Italian sentence adverbs in the left periphery

Abstract

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.