Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of domain adverbials in Italian and German 133 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of domain adverbials in Italian and German Marta Lupica Spagnolo (Universität Potsdam) http: / / orcid.org/ 0000-0001-8102-3842 Riassunto : Nel presente contributo, la categoria funzionale degli avverbiali di dominio (DAials) in italiano è analizzata in prospettiva contrastiva con il tedesco. Nella prima parte dell’articolo, sono esaminate le traduzioni dei DAials dal tedesco all’italiano nell’Europarl corpus. Oltre ad ottenere una lista dei modelli di formazione dei DAials nelle due lingue, l’analisi mette in luce una differenza tra DAials realizzati come avverbi (AdvPs) e sintagmi preposizionali (PPs) con aggettivo, da un lato, e PPs con nome e alcuni tipi di clausole (CPs) dall’altro: solo gli ultimi DAials introducono infatti un’espressione referenziale che può essere modificata da aggettivi, nomi e/ o altri PPs. Nella seconda parte del contributo, ci si concentra sulle relazioni tra forma, posizione frasale, valore semantico e funzione pragmatica di una serie di DAials - derivati dal lemma politica - in un corpus di giornali online. I DAials della serie e, in particolare, gli AdvPs sono molto più numerosi in tedesco che in italiano. Inoltre, indipendentemente dalla loro complessità morfosintattica e dal peso informativo, i DAials occorrono soprattutto in posizione intermedia in tedesco. Invece, in italiano, AdvPs, PPs con nome e PPs con aggettivo tendono ad occupare una posizione più variabile nella frase e ad avere proprietà semantiche e pragmatiche differenti. Speciale attenzione è rivolta alle funzioni testuali dei DAials all’inizio di frase con struttura Verbo-Soggetto in italiano. Keywords : Domain adverbials, Italian-German contrastive analysis, Corpus linguistics, Translation studies, Online newspapers, Adverbial formation patterns, Semantic and pragmatic properties, Adverbials in VS-clauses 1. Introduction In this paper, we aim to attain a better understanding of the functional category of domain adverbials (henceforth DAials) in Italian compared to German. In line with De Cesare et al. (2020: 32), we define DAials as an open functional category whose main function «is to identify a [notional] domain that is relevant in interpreting pieces of information given in the discourse». The notional domain delimited by a DAial - that is, the set of terms in the external reality to which the DAial refers - may pertain to various fields of experience, ranging from science and technology to culture and sport (De Cesare et al. 2020: 35). Moreover, it can be more or less specific: compare, e.g., politisch ‘politically’ and außenpolitisch ‘regarding foreign policy’ in German. As a peculiarity of our approach, we do not investigate one (or a small Marta Lupica Spagnolo 134 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 group of) specific instance(s) of DAials in the two languages, such as an adverb or a prepositional phrase. Rather, in this paper, we focus on the functional category of DAials as a whole. As illustrated by examples [1]-[3], DAials may occur in a great variety of morphosyntactic manifestations in present-day Italian and German. Following De Cesare et al. (2020), we distinguish between three main forms, i.e., i) adverbs (AdvPs), ii) prepositional phrases (PPs), and iii) adverbial clauses (CPs). PPs and CPs are henceforth also called «analytic forms» since they consist of two or more constituents. By contrast, AdvPs are also referred to as «synthetic forms». (1a) Politicamente, non è un problema. (1b) Politisch ist das kein Problem. ‘Politically, this is not a problem.’ (2a) Da un punto di vista politico/ in termini di politica, non è un problema. (2b) Von einem politischen Standpunkt aus/ hinsichtlich der Politik ist das kein Problem. ‘From a political point of view/ in terms of policy, it is not a problem.’ (3a) Politicamente parlando, non è un problema. (3b) Politisch gesehen/ betrachtet ist das kein Problem. ‘Politically speaking, it is not a problem.’ Domain AdvPs are formed in Italian by adding to a relational adjective the suffix -mente (Grossmann 1999), such as politicamente ‘politically’ in [1a], which derives from politico ‘political’. By contrast, AdvPs are created by a simpler morphological process in German, that is, by conversion from a relational adjective: AdjP politisch ‘political’ > AdvP politisch ‘politically’. Italian and German DAials can also occur as a great variety of PPs formed with an adjective (PPs with adj.) and PPs formed with a noun (PPs with noun), such as, for instance, in [2a] and [2b]. Domain CPs are usually created by an AdvP followed by parlando ‘speaking’ in Italian (ex. [3a]) or by gesehen/ betrachtet ‘seen/ considered’ in German (ex. [3b]). Moreover, in German (as well as in English), innovative formation patterns have recently been developed to create domain AdvPs; the latter may thus also be derived through the extremely productive suffixes -mäßig and -technisch (in English-wise), such as in gattungsmäßig ‘regarding genre/ genre-wise’ and fernsehtechnisch ‘regarding television/ television-wise’ (Inghult 1975, Ruge 2004, Diepeveen 2013) 1 . As suggested by De Cesare 1 The suffixes -mäßig and -technisch are employed in German if it is not possible to derive a domain AdvP from an adjective ending in -lich or -isch because of phonetic or morphological constraints, such as for nouns ending in -ung (e.g., bevölkerungsmässig ‘population-wise’), or if the adverbial has already been lexicalised with another meaning, such as in förmlich ‘formal, ceremonial’ vs formmäßig ‘as for the form’. In addition, as already pointed out by Kühnhold et al. (1976: 292-95), these suffixes are increasingly used for building nonce words especially in the press, thereby giving rise to competing forms (see, for instance, berufsmäßig ‘workwise’ and beruflich ‘professionally’). 135 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German et al. (2020: 32), these morphological innovations may testify to a higher communicative relevance of the functional category under scrutiny in the two Germanic languages as opposed to Italian (and other Romance languages), where analogous formation patterns specialized in building DAials have not developed. DAials do not constitute a traditional adverbial category in either German or Italian grammar traditions. German DAials were classified for the first time as an autonomous class by Bartsch (1972: 62-65). Except for some pioneer studies, the interest in Italian DAials grew in the nineties (Lonzi 1991, Grossman 1999, Frenguelli 2008). This fact may account for the great variety of competing labels used to refer to this adverbial category in both languages 2 . In this paper, we adopt the denomination «domain adverbials». As opposed to the term «adverb», which indicates a word class, such as «noun», «verb», or «adjective», the notion «adverbial» refers to the syntactic or grammatical function of the constituents under scrutiny, at the same level as the concepts of «subject» or «direct/ indirect object» (De Cesare et al. 2018: 4). Adverbials (and adverbs) are often defined ex negative, that is, as non-declinable constituents that are not arguments of the verb. In line with the classification proposed in De Cesare (2016) within the functional framework of Dik et al. (1990), we maintain that adverbials provide additional information to one of the four layers structuring an utterance, i.e., «predicate», «predication», «proposition», or «illocution» 3 . In particular, as we will discuss in more depth in Section 2, DAials may modify predication relations and/ or phrases, such as adjectives or nominal phrases, and may have a scope encompassing a whole clause or even reaching beyond the boundary of the host utterance on the following text. In this paper, we will also use the term «formation pattern» to indicate each different morphosyntactic manifestation of a DAial independent of the notional domain referred to. That is, from a political point of view and from a statistical point of view are considered as one formation pattern. By contrast, from a political point of view and at a political level are regarded as two formation patterns (belonging to the form PP with adj.). DAials are an interesting adverbial class to be studied per se, as well as from a contrastive perspective. As diachronic studies show, their use has increased throughout the 19 th century in many European languages (Lenker 2002: 170-74 on English and German, Inghult 1975: 158 on German, Grübl 2018 on Italian, Klump 2007 on Italian, French, and Spanish). According to Ramat/ Ricca (1998: 247), the high fre- 2 The three most frequent labels in the German-language literature are Bereichsadverbiale ‘field/ domain adverbials’, Einordnungsadverbien ʻclassification/ indexing adverbsʼ, and die Prädikation limitierende Adverbiale ʻadverbials limiting the predicationʼ (e.g., Pittner 1999, Helbig/ Helbig 1990, Bartsch 1972, respectively). In Italian, apart from avverbi di dominio ‘domain adverbs’ (i.a., Grossmann 1999), we found both avverbi di inquadramento ‘framing adverbs’ and avverbi di punto di vista ‘viewpoint adverbs’ in Lonzi (1991). For an overview of the most frequent labels for DAials in the Italian, French, and Spanish literature, see De Cesare (in press). 3 The classification of DAials within the framework of Dik et al. (1990) raises some problems, however. On this issue see, for instance, Ramat/ Ricca (1998: 191-93). Marta Lupica Spagnolo 136 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 quency of international words as the basis of DAials points to a common and progressive extension of this functional category in the European lexicon. This increase has been connected to the development of new scientific disciplines and to the related growing communicative need for diversifying perspectives on reported facts, objects, and situations (Diepeveen 2013). Moreover, DAials are also used for modulating the speakers’ commitment towards a specific affirmation (Hermoso Mellado-Damas 2015) and for organizing texts into thematic blocks (cf. Section 2 for more details). Despite these similarities, important cross-linguistic differences both in the research approaches towards the functional class under scrutiny and in the frequency of use of DAials in the two languages may also be observed. Thus, as far as we know, studies on DAials in Italian have mainly focused on the word class «adverb». They do mention other forms with the same function, but they provide these as paraphrases. As for results, we did not find an exhaustive list of DAials occurring as PPs and CPs in the literature on Italian. Furthermore, even if we know that the use of domain AdvPs in Italian has increased in the last decades, at least in some text typologies, such as technical prose and newspaper articles (Frenguelli 2008), the degree of this increase has not yet been precisely quantified 4 . In contrast, research on German usually takes into consideration a greater variety of morphosyntactic manifestations and formation patterns (e.g., Bartsch 1972: 62-65, Diepeveen 2012: 67-69, 2013: 17- 18). Nevertheless, the frequency of DAials occurring as PPs and CPs in corpora of real texts, as well as their semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic properties in contrast to those of AdvPs are still largely unexplored. In particular, previous studies on DAials have explained the alternation between AdvPs, PPs, and CPs in Italian and German texts by a cluster of morphosyntactic and stylistic factors mainly related to their form. We may identify three main factors which, according to the literature, play a major role in determining the distribution of these adverbial forms both in and across languages. First, AdvPs are claimed to outnumber analytic expressions especially in journalistic prose for economic reasons in both Italian and German: as a matter of fact, AdvPs allow for the expression of domain modification in fewer words than PPs and CPs do, thereby avoiding complex syntax and facilitating informative synthesis (Frenguelli 2008: 141 on Italian, Inghult 1975: 155-59 on German). Second, the distribution of DAials is also seen as constrained by stylistic factors. Thus, domain CPs formed with parlando are marked as diastratically and diaphasically high in Italian (Klump 2007: 207-10). In contrast, domain AdvPs derived with -technisch and -mäßig are evaluated as stylistically low in German and, therefore, their use is usually felt as inappropriate in formal registers (Ruge 2004, Diepeveen 2013). Third, by conducting a contrastive analysis of journalistic articles published online between 2011 and 2012, De Cesare et al. (2020) ascribe 4 For a quantification of the rise of Italian AdvPs derived by -mente independently of the functional class to which they belong, see De Cesare (2019). 