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
Archivi del Sud. 1996. Contami unu contu. Racconti popolari della Sardegna, Vol. I: Logudoro. Alghero: Archivi del Sud.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.
Bellert, Irena. 1977. On semantic and distributional properties of sentential adverbs. Linguistic Inquiry 8(2): 337–351.
Bowers, John. 1993. The syntax of predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4): 591–656.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads. Oxford: OUP.
Company Company, Concepción. 2004. ¿Gramaticalización o desgramaticalización? El reanálisis y subjetivización de verbos como marcadores discursivos en la historia del español. Revista de Filología Española 84(1): 29–66.
CREA – Real Academia española: Banco de datos (CREA) [online]. Corpus de referencia del español actual. <[URL]> (20December2014).
Cruschina, Silvio & Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2008. Hearsay and reported speech: Evidentiality in Romance. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 33: 95–116.
Cruschina, Silvio. 2010. Aspetti morfologici e sintattici degli avverbi in siciliano. In Studi sui dialetti della Sicilia [Quaderni di lavoro ASIt 11], Jacopo Garzonio (ed.), 21–42. Padua: Unipress.
Cruschina, Silvio. 2015. The expression of evidentiality and epistemicity: Cases of grammaticalization in Italian and Sicilian. Probus 27: 1–31.
De Haan, Ferdinand. 2005. Semantic distinctions of evidentiality. In The World Atlas of Language Structures, Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds), 314–317. Oxford: OUP.
Demonte, Violeta & Fernández-Soriano, Olga. 2014. Evidentiality and illocutionary force. Spanish matrix que at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist, and Typological Perspectives [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214], Andreas Dufter & Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo (eds), 217–252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dendale, Patrick & Tasmowski, Liliane. 2001. Introduction: Evidentiality and related notions. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3): 339–348.
Erdmann, Peter. 1997. Supplementive adjective clauses in English. In Language History and Linguistic Modelling. A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th Birthday, Vol. 2, Raymond Hickey & Stanislaw Puppel (eds), 1433–1451. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ernst, Thomas. 2002. The Syntax of Adjuncts. Cambridge: CUP.
Etxepare, Ricardo. 1997. The Grammatical Representation of Speech Events. PhD dissertation, University of Maryland.
Etxepare, Ricardo. 2008. On quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish. In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions [Typological Studies in Language 80], Ritva Laury (ed.), 35–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Etxepare, Ricardo. 2010. From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations. Lingua 120(3): 604–627.
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations, Irina Nikolaeva (ed.), 366–431. Oxford: OUP.
Giorgi, Alessandra. 2010. About the Speaker. Towards a Syntax of Indexicality. Oxford: OUP.
Grevisse, Maurice & Goosse, André. 2008. Le bon usage, 14th edn. Brussels: De Boeck & Larcier.
Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier. 2001. Spanish Exclamatives and the Semantics of the Left Periphery. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 1999. Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 1999, Leiden, 9–11 December 1999 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 221], Yves de Hulst, Johan Rooryck & Jan Schroten (eds), 167–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier. 2008. Spanish root exclamatives at the syntax/semantics interface. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 7: 117–133.
Hernanz, María Luisa. 2007. From polarity to modality: Some (a)symmetries between bien and si in Spanish. In Coreference, Modality, and Focus: Studies on the Syntax-Semantics Interface [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 111], Luis Eguren & Olga Fernández-Soriano (eds), 133–169. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hill, Virginia. 2007. Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field. The Linguistic Review 24(1): 61–86.
Hill, Virginia. 2012. A main clause complementizer. In Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 190], Lobke Aelbrecht, Liliane Haegeman & Rachel Nye (eds), 279–296. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hummel, Martin. 2012. Polifuncionalidad, polisemia y estrategia retórica. Los signos discursivos con base atributiva entre oralidad y escritura. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Hummel, Martin. 2013. Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition. Folia Linguistica Historica 34(1): 1–42.
Hummel, Martin. 2014. The adjective-adverb interface in Romance and English. In Adjectives in Germanic and Romance [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 212], Petra Sleeman, Freek Van de Velde & Harry Perridon (eds), 35–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Kany, Charles E.1944. Impersonal dizque and its variants in American Spanish. Hispanic Review 12(2): 168–177.
Killie, Kristin. 2015. Secondary grammaticalization and the English adverbial -ly suffix. Language Sciences 47: 199–214.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge.
Kocher, Anna. 2014. Claro que son adverbios: Análisis de un proceso de gramaticalización. MA thesis, University of Vienna.
