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

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Chapter 3
Before the complementizer

Adverb types and root clause modification

 | University of Vienna
 | University of Vienna
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 21 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.242.04cru
Abstract
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
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