137 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German the high frequency of domain AdvPs in German as opposed to Italian (as well as English, French, and Spanish) to morphological reasons. On the one hand, German domain AdvPs are formed through conversion; that is, through a simpler word-formation process than in the other four languages (compare ex. [1a] and [1b] above). On the other hand, AdvPs in German can be created from compound nouns/ adjectives, such as fiskalpolitisch ‘in terms of fiscal policy’, derived from Fiskalpolitik/ fiskalpolitisch, or außenpolitisch ‘in terms of foreign policy’, derived from Außenpolitik/ außenpolitisch. These highly synthetic forms, which may refer to very specific and technical domains, are not possible in Italian (or in the other three languages), where the same notional domains have to be referred to by analytic forms, such as the PPs in termini di politica fiscale or in termini di politica estera. By contrast, cross-linguistic differences in the frequency of domain AdvPs do not seem to be related - at least in the corpus of online written news analysed by De Cesare et al. (2020) - to the availability of the two innovative formation patterns in -technisch and -mäßig. Possibly owing to the above-mentioned stylistic constraints, AdvPs formed by the latter two suffixes are very rarely observed in the examined dataset 5 . In this paper, we will add new evidence supporting the morphological explanation provided by De Cesare et al. (2020). Furthermore, we will investigate, on the basis of two larger corpora (comprising texts of two different text typologies), other possible factors that may play a role in determining the distribution of DAials occurring as AdvPs, PPs, and CPs in Italian as opposed to German. In particular, after providing - through an analysis of a parallel corpus of parliamentary proceedings, i.e., the Europarl corpus - a list of formation patterns used for expressing domain modification in the two languages (Section 3), we will focus on the distributional, semantic, and pragmatic properties of a series of DAials in a comparable corpus of online written news (Section 4). These DAials constitute a series, since they all refer to the same notional domain - that is, the very frequently mentioned domain of politics/ policy - and therefore share an analogous meaning, but have different forms (see ex. [1]-[3] above). In analysing a series of DAials, we rule out the possibility that cross-linguistic variations in their frequency, distribution, and function might be caused i) by the type of notional domain referred to (e.g., technical, scientific, etc.) and/ or ii) by very general morphological constraints, such as the lower productivity of compounding strategies in Italian as opposed to German (see the findings of De Cesare et al. 2020 discussed above). The approach adopted in this paper is «unidirectional» (Pierini 2012: 60-61), which means that it aims to better understand the properties of Italian DAials in light of their similarities to and differences from analogous forms in German. This approach was chosen because, as illustrated in this 5 Stylistic constraints could, along with space constraints, affect the distribution of DAials in both printed and online journalistic articles, since these are expository, informative texts addressed (and available) to a large audience. Nevertheless, it is important to note that online news is a very composite text typology where linguistically different sources are combined during the editing process (cf. Section 4 for more details). Marta Lupica Spagnolo 138 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 section, forms and properties of DAials have been, on the one hand, more extensively investigated in the literature on German. On the other hand, DAials and, among these, domain AdvPs have been shown to be a more consolidated strategy for expressing domain modification in German than in Italian, at least if we look at their frequency in online written news and if we consider the development of innovative and extremely productive formation patterns with -mäßig and -technisch (De Cesare et al. 2020). As a result of our contrastive analysis, we will evaluate whether the patterns of use of Italian DAials are comparable to the German ones or are related to language-specific constraints. This paper is structured as follows. As a first step, we describe two semantic values expressed by DAials, i.e., restricting and specifying (Molinier 1984), and discuss how these meanings may be interrelated with their clause position and their pragmatic (interactional and textual) properties in written texts (Section 2). Since these features are mainly investigated for domain AdvPs, we primarily focus on adverbials with this form in Section 2. To what extent they are also valid for Italian and German DAials occurring as analytic forms is a question that is addressed in the subsequent parts of this paper. Sections 3 and 4 are dedicated to exposing the methods and results of our two corpus-based contrastive analyses. Specifically, our objectives are threefold. First, using the inventory of German forms provided in the literature as a starting point, we aim to identify which adverbial forms - simple and compound-based AdvPs, PPs, or CPs - and which formation patterns are employed for translating synthetic and analytic DAials from German into Italian in the Europarl corpus (Section 3) 6 . Besides constituting a preliminary step for the following investigation, this mainly descriptive analysis highlights an important difference between DAials realized as AdvPs and PPs with adj., on the one hand, and PPs with noun and CPs, on the other hand: as a matter of fact, only the latter two forms may introduce a referential expression that can be modified by adjectives, nouns, and/ or other PPs. Second, through a quantitative analysis of the distribution of DAials in online newspapers (cf. Section 4.1 for a description of our corpus), we intend to better quantify the absolute and relative frequency of Italian DAials and to identify their preferred clause position and their primary functions at the beginning of the clause, using German as a baseline (Section 4.2). Third, we aim to account for the observed interrelations between form, position, and function, by conducting a qualitative analysis of the morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of different forms of DAials (i.e., AdvPs, PPs with noun, and PPs with adj.) in Italian as opposed to German (Section 4.3). Particular attention is reserved in this section for the textual properties of DAials at the beginning of VS-clauses in Italian. Concluding remarks are provided in Section 5. 6 This study is partially based on research conducted with Ana Albom on the Italian and Spanish translations of German DAials in the Europarl corpus and presented at the International Contrastive Linguistics Conference 8 in Athens, 25-28 May 2017. 139 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German 2. Semantic, pragmatic, and distributional properties of DAials 7 As for their semantics, DAials may have one of two distinct values, that is, a restricting or a specifying one (Molinier 1984: 59-61, De Cesare et al. 2020: 35). Restricting and specifying DAials tend to carry out different pragmatic functions (interactional and textual, respectively), and to show different distributional features both in the clause and in the text (see Section 2.1 and 2.2). Based on our data, we have identified a third use context for Italian DAials in online newspapers. In these contexts, DAials are fronted at the beginning of a VS-clause and carry out what we have defined as an anchoring function (Section 2.3). 2.1 Restricting DAials 8 Restricting DAials restrict the validity of a predication; that is, they limit the attribution of a property to a subject with respect to a specific domain (cf. Salvi 1988/ 2001: 44 for this definition of predication). In doing so, they indicate the «domain of truth» (domaine de vérité) in which the predication applies. The predication can be explicit, such as in [4], or implicit (also: elliptical, underlying), such as in [5], where politically modifies an Adjectival Phrase (AdjP) inside a Nominal Phrase (NP). In particular, we assume that the underlying predication in [5] corresponds to the relative clause «the issue that is/ was politically problematic» (cf. also Molinier 1984: 66). (4) Politically (and financially), it is not a problem. (5) The politically (and financially) problematic issue was solved. Semantically, we assume no stark difference between the AdvPs in [4] and [5]. In both cases, the predication relation - before being restricted - potentially holds true in a variety of alternative domains and, in fact, politically may be coordinated with other DAials, such as financially, morally, and so on. Given this similarity on a semantic level, however, it should be noted that there are some constraints regarding the adverbial forms that may appear in the two contexts: Politically in [4] can easily be replaced by a PP or a CP, such as «from a political point of view» or «politically speaking». In contrast, these analytic expressions are hard to find in an utterance like [5]. Furthermore, the distributional properties of politically in [4] and [5] are different. Especially if it is graphically detached (i.e., if the DAial is separated by the rest of 7 The observations outlined in this section are strongly based on discussions conducted with the members of the ISAaC research group at the University of Basel. For some research results of this project, see De Cesare (2018a, 2018b, in press), De Cesare et al. (2018, 2020). 8 For brevity, we mainly provide examples in English in Sections 2.1 and 2.2. However, unless otherwise stated, the illustrated properties are also valid for Italian and German DAials. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 140 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 the clause through punctuation marks) 9 , the AdvP in [4] can be moved to the middle or end of the clause without changing the meaning of the utterance where it occurs: see «Politically (,) it is (,) politically (,) not a problem (,) politically». The same does not hold for an AdvP working as a phrase modifier, which must occupy a position directly before or after the modified constituent (Molinier 1984: 66). As for their pragmatic properties, restricting DAials - as both predication and phrase modifiers - often function as «hedges» (Hasselgård 2010: 298-99). As a matter of fact, they indicate to what extent and/ or in which sense an object or person belongs to a certain category (expressed by the predication). Therefore, they may be used to downplay a critique or a generalization in the framework of linguistic politeness (Diepeveen 2013). In this sense, restricting DAials are usually interactionally oriented and mainly have an intersubjective 10 function: they help the speaker/ writer negotiate vis-à-vis the listener/ reader a subjective stance towards the state or process referred to. Often, the negotiated stance is evaluative, while speakers strategically use DAials to reduce their commitment to their own judgement, such as, for example, in «he is politically dead» (Bellert 1977: 347-48, Bertuccelli Papi 1992, Hermoso Mellado-Damas 2015). As a consequence of this, restricting DAials tend to appear together with positively or negatively connotated expressions, such as «problem» or «problematic (issue)» in examples [4] and [5]. 2.2 Specifying DAials As opposed to restricting DAials, specifying DAials specify the «universe of discourse» (univers de discours 11 ) in which an utterance has sense and is necessarily valid (Molinier 1984: 60). Thus, in [6] and [7], politically does not properly limit the domain of application of «being a leftist», since the utterances cannot be interpreted in any other domains apart from that of politics/ policy. Since no other competing domains are possible, the AdvP in [6] and [7] can hardly be coordinated with other DAials. (6) Politically, Paul is a leftist 12 . (7) Politically, a leftist is (defined as) a person who supports social equality. 9 The degree of integratedness vs detachedness in the clause is a very important parameter also for evaluating the pragmatic functions of an adverbial (see also Section 2.2). 10 For a discussion on discourse markers with a mainly intersubjective vs discourse-structuring function, see Sarda et al. (2014: 14). 11 «Universe of discourse» is defined in logic as the general set of circumstances in which a proposition can be said to be true or false (Charolles 1997: 5). 12 The original example taken from Molinier (1984: 61) is «Politiquement, Paul se situe au centre gauche». 