Kocher, Anna. 2015. Epistemic and evidential adverbial constructions in Ibero-Romance. Talk at the International Conference on Linguistics of Ibero-Romance Languages, Ghent, 14–16 December.
Laenzlinger, Christopher. 1996. Adverb syntax and phrase structure. In Configurations: Essays on Structure and Interpretation, Anna-Maria di Sciullo (ed.), 99–127. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2011. Adverb agreement and split intransitivity: Evidence from southern Italy. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 96(1): 31–66.
Lonzi, Lidia. 1991. Il sintagma avverbiale. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, Vol. 2: I sintagmi verbale, aggettivale, avverbiale; la subordinazione, Lorenzo Renzi & Giampaolo Salvi (eds), 341–412. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Lupşa, Cornelia Daniela. 2011. Deconstructing the “Adverb plus complementizer construction” in Romanian. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 13(2): 91–98.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.
NGLE – Real Academia Española. 2009. Nueva gramática de la lengua española, 2 Vols. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Olbertz, Hella. 2007. Dizque in Mexican Spanish. The subjectification of reportative meaning. Italian Journal of Linguistics 19(1): 151–172.
Plungian, Vladimir A.2001. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Studies in Language 12(1): 349–357.
Poletto, Cecilia & Zanuttini, Raffaella. 2013. Emphasis as reduplication: Evidence from sì che/no che sentences. Lingua 128: 124–141.
Radford, Andrew. 2013. The complementiser system in spoken English: Evidence from broadcast media. In Information Structure and Agreement [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 197], Victoria Camacho Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 11–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ramat, Paolo & Ricca, Davide. 1998. Sentence adverbs in the languages of Europe. In Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe, Johann van der Auwera (ed.), 187–275. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York NY: MacMillan.
Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2015. ‘I didn’t say it. Somebody else did.’ – The Romanian hearsay marker CICĂ. In Redefining community in Intercultural context, Vol.4/1. Selection of papers presented within 4th RCIC Conference, Braşov, 21 May, 2015, 31–41.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Rizzi, Luigi & Roberts, Ian. 1989. Complex inversion in French. Probus 1(1): 1–30.
Roberts, Ian & Roussou, Anna. 2003. Syntactic Change: A Minimalist Approach to Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Rodríguez-Espiñeira, María José. 2014. Emergencia e historia de la construcción es capaz que. In Llaneza. Estudios dedicados al profesor Juan Gutiérrez Cuadrado, María Bargalló Escrivá, María Pilar Garcés Cómez & Cecilio Garriga Escribano (eds), 205–218. A Coruña: Anexo de la Revista de Lexicografía.
Speas, Peggy & Tenny, Carol L.2003. Configurational properties of point of view roles. In Asymmetry in Grammar, Vol. 1 [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 57], Anna-Maria di Sciullo (ed), 315–344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Suñer, Avellina & Àngela Di Tullio. 2014. Bare adjectives as syncretic forms. Borealis 3(1): 23–47.
Stalnaker, Robert. 1978. Assertion. In Syntax and Semantics, 9: Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 315–332. New York NY: Academic Press.
Traugott, Elisabeth Closs. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation, Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds), 37–54. Cambridge: CUP.
van der Auwera, Johann & Plungian, Vladimir A.1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2(1): 79–124.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as Economy [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 71]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The Linguistic Cycle. Language Change and the Language Faculty. Oxford: OUP.
Cited by (18)
Cited by 18 other publications
SUZUKI, SHINGO
2024. Hearsay Evidential Markers: On the Degree of Grammaticalization of Italian dice che and Romanian cică. Studii și cercetări lingvistice 2024:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Cruschina, Silvio
2023. L’espressione dell’epistemicità e dell’evidenzialità in siciliano. Gli avverbi in -ca . Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 30 ► pp. 63 ff.
Staps, Camil & Johan Rooryck
2023. The interpretation of [+distal] in demonstratives and complementizers. Linguistics 61:5 ► pp. 1195 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Introduction. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 1 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The expression of affect. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 157 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. A grammar for the utterance. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 15 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Utterances without commitment. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 203 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The grammar of dialogue. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 251 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. The Grammar of the Utterance,
Corr, Alice
2022. Doing things with utterance grammar. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 135 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Vocatives. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 51 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Interjections and particles. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 99 ff.
Corr, Alice
2022. Conclusions. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 299 ff.
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. xi ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. General Preface. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. vii ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.