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The goal of this contribution is to deepen our knowledge of French cleft sentences through the study of a special category of clefts calledadverbial clefts. The issues that we will address concern their form, discourse frequency and boundaries with resembling structures. In order to shed light on these issues, we start by defining the concept ofadverbialfrom a morphosyntactic and functional point of view. We then present a corpus-based description of the categories of adverbials that can be cleaved. Finally, we propose a general semantic principle capable of describing and explaining, in a coherent and unitary way, both the data obtained in our empirical study and found in the form of constructed examples in the existing literature. In addition to explaining why certain adverbials can be cleaved while others cannot, this principle also allows for a distinction to be made between two syntactic realizations of the structure ‘c’est Adv que p’, as well as for a solution to the controversial issue of the status of domain adverbials.

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.

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, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.

The aim of this contribution – functioning as preface to the special issue of Linguistik online entitled Formal and functional perspectives on sentence adverbials in the Romance languagesand beyond – is to give a general overview of its research object and agenda. We start by providing a morpho-syntactic definition of the category of adverbials and then present a functional classification of these expressions, paying particular attention to the category of sentence adverbials. After having clarified the research object of this special issue, we present the content of the ten contributions collected, by identifying the lines of analysis which they address.

The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine grained analysis of the contexts in which “exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources. Keywords: cleft sentences exhaustiveness conversational implicature contrastive analysis English Italian corpus study

This contribution sketches the main formal and functional properties of Spanish cleft constructions and reviews the ways these syntactic structures are described in contrastive studies and contrastive grammars. In light of their pragmatic properties, as well as their availability in the main Romance languages, it then advocates that clefts are worthwhile taking into account more systematically in teaching Spanish as a foreign language. These structures are relevant to consider in two didactic methods, namely in communicative-based approaches and in the socalled intercomprehension method.

Cette etude contrastive decrit les principales caracteristiques des constructions impersonnelles dans les langues romanes (francais, italien, espagnol et, dans une moindre mesure, portugais), en pretant une attention particuliere aux problemes detraductionqu’engendrentlessimilitudesetlesdifferencesentreceslangues.Apres une breve description des constructions impersonnelles construites avec un verbe conjugue (1.1), l’analyse se concentre sur les constructions impersonnelles basees sur une forme non conjuguee du verbe (1.2), comprenant les constructions impersonnelles infinitives (2), gerondives (3), et participiales (avec participe present et passe ;4– 5). Le but de cette contribution consiste aussi a fournir un compte rendu detaille des ressources bibliographiques disponibles sur les constructions impersonnelles dans les differentes langues romanes (grammaires specialisees, etudes contrastives, manuelsdetraductionetc.).