141 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German Apart from coordination, another criterion for distinguishing between restricting and specifying DAials is the type of verb used in the host utterance. Specifying DAials are typically found in «generic analytic sentences» (Hermoso Mellado- Damas 2015: 115); that is, for instance, equative copular clauses or definitions, such as in [6] and [7], respectively. This means that specifying DAials generally occur in clauses where an identity relation (rather than a predicative one) is expressed. However, specifying DAials may also appear with other verbs and/ or in other sentence types, such as in ex. [8] below. As already mentioned, the crucial difference from restricting DAials consists in the fact that there are no other alternative domains in which the utterance may hold true 13 . (8) Syntactically, one assigns strings like most dentists , the dogcatcher , and John’s teacher to a common grammatical category [NP] because of the fact that-[…]. Semantically, it appears that the meanings of (1-1) through (1-3) depend in a regular way on the noun phrases the sentences contain. (ex. taken from Ernst 2004: 111. Emphasis in the original) If we look at examples [6] and [7] above, we may argue that specifying DAials are superfluous for interpreting the meaning of the utterance in which they occur. One reason is that their function becomes rather manifest at the textual level. As illustrated by [8], specifying DAials mainly work as «indexation links» in written texts (cf. Sarda et al. 2014 for the term); that is, they carry out a structuring and segmenting function on the ongoing discourse 14 . In particular, for instance, in [8], the speaker/ writer establishes through the AdvP syntactically a frame that sorts - and therefore organizes - the following utterances under a specific point of view (‘related to syntax’). This frame holds until it is replaced by the next DAial semantically, which therefore marks a shift in the textual structure. In this sense, specifying DAials are means of both connecting utterances together and segmenting the text in paragraphs or blocks 15 , thereby enhancing text cohesion and facilitating its interpretation. 13 In the literature, few syntactic tests have also been discussed for distinguishing DAials with a restricting or specifying function: for example, the former can answer, together with yes/ no, a total interrogative and may be easily clefted, while the latter cannot (cf. De Cesare 2018b on French). 14 Sarda et al. (2014: 16-18) use the concept of «indexation links» to refer to a broader category of adverbials, called «framing adverbials», which comprise, among others, topicalizing adverbials, such as as for x, setting adverbials of space and time, such as in Germany or in the 18 th century, and meta-discursive organizers, such as in short. In contrast, specifying DAials are not explicitly mentioned as belonging to this category. For a more detailed comparison between DAials and topicalizing adverbials, see Section 3. 15 Blocks are the text units graphically separated from each other in which online articles are subdivided (De Cesare et al. 2016: 125). In the following examples, the signs <b> and </ b> indicate the beginning and end of a block, respectively. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 142 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Although more studies on this topic are needed, the capability of adverbials to take a wide scope - i.e., to extend their influence beyond the boundary of the host utterance to the following ones - has been related in the literature to their position in the clause and in the text, at least in some languages and for some classes of adverbials. In particular, according to Sarda et al. (2014: 14-20), adverbials working as indexation links usually occur at the beginning of the clause and, preferably, at the beginning of the paragraph in English, and also tend to be (graphically or intonationally) detached 16 (see also De Cesare 2018a: 109-12 on Italian sentence adverbials, Ernst 2004: 114 on English domain AdvPs, De Cesare in press on Italian, French, and Spanish DAials). Furthermore, the dimension of the textual shift provoked by an adverbial tends to relate to its morphosyntactic complexity, that is, for instance, to its length in terms of both syllables and words (cf. Virtanen 1992 on temporal and spatial adverbials in English). Other relevant parameters are the informational status of the adverbial and the text typology. Thus, a monosyllabic setting AdvP, such as then, whose meaning is inferable from the previous context, would possibly mark a more local shift in a narrative than a PP formed by two constituents and introducing an informationally new landmark, such as one morning (Virtanen 1992: 109). Analogously, we may expect that the morphosyntactic complexity and informational status of a DAial fronted in clause-initial position also play a role in determining the textual shift that it provokes in both Italian and German online written news. More generally, starting from the above-mentioned findings, our working hypothesis is that form and position - in the clause as well as in the text - may be interrelated factors in explaining the semantic and pragmatic features of Italian and German DAials in online newspapers. As we will see, this hypothesis turns out to be partially true for Italian. In this language, AdvPs tend to occur in a mid-clause position, while PPs with noun and, above all, PPs with adj. show a more variable distribution in the clause. These distributional patterns mirror the properties that these adverbial forms have, for the most part, at the semantic and pragmatic level. In contrast, form, position, and function do not seem to be strictly interrelated in German. As in the case of other adverbial classes (Pittner 2015: 151), German DAials basically occur in the middle field (Mittelfeld); only rarely are they fronted in the prefield (Vorfeld) or extraposed, after all constituents, in the post-field (Nachfeld). Relatedly, the three adverbial forms do not seem to perform distinct and specialized 16 Due to the lack of prosodic information, a non-integrated position in written texts is usually identified by looking at punctuation marks; that is, it is associated with a graphically detached position. In this paper, we will use punctuation as a provisional criterion for distinguishing DAials in mid-clause and final positions. However, since, as is well known, Italian and German are characterized by punctuation systems based on different principles - i.e., textual vs (mostly) syntactic ones, respectively (Ferrari et al. 2017 for an overview) - we cannot exclusively rely on punctuation to compare the pragmatic properties of DAials across texts written in these two languages (cf. Section 4 for more details). 143 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German functions in German online press, while domain AdvPs clearly outnumber DAials occurring as analytic forms. 2.3 DAials at the beginning of VS-clauses Based on our data, we have identified a third context where Italian DAials may occur in online newspapers. In this context, DAials are fronted at the beginning of a main VS-clause; that is, they are followed by a finite verb whose syntactic subject is postposed, but belongs to the same prosodic and/ or informational unit as the main verb 17 . In particular, following Bernini (1995), we distinguish two sub-types of main VS-clauses in Italian. The first type can be paraphrased with a cleft sentence and usually occurs with contrast or exhaustive listing: see example [9], where the DAial is preceded by an adversative conjunction. Conversely, the second type of VS-constructions, such as that in [10], cannot be explained in terms of contrast, but rather requires a presentative (or thetic) interpretation 18 . (9) Un intervento […] infarcito di affermazioni a effetto: come quella che «il terrorismo è la peste del Ventunesimo secolo». </ b> <b> Ma, dal punto di vista politico, sono i giudizi sul movimento pacifista a fare più scalpore. «La pace non si conquista sventolando bandierine, ma portando avanti una politica autenticamente pacificatrice» (repubblica.it, 2004). ‘A speech […] full of catch-phrases: «such as that terrorism is the plague of the twenty-first century». </ b> <b> But from a political point of view, the judgments on the pacifist movement mostly cause a sensation. «Peace is not gained by waving flags, but by pursuing an authentically peaceful policy […]» (10) «Sul piano politico - conclude - c’è già la possibilità di un accordo» </ b> (repubblica. it, 2010). «On the political level - he concludes - there is already the possibility of an agreement» </ b>’. According to previous studies (cf. Bernini 1995: 63 on Italian, Sasse 1996 for a contrastive perspective), the presence of preverbal material, in particular of setting adverbials of time and space preceding the main verb, has proven to be frequent in both types of VS-clauses. However, given that adverbials do not seem to directly trigger VS-order in Italian, their functions in VS-clauses have, as far as we know, scarcely been explored. 17 Utterances where the subject is right-dislocated do not belong to this clause structure. 18 Both examples [9] and [10] stem from our corpus of online written language. The examples in this and the following sections are literally translated into English in order to maintain the original adverbial’s position and clause structure. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 144 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 As for our corpus, DAials fronted at the beginning of a VS-clause cannot properly be classified as restricting DAials. The reason is related to the peculiar informational and textual properties of VS-clauses in Italian. As a matter of fact, VS-clauses, especially with a presentative interpretation, such as that in [10] above, «do not predicate a property of some entity but they simply assert or ‹pose› […] a fact or state of affairs» (Lambrecht 1994: 140; see also Venier 2002: 95, Salvi 1988/ 2001: 44- 50). Therefore, we cannot identify a predication to which the DAials attach to restrict it. The semantic function of DAials at the beginning of VS-clauses is thus more similar to that of specifying DAials. However, if we look at their pragmatic properties, these DAials do not usually extend their scope beyond the utterance in which they occur and, therefore, do not work as indexation links at the textual level. Again, this fact may be explained by the clause structure in which they are embedded. In both types of VS-clauses, the constituent after the verb is informationally very salient (Bernini 1995, De Cesare 2007, respectively). Consequently, it highly competes with the DAial in the organization of the following discourse: see, as evidence, the repetition of items related to both the DAials and the clefted-constituent, underlined in [9]. Rather, as we will discuss in more detail in Section 4, DAials at the beginning of VS-clauses tend to be linked to what was previously said. Because of their backwards orientation, we define these DAials as having an «anchoring» function (cf., again, Lambrecht 1994: 85-86 for the term): fronted in clause-initial position, an anchoring DAial provides the reader with a point of departure for interpreting an utterance which otherwise is mostly forward-looking. Finally, it should be noted that analogous contexts cannot be identified on the basis of syntactic or functional criteria in German. On the one hand, as is well known, verb-subject inversion in declarative clauses necessarily requires the anteposition of another constituent in the prefield. On the other hand, other linguistic strategies, such as subject accentuation, strongly compete with XVS-order in performing discourse-(re)initiating functions similar to that of VS-clauses in Italian (Sasse 1996: 39-43). 3. Formation patterns for expressing domain modification in Italian and German 3.1 Data and methods To draw up a list of formation patterns used to express domain modification in the two languages, we look at how German DAials are translated into Italian in a parallel corpus. The parallel corpus consists of the German-Italian sub-corpus of the Europarl corpus (i.e., the europarl7_de), which is available online on the platform 145 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German Sketch Engine and comprises approx. 54.000.000 tokens. The Europarl corpus was primarily compiled for statistical machine translation research (Koehn 2005) 19 . It collects the minutes of the debates at the European Parliament (originals and translations of 21 European languages), dating back to the period from 1996 to 2011. In terms of text typology, we are hence dealing with either texts written to be read aloud or transcribed spoken language. We decided to examine the Italian equivalents of German DAials because, as already mentioned, a preliminary list of formation patterns of German DAials is available in the literature (see, in particular, Diepeveen 2012: 67-69, 2013, Bartsch 1972, Altmann 1976: 245-47). Apart from drawing up an analogous list for Italian DAials, we aimed to identify, by looking at the translation pairs, initial clues to explain cross-linguistic differences in the use of DAials in the two languages. However, the results of the analysis revealed in this section are preliminary. As demonstrated by Cartoni et al. (2013) utilizing homogeneity measures, the data from the Europarl corpus tend to be accurate and highly comparable, since the translations are usually proofread by specialists in their first languages. Nevertheless, they also present several limitations: apart from the problem of the pivot languages (see below), a major issue consists in the fact that the European Parliament’s translators usually work with translation memories. This may lead to a preference for standardized lexical choices and/ or to other simplification strategies that are typical for translated texts (cf. Baroni/ Bernardini 2006). The formation patterns of German DAials selected for the query are listed in Appendix 1. They are divided into four groups, i.e., i) AdvPs formed with the morphological categories -lich, -isch, -ell, -al, -är, -iv, -mäßig, and -technisch; ii) PPs with adj.; iii) PPs with nouns; and iv) CPs formed with finite or infinite verbs. The search was automatically carried out in the europarl7_de corpus, by setting the additional parameter «language of the speaker = German». This parameter - which refers to the documents’ metadata - allows selecting only texts/ talks that were originally delivered in German 20 . Moreover, as is well known, German has been, along with English and French, a pivot (or relay) language in the European Parliament since 2004. That means that texts are first translated into English, French, or German and then from these languages into other ones. Given that, the risk of including texts translated twice - for instance, from German into English and then from English into Italian - is reduced as far as possible in our dataset. After conducting an automatic query, we filtered out the occurrences of DAials in the German europarl7_de corpus through a qualitative analysis. As already discussed, for example, in Bartsch (1972: 63), problems may arise when distinguishing 19 See also: www.statmt.org/ europarl/ [24.1.2021]. 20 However, as noted by an anonymous reviewer, we cannot exclude the possibility that the talk’s original speaker may have been bilingual. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 146 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 between DAials and other classes of adverbials, in particular manner adverbials. Following De Cesare et al. (2020), the main criteria we used for this task were: i. the «paraphrase test»: DAials can be paraphrased with ‘from an ADJ point of view’ or ‘with respect to N’, but not with ‘in an ADJ way/ manner’; ii. the «fronting test»: DAials can be moved into sentence-initial position without changing functional category; iii. the «context of occurrence»: DAials are often accompanied by other DAials in the preceding or following context. Apart from manner adverbials, during our analysis we found out that DAials are sometimes hard to distinguish from topicalizing adverbials (also called topicalizing markers in the literature), namely adverbials, such as as for x or related to x, whose function is to indicate that «the introduced segment becomes the topic of the utterance» 21 (Garcés Gómez 2003: 379; see also Sarda et al. 2014 on English, Charolles 1997, 2005 on French, who, however, uses the label adverbiaux cadratifs ‘framing adverbials’). Topicalizing and domain adverbials have similar organizing functions at the textual level. Nevertheless, they differ in some important respects. First, the former can have a co-referential element in the utterance in which they occur (Garcés Gómez 2003: 363), while the latter cannot: compare, for instance, the clauses «As for the content 1 , I changed it 1 » and «In terms of contents 1 , I change it 2 ». Second, the scope of a topicalizing adverbial tends not to exceed the clause boundary (Charolles 1997: 33) and therefore to be more restricted than that of a (specifying) DAial. Third, the item introduced by a topicalizing adverbial is usually already mentioned in the previous context or is supposed to be known by the audience; in other words, it tends to be informationally active or semi-active. As we will further discuss in Section 3.2, not all forms of DAials may be able to satisfy this third condition. 3.2 Results Table 1 shows the German DAials used in the europarl7_de corpus and their translations into Italian. The data are arranged according to the frequency of each formation pattern. As already mentioned, in this paper, we indicate with «formation pattern» each different morphosyntactic manifestation of a DAial, independently of the notional domain referred to and of other grammatical features, such as number or definiteness (thus, for instance, we refer with the abstract formation pattern da 21 «[M]arcadores de topicalización […] indican que el segmento que introducen se convierte en el tópico del enunciado» (Garcés Gómez 2003: 379). Specifically, Garcés Gómez (2003) distinguishes between topicalizing adverbs, derived by -mente, and topicalizing markers, such as en cuanto a ‘as for’ and en lo referente a ‘with regard to’. As discussed in Section 1, AdvPs, PPs, and CPs are, according to our definition, all adverbials. 147 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German punto di vista ‘from point of view’ to specific DAials occurring as both from the point(s) of view and from a point of view). German DAials Italian translations AdvPs AdvP (35) AdvP (11) PPs with adj. auf [adj.] Ebene (3) aus [adj.] Perspektive (2) a livello [adj.] (6) da punto di vista [adj.] (5) in termini [adj.] (2) da prospettiva [adj.] (1) su piano [adj.] (1) PPs with noun in Bereich [noun] (11) hinsichtlich [noun] (3) in Bezug auf [noun] (2) in puncto [noun] (1) von [noun] her (1) in termini di [noun] (4) in materia di [noun] (3)- in campo di [noun] (2) in ambito di [noun] (1) in settore di [noun] (1) sotto profilo di [noun] (1) CPs [AdvP] betrachtet (1) [AdvP] gesehen (1) [AdvP] gesprochen (1) wenn man es [AdvP] betrachtet (1) osservare da prospettiva [adj.] (1) DAials translated as topicalizing adverbials relativo a-[noun] (2)- in relazione a [noun] (1) quanto a [noun] (1) che attiene/ attengono a [noun] (1) DAials not translated as adverbials translated as adj. (11) not translated or paraphrased with a noun or a verb (7) Table 1. German DAials and their Italian translations in the europarl7_de corpus A summary of the same data is provided in Table 2, where we report the frequencies of the different formation patterns out of the total number of tokens. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 148 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 German DAials Italian translations formation patterns tokens formation patterns tokens AdvPs 22 2 35 1 11 PPs with adj. 2 5 5 15 PPs with noun 5 18 6 12 CPs 4 4 1 1 DAials translated as topicalizing adverbials 4 5 Table 2. Frequencies (formation patterns out of tokens) of German DAials and their Italian translations in the europarl7_de corpus Looking at Tables 1 and 2, we may observe that the total number of DAials in the original German texts exceeds that of their Italian translations (62 vs 39). The main reason lies in the fact that there are a few cases in which German DAials (more specifically, AdvPs) are not translated as adverbials in Italian (see, in particular, the last row in Table 1). This frequently happens when the domain AdvP modifies an adjective in a nominal phrase in German. In these contexts, the DAial is often rendered with a corresponding adjective in Italian, such as, for instance, in «ein strategisch wichtiger Partner» ‘a strategically important partner’ that becomes «un partner strategico» ‘a strategic partner’ 23 . These and analogous rewordings may be accounted for as an effect of simplification strategies, which are very common in translated texts. In this regard, Baroni/ Bernardini (2006) also determine that the low frequency of adverbs - independently of the functional class to which they belong - may be used as a diagnostic feature to automatically discriminate between texts originally written in Italian and texts translated into this language. Moreover, the data reveal that DAials occurring as PPs in the Italian translations outnumber those in the original German texts. This holds regarding the number of both tokens (27 vs 23) and formation patterns (11 vs 7). As a matter of fact, PPs are used in Italian to render not only DAials with the same form, but also DAials occurring as AdvPs (or also as CPs) in the original German texts. This happens not only when the original German AdvP is derived from a compound adjective, such as in the case of umweltpolitisch ‘in terms of environmental politics/ policy’. As the trans- 22 In the europarl7_de corpus, German domain AdvPs are formed either by conversion or by -mäßig, i.e., in our terms, by two formation patterns. In Italian, AdvPs may exclusively be created through one formation pattern, i.e., by adding the suffix -mente. 23 Note that this paraphrase is only possible for restricting and not for specifying DAials (Molinier 1984: 62). 149 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German lation from [11a] into [11b] shows, PPs are sometimes preferred in Italian even if the original German AdvP was based on a simple adjective. (11a) Inhaltlich halten wir unseren Vorschlag für den weitsichtigeren […] (europarl7_de) ‘Content-wise, we consider our proposal as the more far-sighted […]’ (11b) In termini di contenuti consideriamo la nostra proposta più lungimirante […] ‘In terms of contents, we consider our proposal more far-sighted […]’ Regarding the translation pair in [11], it should be noted that there does exist in Italian a synthetic form, i.e., contenutisticamente, for rendering the German AdvP inhaltlich. Nevertheless, the former AdvP is scarcely used and, for example, occurs only 5 times in the Reference Corpus for Written Italian Coris/ Codis 24 . This distribution suggests another reason accounting for the high frequency of PPs in the Italian translations of German DAials. Since DAials in Italian are overall less frequent than in German, their interpretation may be less easy to retrieve for both writers/ speakers and readers/ listeners. This holds especially if they must process complex texts under time pressure, as it happens when editing/ reading the translations of the European Parliament Proceedings. Thus, DAials occurring as PPs may be preferred at least in this text typology to AdvPs, since the former provide a paraphrase of the corresponding German AdvPs and are therefore semantically less ambiguous than synthetic forms. Third, the qualitative analysis of the dataset points out the ambiguity of some forms listed in Table 1. A few forms, such as hinsichtlich [noun] ‘in terms of/ as far as’, may also be - and indeed are often - used as topicalizing adverbials in German. That is, they are used to mark the linguistic unit about which something is going to be said (Garcés Gómez 2003: 360-64, Charolles 1997: 25-33, 2005: 4) and not, as DAials are, for restricting or specifying the domain in which a predication holds true or an utterance is necessarily valid. The same holds for Italian, where some adverbials, such as in materia [noun] ‘on the subject of’, may serve both functions depending on the context. The effect of this ambiguity becomes evident if we look at a few translation pairs. German DAials with an ambiguous meaning, such as im Bereich [noun] ‘in the field of’ in [12a], are sometimes rendered with expressions like relativo a ‘related to’ in [12b], which exclusively work as topicalizing adverbials in Italian. Other topicalizing adverbials used for rendering German DAials in the Italian translations are quanto a ‘as for’, in relazione a ‘in relation to’, che attengono a ‘which relate to’ (cf. the second last row in Table 1). 24 For a description of this corpus, see: http: / / corpora.dslo.unibo.it/ coris_eng.html [24.1.2021]. