This paper investigates the syntactic behaviour of adverbial clauses in contemporary German and Italian. It focuses on three main questions: (i) How many degrees of syntactic integration of adverbial clauses are there to be distinguished by an adequate grammatical description of the two languages? (ii) Which linear and hierarchical positions in the structure of the matrix sentence can be occupied by adverbial clauses? (iii) Which is the empirical distribution of adverbial clauses introduced by the conjunctions als, während, wenn, obwohl and weil in German, as well as quando, mentre, se, sebbene and perché in Italian? Responding to question (i), a distinction is drawn between strongly integrated, weakly integrated and syntactically disintegrated adverbial clauses. There are further degrees on the gradient of syntactic integration, which are not examined in this paper. Responding to question (ii), eight classes of structural positions in the matrix sentence are identified that can be occupied by adverbial clauses. Five of them are positions of syntactic integration, three are positions of disintegration. Responding to question (iii), the distribution of the ten classes of adverbial clauses is described on the basis of a corpus of internet data. Strongly integrated, weakly integrated and disintegrated adverbial clauses show clearly different distributions within the structure of the matrix sentence. Also the semantic classes of adverbial clauses (temporal, adversative, conditional, concessive, causal) are distributed differently.

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract