The syntax of peripheral adverbial clauses

• Published in: Journal of linguistics Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 697 - 738
• Main Authors: BADAN, LINDA, HAEGEMAN, LILIANE
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2022
• Subjects: Adverbials; Classification; Clauses; Discourse; Discourse context; English language; Italian language; May, Theresa; Propositions; Speech; Speeches; Syntax; Italy; English; syntax; Italian; adverbial clauses
• ISSN: 0022-2267; 1469-7742
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022226721000463

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).