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 150 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 (12a) Sowohl im Bereich der Migrations- und Asylpolitik als auch im Bereich der Bürgerrechte und des Datenschutzes wird das Bedürfnis nach Sicherheit in Europa vor die Menschenrechte […] gestellt. (europarl7_de) ‘In the field of migration and asylum policy as well as in the field of civil rights and data protection, the need for security in Europe has been prioritized ahead of human rights […]’ (12b) La politica relativa a immigrazione e asilo, diritti civili e protezione dei dati ha scelto di dare priorità alla sicurezza in Europa […] ‘The politics relating to migration, asylum, civil rights, and data protection chose to give priority to security in Europe […]’ It is worth noting that only PPs with noun and a few finite CPs (but not AdvPs or PPs with adj.) may work as topicalizing adverbials depending on the context. The reason lies in the fact that, to become a topic, the element introduced by the adverbial must be a discourse-referential expression; in other words, it «must have a certain pragmatic reality for the interlocutors» (Lambrecht 1994: 156). Thus, it should preferably be a pronoun or a noun already mentioned or evoked in the previous context (see also, in this regard, the use of the definite article in front of the noun introduced by the DAial in [12a]). This latter observation motivates from a functional as well as morphosyntactic point of view a distinction between DAials occurring as PPs with adj. and DAials occurring as PPs with noun in our study: only PPs with noun may work as topicalizing adverbials. 3.3 Summary By integrating the results of our query in the europarl7_de corpus with inventories of forms provided in the existing literature, we can now compile an empirically grounded list of formation patterns for creating domain PPs with adj., PPs with noun, and CPs in Italian (cf. Appendix 2). Furthermore, we can single out some similarities and differences in the use of DAials in the two languages under scrutiny. In particular, the analysis reveals a tendency to avoid the use of domain AdvPs as modifiers of adjectives in complex NPs in Italian. Furthermore, it suggests that DAials tend to occur more frequently as PPs in this language in comparison to German. However, we must be cautious about drawing any conclusions at this point of the analysis. As already mentioned, translation effects and, among these, simplification strategies may have a greater impact in our parallel corpus than in other text typologies in motivating the observed distribution of AdvPs and PPs. Against this background, more robust evidence concerning the cross-linguistic differences in the use of (a series of) DAials will emerge through the examination of a comparable corpus of online news originally written in Italian and German in Section 4. 151 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German 4. A series of DAials in Italian and German online newspapers 4.1 Data and methods Our dataset, the TenTen_News corpus, is comprised of online journalistic articles originally written in Italian and German. The texts are taken from the web-corpora itTenTen10 and deTenTen13, available online on Sketch Engine (cf. Jakubíček et al. 2013 for a description of the TenTen corpus family). As summarized in Table 3, the selected Italian articles were published in different sections of the popular daily newspaper <repubblica.it>. The German texts were written for two popular daily and weekly newspapers, i.e., <sueddeutsche.de> and <zeit.de>, respectively. In addition to their text typology, the Italian and German sub-corpora are highly comparable in size (about 14.000.000 tokens each) and are similar concerning the articles’ publication period. However, as opposed to the Italian dataset, the German texts were collected from the internet automatically. So, they sometimes include readers’ comments on the articles 25 . Italian TenTen_News corpus (14.593.414 tokens) Newspapers (website) Text typology Tokens Years repubblica.it Online articles taken from various sections 14.593.414 2000-2010 German TenTen_News corpus (14.485.949 tokens) sueddeutsche.de Online articles taken from various sections (including readers’ comments) 7.838.319 2006-2013 zeit.de 6.647.630 2009-2013 Table 3. Composition of the Italian and German TenTen_News corpus We chose the TenTen_News corpus as the dataset for our analysis for two reasons. First, to better understand the interrelations between form, position, and function, we resolved to exclusively focus on a series of DAials and therefore needed a large corpus in order to access a sufficient number of observations. The DAials under scrutiny constitute a series, since they are all formed via the same lemma, namely the relational adjective «political» (I. politico/ G. politisch) and/ or the noun «politics/ policy» (I. politica/ G. Politik). We picked up the domain politics/ policy after a preliminary search in two large Italian corpora: the above-mentioned Reference Corpus for Written Italian Coris/ Codis and the web-corpus ItTenTen2010. In both corpora, politicamente is one of the most frequent AdvPs that may potentially have domain meaning. Because of its high frequency in corpora with different designs, and since it is often mentioned in the literature, we regard politicamente as a prototypical 25 We are not considering DAials in readers’ comments for the qualitative analysis in Section 4.3. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 152 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Italian domain AdvP 26 . In particular, we assume that, due to its frequency and its semantic features, the function of politicamente as a domain modifier should be (quite) easily identifiable by readers as opposed to what may happen with other AdvPs more rarely used as DAials in Italian, such as contenutisticamente ‘content-wise’ mentioned in Section 3.2. In our Italian TenTen_News corpus, there are only a few examples where politicamente is used as a manner adverb or has an ambiguous meaning, that is, 67 occurrences out of 410 27 . Given that, we believe that Italian DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy may be better compared with analogous forms in German, that is, in a language in which domain modification has been proven to be proportionally more frequent (cf. Sections 1 and 2). Second, we decided to use a corpus of online newspapers as the dataset because of the peculiar pragmatic-textual features of this text typology, which, in turn, mainly depend on their production and fruition modalities (Bonomi 2014, De Cesare et al. 2016: 100-39 for an overview). Journalistic articles - both printed and published online - are generally expository, informative texts whose main function is to convey information about facts. In this text typology, journalists may take advantage of the use of DAials to qualify the validity of reported information and/ or to convey different perspectives about situations and events (Beaulieu-Masson 2006: 87-89). However, the role of the author is less central in online news than in printed press: as a matter of fact, the former is characterized by a few anonymous articles (or articles signed by the online redaction), where the need to negotiate responsibility through restricting DAials may be less strong than in, for instance, editorials or opinion pieces. Furthermore, the fact that journalists must work under time pressure to constantly update their online news has important consequences for their texts’ language and structure. Thus, online articles are, for instance, permeated by a scarce use of explicit cohesion markers in comparison to printed press (De Cesare et al. 2016: 127). At the same time, due to the difficulties of reading on computer screens, writers must develop other strategies, such as topic repetition and/ or text segmentation in blocks, to ensure a quick understanding of their texts. In this sense, informational synthesis may be sought in online news not only for space-saving reasons, but also to facilitate writing and reading processes. As we will more thoroughly discuss in the next sections, these editing and reading conditions may have an impact on the frequency of specifying DAials in our corpus. Eventually, it should be noted that online news is edited by gathering information from different written and spoken sources, such as press agencies, legal records, interviews, and blog entries. These sources may be written in the same language as 26 For the application of the concept «prototypicality» to the lexical category «adverb», see Ramat/ Ricca (1994). Prototypicality is understood as related to frequency both within and across languages. 27 This happens, for instance, when politicamente co-occurs with certain verbs, such as to act, to organize, to exploit. 153 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German the article or other languages, especially English. Therefore, single articles - as well as single blocks inside an article - may differ a great deal from one other in terms of their registers. Besides, owing to frequent copy-and-paste operations and covert translations, they tend to be characterized by formulaic and standardized expressions. For this reason, a quantitative analysis of the form and position of DAials in our corpus must be completed by a qualitative investigation of the functions that these DAials serve in specific utterances and texts. The combination of these two approaches allows, in our opinion, the identification of both well-established and innovative tendencies in the use of DAials in the two languages. 4.2 Results 4.2.1 Form and frequency In Table 4, we present an overview of the absolute and relative frequency of DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy in our corpus of Italian and German online news (for a list of the formation patterns searched for, see Appendices 1 and 2) 28 . Because most of these expressions can also serve as topicalizing or manner adverbials, we examined the query results manually and sorted out the tokens that were not used as DAials in the texts. Furthermore, in Table 4, we add the information about how many AdvPs, PPs with adj., PPs with noun, and CPs occur only once in the same article. The latter frequencies are used as a dataset for the statistical analyses provided in this section. As a matter of fact, the statistical tests we carried out assume that our observations are independent of each other. By contrast, the probability that a DAial occurs in a text is higher if another DAial is already used in the same article (on the notion of independence in statistics, see Gries 2013) 29 . 28 As for the AdvPs, apart from politicamente/ politisch, we also searched for occurrences of politikmäßig and politiktechnisch. These forms are not listed in German dictionaries; however, they do occur in some journalistic articles published online. We did not find any occurrences of these two formation patterns in the German TenTen_News corpus. 29 In order to control the independence of our data, we also checked the distribution of DAials according to the article’s author and news section. Regarding the first variable, the results of the control are less reliable because, as mentioned in Section 4.1, a few articles, especially in the Italian corpus, are not signed at all. However, the latter are often published in different years and/ or news sections: so, we can assume that our results do not reflect idiolectal habits of a very small group of journalists. As for the second variable, the DAials belonging to the series tend to occur in the section «politics» in both languages. Nevertheless, they also appear in a great number of other sections, such as «economy», «environment», «local news», or «culture». Although very promising, a detailed investigation of the distribution of DAials by these or other sociolinguistic variables is beyond the scope of this paper, which mainly focuses on their semantic, distributional, and pragmatic properties. