Adverbial Clusters in Romance Languages – A Comparative Perspective

The present paper aims to describe the adverbial clusters in Romance languages from a comparative perspective, a topic that has been little addressed in studies devoted to Romance varieties. Such research can only be carried out by using an extensive corpus, that allows both qualitative and quantitative observations, which is why I chose the ROAMED corpus, consisting of journalistic texts published online, in 2019, and written in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and French. The analysis revealed that the four Romance languages behave similarly regarding the use of adverbial clusters, and the most commonly used were groups of two situative adjuncts. Their position generally follows the prototypical order, and the examples with topic shift were interpreted as being determined by semantico-pragmatic factors.

Full Text