5.The paradiscourse: Ensuring a bond of trust
    • 5.1The researcher-speaker relationship
    • 5.2Presenting the research: A motivating and accessible project
    • 5.3The Informants’ Privacy
    • 5.4Closing the Interview: Meta-Data and Debt Incurred
  • 6.The core of the interview
    • 6.1Interview structure
      • 6.1.1 Section 1: Conversational interview
      • 6.1.2 Section 2: Worksheets on the targeted linguistic items
    • 6.2Elicitation frames
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.20019.wis
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