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 154 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 AdvPs PPs with adj. PPs with noun CPs Total Italian 343 (69,4%) 120 (24,3%) 29 (5,9%) 2 (0,4%) 494 only once in the same article 308 (67,7%) 117 (25,7%) 28 (6,2%) 2 (0,4%) 455 German 803 (95,4%) 22 (2,6%) 6 (0,7%) 11 (1,3%) 842 only once in the same article 715 (94,8%) 22 (2,9%) 6 (0,8%) 11 (1,5%) 754 Table 4. Form and frequency of a series of DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy in the Italian and German TenTen_News corpus The data in Table 4 show that DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy mostly occur as AdvPs in both Italian and German online newspapers. If we look at the data separately - i.e., if we compare the occurrences of DAials first in Italian and then in German - we find out that, according to two chi-squared goodness-of-fit tests, the frequency distribution of AdvPs, PPs with Adj., PPs with noun, and CPs deviates very significantly from the expected one in Italian (X 2 = 506,24, df = 3, p twotailed < 0,001) as well as German (X 2 = 1961,5, df = 3, p two-tailed < 0,001) 30 . The great frequency of DAials occurring as AdvPs (as opposed to PPs and CPs) in the two languages may be accounted for by their distributional flexibility which, in turn, represents an advantage especially in the text typology under scrutiny (cf. Section 4.3 for more details). The data in Table 4 also reveal some differences in the use of DAials across languages. First, domain AdvPs are much more frequent in German online articles than in Italian ones. This is found by considering their absolute frequency (715 vs 308) and their frequency with respect to other forms (94,8% vs 67,7%). Second, Italian PPs with adj. and, to a lesser degree, PPs with noun outnumber analogous forms in German. By contrast, DAials occurring as CPs are underrepresented in the Italian corpus (only 1 occurrence) and are also rare in the German dataset (11 occurrences). According to a Fisher’s exact test, the observed differences in the frequencies of the four DAials’ forms in Italian vs German are statistically significant (p two-tailed < 0,001) 31 . This also holds if we exclusively compare the distribution of AdvPs and PPs in our two sub-corpora (i.e., without considering CPs) through a chi-squared test for independence (X 2 = 179,12, df = 1, p two-tailed < 0,001, Cramer’s V= 0,389). In particular, an inspection of the Pearson’s residuals reveals that Italian and German particular- 30 This also holds true if we lump together the occurrences of PPs with adj. and PPs with noun in our two sub-corpora and, therefore, if we compare the distribution of AdvPs, PPs, and CPs in Italian (X 2 = 309,13, df = 2, p two-tailed < 0,001) and German (X 2 = 1283,7, df = 2, p two-tailed < 0,001). 31 We computed a Fisher’s exact test because the expected frequencies were less than 5 (on the use of this test, see Gries 2013). 155 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German ly differ regarding the observed distribution of DAials occurring as PPs: in Italian online newspapers, PPs are overused in comparison to German. These quantitative results corroborate, on the basis of a larger dataset, the outcomes in De Cesare et al. (2020) discussed in Section 1. Moreover, they are in line with the tendencies observed through the analysis of the europarl7_de corpus in Section 3. Finally, Table 5 provides an overview of the types and frequencies of formation patterns used to create Italian and German PPs in the TenTen_News corpus. On the one hand, analogous formation patterns do not have the same frequencies in the two languages (compare, for instance, the occurrences of DAials involving punto di vista and Standpunkt ‘point of view’, respectively). On the other hand, the most common formation patters for PPs with adj. do not correspond to the most common ones for PPs with noun in either Italian or German. Thus, punto di vista is, for example, very often used to create PPs with adj., but not to form PPs with noun in Italian. Italian f ≥ 10 10 > f ≥ 3 3 > f ≥ 1 PPs with adj. (47) punto di vista (43) piano (14) livello (5) campo, termini (3) profilo (1) aspetto, materia, prospettiva PPs with noun (13) materia (4) campo (3) ambito, termini (2) punto di vista (1) livello, merito, piano, prospettiva German PPs with adj. (11) Ebene (8) Hinsicht (2) Sicht (1) Standpunkt PPs with noun (3) Bereich (1) hinsichtlich, puncto, Sicht Table 5. Types and frequencies of the formation patterns for Italian and German PPs in the TenTen_News corpus 4.2.2 Form and position As the next step, we examine which position in the clause the four DAials’ forms mostly occupy across languages. We distinguish between an initial, a mid-clause, and a final position based on the following criteria (cf. Lonzi 1991: 403-07 on Italian, Pittner 1999 on German) 32 : 32 On Italian, see also De Cesare (2018a), who, however, adopts partially different criteria. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 156 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 i. Italian DAials occupy an initial position if they are located i) at the very beginning of a main clause after a strong punctuation mark, or ii) directly after one or more constituent(s), such as coordinating conjunctions, other adverbials, or the subject, but before the finite verb of a principal or coordinate clause. German DAials are in the initial position if they occur in the prefield (Vorfeld) in main or coordinate clauses. DAials at the beginning of subordinate clauses are, by contrast, excluded from the count in both languages. ii. Italian DAials are in the final position if they occur after all constituents, in a graphically detached position (e.g., after a comma or a colon), at the end of a main or subordinate clause. This location approximately corresponds to that of the post-field (Nachfeld) in German. It should be noted that, since we exclusively rely on the presence of punctuation marks, our criteria for defining the final position in Italian are provisional. On the one hand, as is well known, online newspapers are characterized by both punctuation inaccuracy and emotional/ emphatic (over)use of some punctuation marks, such as comma or period 33 (Bonomi 2014: 174-75). On the other hand, if a graphically detached adverbial is not in an integrated position, the converse does not necessarily hold. That means that the number of DAials in the final position in both our sub-corpora may be underestimated (in favour of DAials in the mid-clause position) since we are not considering intonationally, but only graphically detached DAials. However, given the different sentence structures of the two languages under scrutiny, we decided to adopt a quite strict definition of the final position 34 . iii. The remaining positions - both graphically integrated and detached - are regarded as mid-clause positions. Table 6 provides an overview of the positions occupied by different forms of DAials in our corpus. For this analysis, all PPs and CPs are counted as long as they occur in different articles. We only consider a random sample of 100 occurrences of politisch and politicamente (which do not appear in the same text). 33 In this regard, we found in our corpus DAials which, although they are placed after a period, informatively belong to the previous utterance and, therefore, are here classified as occupying a final position: see, for instance, «Un’Italia spaccata, divisa tra due metà irriducibili e inconciliabili. Sul piano politico, culturale, sociale» ‘a split Italy, divided between two irreducible and irreconcilable halves. On the political, cultural, social level’ (repubblica.it, 2006). 34 For a study comparing the position of several adverbials’ classes in two languages, i.e., German and English, which also show different basic sentence structures, see Frey/ Pittner (1999). 157 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German initial mid-clause final (detached) Total AdvPs (100 occurrences) It. G. 8 (8%) 14 (14%) 86 (86%) 84 (84%) 6 (6%) 2 (2%) 100 100 PPs with adj. It. G. 35 (31,5%) 4 (19,1%) 56 (50,5%) 15 (71,4%) 20 (18%) 2 (9,5%) 111 21 PPs with noun It. G. 4 (15,4%) 2 (33,3%) 19 (73,1%) 4 (66,7%) 3 (11,5%) 0 26 6 CPs It. G. 1 (100%) 5 (50%) 0 4 (40%) 0 1 (10%) 1 10 Table 6. Clause position of the series of DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy in the Italian and German TenTen_News corpus According to a Fisher’s exact test, there is no statistically significant correlation between the form of a DAial and its preferred position in our German dataset. Independently of their form, the majority of German DAials tend to occur in the midclause position in our corpus of online news. This preference is more evident for AdvPs (84%), but also holds for PPs with adj. (71,4%) and PPs with noun (66,7%). In contrast, German CPs do not show a clear bias for a specific position, being used both at the beginning (50%) and in the middle (40%) of the clause. As opposed to German, there is a statistically significant correlation between form and position of Italian DAials in our corpus according to a Fisher’s exact test (p two-tailed < 0,001) 35 . The interpretation of this result is not straightforward. However, we may note that, similarly to German, the AdvP politicamente tends to occur in the middle of the clause in Italian (86%). By contrast, even if they also mostly appear in mid-clause position, PPs with noun and, above all, PPs with adj. exhibit greater mobility in our Italian corpus compared to analogous forms in German. As we only found one CP in our Italian dataset, we cannot draw any conclusion regarding their preferred clause distribution. 4.2.3 Form and function in clause-initial position As the last step of our quantitative analysis, we focus on the semantic and pragmatic properties of DAials that are fronted at the beginning of the clause. As discussed in Section 2, from a semantic point of view, we distinguish between DAials with restricting and specifying meanings. Useful tests for differentiating between these two types of DAials are i) whether they can be coordinated with other DAials and ii) what type of verb is involved. Pragmatically, restricting and specifying DAials usually serve an intersubjective and a textual (in particular, an indexation) function, respectively. In connection with this, 35 The Fisher’s exact test is also statistically significant if we compare the clause position of Italian AdvPs, PPs with adj., and PPs with noun (i.e., without considering CPs). Marta Lupica Spagnolo 158 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 the former mainly work locally, while the latter tend to extend their scope beyond the host utterance and to be placed at the beginning of a block. Furthermore, by looking more closely at their semantic and textual properties as well as at the clause structure in which they are embedded, we identify a third context where DAials may occur in our Italian corpus (see also Section 2.3). DAials fronted at the beginning of a VS-clause in Italian semantically work in an analogous way to specifying DAials. However, as opposed to the latter, they tend to have a narrow scope 36 and be linked to the previous (not to the following) context. Because of their backwards orientation, we define these DAials as having an anchoring function in Italian written texts. Table 7 summarizes the semantic and pragmatic properties of Italian and German DAials in the initial position in the TenTen_News corpus and indicates the clause structure in which they occur. For this analysis, we consider all DAials at the beginning of a main or coordinate clause and not only those that occur in different articles (therefore, the totals of tokens are different from those in Table 6). In German, we exclusively distinguish between two types of DAials, since we could not identify based on syntactic or functional criteria contexts that are analogous to those of anchoring DAials in Italian. Italian DAials in the initial position Semantics Predominant pragmatic function Clause structure AdvPs PPs with adj. PPs with noun CPs Total restricting intersubjective DAial + SV 27 (52,9%) 22 (43,1%) 1 (2%) 1 (2%) 51 specifying textual (indexation) DAial + SV 3 (33,3%) 5 (55,6%) 1 (11,1%) 0 9 specifying (narrow scope) textual (anchoring) DAial + VS 2 (15,4%) 9 (69,3%) 2 (15,8%) 0 13 German DAials in the initial position restricting intersubjective DAial + V 41 (80,4%) 3 (5,9%) 2 (3,9%) 5 (9,8%) 51 specifying textual DAial + V 3 (60%) 2 (40%) 0 0 5 Table 7. Semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic properties of a series of DAials in the initial position in the Italian and German TenTen_News corpus 36 Specifying DAials also do not always have a wide scope in our Italian and German corpus. Nevertheless, this can happen, for instance, because they are quoted as a part of indirect speech and not due to structural constraints. 159 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German Based on the data in Table 7, we may observe that both Italian and German DAials carry out an intersubjective function - for instance, working as hedges to reduce the speaker’s commitment towards an affirmation - more often than a textual one in our corpus. This holds even if DAials are placed at the beginning of the clause, that is, in a position where they can more easily take a wide scope 37 . As for the cross-linguistic differences, the three forms of DAials fronted in the initial position tend to be paired with a specific meaning/ function in our Italian dataset. The majority of clause-initial AdvPs has a restricting meaning in our Italian corpus. Specifying DAials - both working as indexation links and with an anchoring function - mainly occur as PPs with adj. 38 . Eventually, even if they are scarcely used at the beginning of the clause, half of PPs with noun in this position serve an anchoring function in Italian online newspapers. By contrast, analogous pairings of form, position, and meaning/ function cannot be identified in our German dataset, where both restricting and specifying DAials at the beginning of the clause mainly occur as AdvPs. 