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The syntax of peripheral adverbial clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2022

LINDA BADAN Open the ORCID record for LINDA BADAN [Opens in a new window]  and
LILIANE HAEGEMAN Open the ORCID record for LILIANE HAEGEMAN [Opens in a new window]
LINDA BADAN
Affiliation:
Department of Translation, Interpreting, and Communication, Ghent University, Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45, 9000Gent, BelgiumLinda.Badan@UGent.be
LILIANE HAEGEMAN
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Ghent University & University of Geneva, Blandijnberg 2, 9000Gent, BelgiumLiliane.Haegeman@UGent.be
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Abstract

This paper explores the relation between the interpretations of while in English and mentre in Italian introducing adverbial clauses. Central while/mentre clauses express a temporal/aspectual modification of the proposition in the host clause. Peripheral while/mentre clauses make accessible a proposition from the discourse context enhancing the relevance of the host proposition. In one approach, clauses introduced by adversative while/mentre are analyzed as ‘less integrated’ with the associated clause than those introduced by temporal while/mentre. In another approach, adverbial clauses introduced by adversative while/mentre are considered not syntactically integrated with the host clause. This paper re-examines the nature of the syntactic integration of the adverbial clauses with the host clause, revealing a parallelism between the adversative peripheral while/mentre clauses and speaker-related sentential adverbs, leading to the conclusion that the non-integration analysis is not appropriate for this type of peripheral clauses and that any analysis must be aligned with that of the relevant non-clausal adverbials, supporting Frey (2018, 2020a, b). We also argue that central adverbial clauses recycled as speech event modifiers must be considered non-integrated. Concretely, we propose that they are integrated in discourse, through a specialized layer FrameP (Haegeman & Greco 2018).

Keywords

adverbial clausesEnglishItaliansyntax
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 697 - 738
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We thank three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their generous and extremely helpful and constructive comments, which have greatly improved our paper. Obviously, they cannot be held responsible for the outcome. Thanks to Gaetano Fiorin and Andrew Radford for comments on the paper and to Manuela Schönenberger for her comments on Section 5.

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