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

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articles linguistiques

Investigating pan-Romance prepositional adverbials

A methodology for field research in Romance

ORCiD logo with link | University of Franche-Comté | University of Graz
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the author.

Published online: 5 October 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.20019.wis
Abstract
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.
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
      • 6.1.1Section 1: Conversational interview
      • 6.1.2Section 2: Worksheets on the targeted linguistic items
    • 6.2Elicitation frames
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
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