4.3 Discussion In this section, we will discuss in more detail the interrelation of form, position, and function of DAials occurring as AdvPs, PPs with noun, and PPs with adj. in our corpus. By contrast, since CPs are rarely used in both Italian and German, we will not further consider DAials taking this form. 4.3.1 AdvPs as phrase modifiers As shown in Section 4.2.1, DAials occur mostly as AdvPs in both Italian and German online newspapers. If we look at their contexts of occurrence, we find out that domain AdvPs are frequently used as phrase modifiers in mid-clause position in both languages. Considering this specific function, we may suggest that the great number of domain AdvPs (as opposed to PPs and CPs) in our data can be accounted for by morphosyntactic reasons that apply in both languages (see also De Cesare et al. 2020: 51-52). Owing to their low morphosyntactic complexity and informational weight, AdvPs can be inserted within a phrase (e.g., an AdjP, an NP, or a PP) to modify it locally more easily than DAials taking analytic forms can. Examples are provided in [13] and [14], where politicamente and politisch, respectively, take a narrow scope over an AdjP inside an NP. 37 An example is «Politicamente B. appartiene alla categoria dei pesi mosca […]» ‘Politically B. belongs to the category of fly weights […]’ (repubblica.it, 2004). Proper nouns are removed here and in the following examples. 38 Fourteen PPs with adj. at the beginning of the clause work as specifying DAials, as opposed to five AdvPs and three PPs with noun in the same position. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 160 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 (13) M. P. ricorre a una misura politicamente impopolare […] (repubblica.it, 2010) ‘M. P. uses a politically unpopular measure […]’ (14) Er sei der «politisch unerfahrenste» Kandidat der Geschichte. (sueddeutsche.de, 2010) ‘He would be the «politically most inexperienced» candidate in history.’ As phrase modifiers, domain AdvPs are usually placed directly before the constituent to which they refer. Therefore, their scope is not ambiguous for the readers. In this embedded position, they work exclusively as restricting DAials. In particular, in [13] and [14], the two restricting DAials function as hedges: they mitigate the communicative force of a negative judgment by limiting its validity to a specific domain. In [14], the reporter’s caution in quoting another person’s utterance in indirect speech is also indicated by the use of quotation marks and the subjunctive mode Konjunktiv-I. PPs both with adj. and with noun may also be used as phrase modifiers in Italian and German. However, PPs carry out this function more rarely than AdvPs do in our corpus: 23 (15%) PPs vs 43 (43%) AdvPs are phrase modifiers in our Italian sample, while 4 (14%) PPs vs 36 (36%) AdvPs have this function in the German one 39 . Again, this result is in line with the findings in De Cesare et al. (2020: 51) and is possibly related to the morphosyntactic weight of the adverbial forms under scrutiny. In both Italian and German, DAials occurring as PPs can hardly occupy an integrated position before an adjective in an NP, like the AdvPs in [13] and [14] above do. Therefore, PPs working as phrase modifiers are postposed after the constituent to which they refer. As a result, their scope is often ambiguous, since it is not always clear whether the DAials modify a clause constituent or the whole predication (cf., e.g., example [16] in Section 4.3.2). As for the cross-linguistic differences, German AdvPs outnumber analogous forms in Italian in our comparable corpus (cf. Table 4 in Section 4.1.2). Apart from possible differences in the communicative relevance of the functional category of domain modification in the two languages (cf. Sections 1 and 2), this result may also be related to the fact that AdvPs show higher distributional flexibility in German written texts compared to Italian ones 40 . In German, the AdvP politisch may be embedded in phrases that are syntactically very complex: in this position, it can, for example, modify another AdvP in an NP, such as in «mit ihren politisch relativ einflussreichen Blogs» ‘with their politically relatively influential blogs’ or «über […] politisch rechts motivierte Gewalttaten» ‘about […] politically right-wing motivated acts of violence’. In contrast, politicamente can less easily occupy such an embedded position in Italian clauses. Since the reasons are not syntactic, they mainly lie, in our opinion, in prosodic and stylistic 39 For AdvPs, 100 occurrences were examined. 40 Another reason may lie in the presence of a few readers’ comments in our German sub-corpus, since the latter are characterized by their own stylistic and space constraints. 161 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German principles of well-formedness. On the one hand, writers (in the same way as speakers) may avoid the juxtaposition of two or more AdvPs formed with the stress-bearing suffix -mente, as in the constructed example «un blog politicamènte relativamènte influente» ‘a politically relatively influential blog’ 41 . On the other hand, journalists may prefer to use a PP instead of an AdvP when this form co-occurs with another DAial that cannot take a synthetic form in Italian. Thus, even if morphological restrictions do not directly inhibit the formation of highly lexicalized AdvPs, such as politicamente, the presence of a DAial occurring as a PP in the nearby context, such as dal punto di vista del gettito in [15], could favour the choice of a DAial formed with an analogous formation pattern, i.e., dal punto di vista politico, in our Italian corpus. It is worth noting that a similar stylistic reason may also explain the scarce presence of CPs in Italian online newspapers: as a matter of fact, creating a CP often presupposes the possibility of forming an AdvP in -mente in Italian. (15) […] la pronuncia […] va a toccare […] la posta più «preziosa» dal punto di vista del gettito, e più controversa dal punto di vista politico, di tutta la manovra […] (repubblica.it, 2005) ‘[…] the pronouncement […] concerns […] the most «valuable» stake from the point of view of revenue, and the most controversial one from the political point of view, of the whole measure […]’ 4.3.2 PPs with noun: modifiability and degree of specificity Unlike AdvPs and PPs with adj., PPs with noun may be easily modified by other constituents, such as adjectives, nouns, or other PPs. Because of this property, they can refer to very specific domains, while Italian AdvPs and PPs with adj. usually cannot 42 . An example is provided in [16], where the Italian PP with noun in termini di politiche ‘in terms of policies’ is further specified by the adjectives fiscali ‘fiscal’, sociali ‘social’, and by the PP del lavoro ‘(of) employment’. (16) <b> «Sta aumentando fortemente il divario tra Nord e Sud e ad essere maggiormente penalizzate - dice il presidente […] A. M. - sono le famiglie, soprattutto quelle numerose». […] «Sono necessari - dice M. - interventi a sostegno delle famiglie: in termini di politiche fiscali, sociali e del lavoro». </ b> (repubblica.it, 2007) ‘<b> «The gap between North and South is growing sharply and families - says the president […] A. M. - especially large ones, are the most penalized. […] «There is the need - M. says - of supporting interventions for the families: in terms of fiscal, social and employment policies». </ b>’ 41 On the effects of lexical stress on silent reading in English, see, e.g., Ashby/ Clifton (2005). I thank Annette Gerstenberg for this suggestion. 42 Domain AdvPs can only be modified by certain adverbial classes, e.g., by focusing AdvPs, but not by degree AdvPs (Lonzi 1991: 346 and Altmann 1976: 245-47 on Italian and German, respectively). Marta Lupica Spagnolo 162 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 This modification pattern is very common in the Italian TenTen_News corpus, where 27 PPs with noun out of 29 (i.e., 93%) are further specified by other constituents. Consequently, PPs with noun constitute relatively long and heavy phrases in Italian. Because of their morphosyntactic and informational weight, they are quite frequently placed in a graphically detached position at the end or the middle of the clause (28%) 43 . In this position, they typically take a narrow scope; that is, their scope only encompasses the utterance in which they occur or the constituent they directly follow (see ex. [16]). Even if it does not exceed the clause boundary, it should, however, be noted that the scope of the PP with noun is semantically ambiguous in [16]: the PP can be interpreted as a restricting DAial that modifies the NP interventi a sostegno delle famiglie ‘supporting interventions for the families’. At the same time, since it occurs in a detached position, the PP may also be regarded as having a scope encompassing the whole utterance quoted in direct speech. By contrast, in the German corpus, PPs with noun are more rarely modified by adjectives (2 cases out of 6, i.e., 33%). One reason may lie in the fact that, as opposed to Italian, German disposes of a more synthetic strategy for referring to very specific domains, that is, to create domain AdvPs from compound nouns/ adjectives, such as fiskalpolitisch or sozialpolitisch 44 . 4.3.3 PPs with adj. as specifying DAials The most striking cross-linguistic difference we found in our corpus concerns the frequency and the variable clause position of PPs with adj. in Italian as opposed to German (cf. Tables 4 and 6 in Section 4.2). The question is why, even if DAials occurring as PPs with adj. are morphosyntactically more complex than AdvPs, the former occur proportionally more often than the latter at the beginning of the clause in Italian. A partial answer to this question may lie in the fact that PPs with adj. fronted in the initial position are specialized in taking a specifying value and carrying out an indexation function in Italian newspapers. In this regard, a typical example of PPs with adj. with a specifying meaning and textual function in the Italian TenTen_News corpus is provided in [17], where the clause-initial DAial sul piano politico ‘at the political level’ is also placed at the beginning of a block. 43 Unlike AdvPs (16%), PPs with adj. also frequently occur in a detached position in our Italian corpus (39%). However, this often happens when they are placed in the clause-initial position (cf. Section 4.3.3 for more details). For a discussion of the function of Italian PPs with noun at the beginning of the clause, see also Section 4.3.4. 44 AdvPs derived from compound nouns/ adjectives were not considered for the quantitative analysis in Section 4.2. For a contrastive study of their frequency in online newspapers, see De Cesare et al. (2020). 163 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German (17) <b> Il vincitore P. B. pensa alla squadra, mentre D. F. analizza la sconfitta e convoca oggi i suoi. […] </ b> <b> I numeri. Innanzitutto, i votanti: 2 milioni 816 mila e 114. Il Pd parla di «proiezioni» […] </ b> <b> Sul piano politico. Nella conversazione dell’altra notte, B. e F. hanno parlato del futuro del Pd. F. ha ribadito: «Nessun incarico per me […]». […] A. G. […] dice che «non è questione di ruoli […]». Della squadra che ha in mente B. per ora si sa […] </ b> <b> Infine, le alleanze. D. P. va all’attacco: «Al nuovo segretario chiediamo con chi voglia fare squadra […]». </ b> (repubblica.it, 2009) ‘<b> The winner P. B. thinks about the team, while D. F. analyses the defeat and calls his people today. […] </ b> <b> The numbers. First of all, the voters: 2 million 816 thousand and 114. The Pd speaks of «projections» […] </ b> <b> At the political level. In the conversation of last night, B. and F. talked about the future of the Pd. F. confirmed: «No job for me […]». […] A. G. […] says that «it’s not a matter of roles […]». Regarding the team, which B. has in mind, for now we know […] </ b> <b> Finally, the alliances. D. P. attacks: «We ask the new secretary with whom he wants to team up […]». </ b>’ The PP sul piano politico in [17] works as an indexation link. Placed at the beginning of a block and, at the same time, separated from it by a period, it occupies a salient position in the text. In this position, it extends its scope over the whole block, thereby gathering the following utterances under the same thematic section (or the same universe of discourse) and signalling to the reader that they must be interpreted accordingly (cf. also Charolles 1997: 31). Thus, the function of the DAial in [17] is clearly different from that of restricting DAials, such as in the examples [13]-[16] above. This also emerges if we consider the journalist’s communicative objectives in the excerpt under scrutiny: instead of modulating an evaluative stance, the writer in [17] aims to describe a (sequence of) state(s) or action(s) in an objective way and without giving any specific interpretation of them. In our corpus of Italian online newspapers, DAials occurring as PPs with adj. tend to have a specifying value and work as indexation links more often than AdvPs do (55,6% vs 33,3%, respectively). In our opinion, an important reason accounting for this result lies in the fact that Italian PPs with adj. are both semantically less ambiguous and informationally more salient than AdvPs derived with the suffix -mente. On the one hand, the latter have homonymous forms working as manner adverbials, while PPs with adj. do not. On the other hand, PPs are longer than AdvPs; therefore, they may attract the attention of readers who easily become aware of them in reading or browsing a text. Thus, PPs with adj. may be used to segment an article into blocks and/ or to mark a shift in the textual structure in a more effective way than Marta Lupica Spagnolo 164 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 AdvPs can (cf. De Cesare et al. 2020: 50 and also Virtanen 1992 for analogous observations on setting adverbials in English). Having said that, however, it is worth noticing that the new frame indexed by the PP sul piano politico in [17] sorts the following utterances quite loosely. Furthermore, the two indexation links that precede and replace sul piano politico - that is, respectively, i numeri ‘the numbers’ and infine, le alleanze ‘finally, the alliance’ - occur as nominal phrases and not as DAials or topicalizing adverbials in our text. Thus, the overall lower frequency of specifying DAials as opposed to restricting DAials in both our Italian and German sub-corpora (cf. Table 7 in Section 4.2.3) can possibly be accounted for by the text typology under scrutiny: as already mentioned, since journalists have little time to edit and update their news, online articles are characterized by fewer and/ or weaker cohesion markers, for instance, in comparison to the printed press. Another reason for the low frequency of specifying DAials in our dataset may also lie in the fact that, as illustrated in Section 2, specifying DAials usually occur in generic analytical sentences, that is, in clauses where an identity relation rather than a predicative one is expressed. In online news, definitions and syllogistic reasoning are less frequent than they are, for instance, in scientific or judicial texts. Moreover, PPs with adj. are also better suited to performing a specifying function as opposed to PPs with noun in Italian newspapers. Unlike the latter, PPs with adj. do not introduce a referential constituent and in fact cannot work, for instance, as topicalizing adverbials (cf. Section 3). Consequently, they depend less strongly than PPs with noun on the already developed discourse. In connection with this, PPs with adj. (may) open new paragraphs more often than PPs with noun (can) do, and there they take a wide scope. By contrast, the referential constituent, introduced by a PP with noun, usually needs to be prepared or evoked by semantically related items in the previous context to be fronted in the initial position (Charolles 1997: 33). This, at least, holds in three cases out of four in which PPs with noun are fronted in clause-initial position in our Italian corpus. Thus, for instance, unlike the PP with adj. in ex. [17] above, the DAial in una prospettiva di politica economica più generale ‘in a perspective of more general economic policy’ in [18] does not introduce a completely new frame of reference (or universe of discourse). Rather, the domain referred to by the PP is connected to the propositional contents developed in the previous utterances: see, on the one hand, the comparative more general which indicates that the point of view expressed by the PP was already mentioned in the preceding text and, on the other hand, the presence of items semantically related to the PP, which have been underlined in [18]. 165 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German (18) <b> Inoltre, se le famiglie hanno ridotto il risparmio o hanno aumentato l’indebitamento per finanziare l’acquisto di nuove autovetture, è prevedibile un impatto negativo sulla futura crescita complessiva dei consumi privati in quanto le famiglie devono nuovamente ridurre l’indebitamento e aumentare il risparmio. Infine, in una prospettiva di politica economica più generale, occorre tenere presente che le misure di bilancio a vantaggio di un settore specifico generano distorsioni dei prezzi relativi che possono impedire cambiamenti strutturali necessari, indurre maggiori pressioni da parte delle attività di lobbying finalizzate a introdurre ulteriori agevolazioni e distorcere le condizioni di parità concorrenziale a livello internazionale. […] </ b> (repubblica.it, 2009) ‘<b> Furthermore, if families have reduced their savings or increased their debts to finance the purchase of new cars, a negative impact on the future overall growth of private consumption is foreseeable, since the families must again reduce their debts and increase their savings. Finally, in a perspective of more general economic policy, it is necessary to be aware that budgetary measures for the benefit of a specific sector generate distortions in relative price which can prevent necessary structural changes, induce greater pressure from lobbying activities aimed at introducing further facilitation, and distort the conditions of competitive equality at an international level. […] </ b>’ 4.3.4 PPs with anchoring function The excerpt in [18] in the previous section exemplifies a third context where Italian DAials may appear in our corpus of online newspapers. In [18], the PP with noun occurs at the beginning of a VS-clause: «occorre tenere presente che […]», literally ‘it is necessary to be aware that […]’. As already mentioned in Section 2.3, the postposed or missing syntactic subject shows a very low presuppositional status or is not presupposed at all in VS-clauses, especially with presentative meaning and/ or occurring as impersonal constructions (Venier 2002: 95, Salvi 1988/ 2001: 44-50). Since no predication relation can be properly identified, DAials in VS-clauses, such as in [18], cannot be described as limiting the validity of a predication, thereby having a restricting value at the semantic level. At the same time, the PP in [18] neither takes a wide scope nor works as an indexation link at the textual level. Again, in our opinion, this fact is related to the clause structure in which the DAial occurs (and not only to extra-linguistic factors 45 ). More specifically, presentative VS-clauses generally have the function of (re)initiating the ongoing discourse by (re)introducing an informationally and/ or contextually new element or event into the main narration line (Venier 2002: 102, Bernini 1995: 46). In doing so, they often mark a change in the theme pursued by the utterances immediately preceding them. However, the constituent after the verb (and not the DAial) is informationally very salient in this clause structure and thus has the highest probability of becoming the new topic of the following discourse (see the «budgetary measures» in [18]). Analogous claims also hold for contrastive VS-clauses 45 Extra-linguistic factors, which may play a role in reducing the scope of a DAial in the initial position, can be, for instance, a block-internal position or a quotation inside reported speech. Marta Lupica Spagnolo 166 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 where the constituent after the verb, especially if it is clefted, tends to be informationally very salient and therefore has a high probability of becoming a discursive topic (De Cesare 2007: 145). Given the above, DAials at the beginning of a VS-clause tend to carry out another function - i.e., which is neither an intersubjective nor an indexation function - that, by adapting a term from Lambrecht (1994), we have called «anchoring». By contextualizing a newly introduced element or event in a specific domain (or universe of discourse), DAials at the beginning of a VS-clause semantically work in an analogous way to specifying DAials. As for their textual properties, however, they do not usually serve to organize the following discourse around a frame. Rather, they tend to be linked to the left context, for instance, by referring to an item already mentioned or evoked. In connection with this, DAials at the beginning of a VS-clause tend to provide the reader with a point of departure for interpreting an utterance that, because of its structure, is strongly forwards-oriented and provokes a minor or major shift in the topic concatenation. Even if such contexts of occurrence are not frequent in our corpus 46 , our data suggest that Italian PPs - both with adj. and with noun - tend to appear at the beginning of VS-clauses more often than AdvPs do (cf. Table 7 in Sections 4.2.3). More specifically, although their number is very low overall, PPs with noun seem to occur proportionally more frequently in this clause structure than other DAials do. The reason is possibly related to their form: since they introduce a referential constituent, PPs with noun are facilitated in - and are indeed often in need of - establishing a backwards link to what was previously written. 5. Conclusion In this paper, we investigated the functional category of Italian DAials in a contrastive perspective with German. For this purpose, we carried out two corpus-based contrastive analyses. In Section 3, we looked at how German DAials are translated into Italian in the Europarl corpus. Based on this analysis, we first compiled a list of formation patterns of Italian DAials, using German as a starting point. Second, we motivated a quadripartite classification of DAials occurring as AdvPs, PPs with adj., PPs with noun, and CPs: as a matter of fact, only the latter two forms may work as topicalizing adverbials and introduce a referential expression that, in turn, can be modified by adjectives, nouns, and/ or other PPs. Third, we preliminarily identified some differences in the use of DAials across languages: German AdvPs are often not rendered as adverbials or are replaced by DAials occurring as analytic forms in the Italian translations. 46 On the scarce use of the presentative c’è ‘there is’ in Italian online newspapers, see also Bonomi (2014: 176). 167 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German In Section 4, we further investigated the frequency, position, and function of a series of DAials referring to the domain politics/ policy in Italian online written news by comparing them with analogous forms in German. DAials mostly occur as AdvPs in both languages. The high frequency of domain AdvPs in our corpus is partially explained by the specific text typology under scrutiny: online articles are generally expository, informative texts where journalists are concerned with both presenting a credible and documented version of a fact and modulating their responsibility towards what is said, and all that in the most space-saving and reader-friendly way possible. In this text typology, the preference for using AdvPs (instead of PPs or CPs) to carry out domain modification may be accounted for by the high concision and informational synthesis that characterize these forms in both languages for morphosyntactic reasons (cf. also De Cesare et al. 2020). Nevertheless, our data also show that domain AdvPs are proportionally less frequent in the Italian corpus than in the German one. Thus, although there has recently been a trend for domain AdvPs to become more frequent in Italian, such as in the language(s) of mass media (Frenguelli 2008), a comparison with German allows for better quantification of this increase. As also observed in De Cesare et al. (2020), the high frequency of DAials in German texts does not depend on the availability of new formation patterns with -mäßig and -technisch. Furthermore, since in this paper we analysed a series of DAials, we may now conclude that this result also holds irrespective of the type of domain involved and/ or of very general morphological constraints, such as the lower productivity of compounding strategies in Italian as opposed to German. Rather, this cross-linguistic difference in frequency seems to be related, on the one hand, to greater difficulty in interpreting DAials occurring as AdvPs in Italian, due to their homonymy with AdvPs belonging to other functional classes (see also below). On the other hand, it seems to be linked to prosodic and stylistic principles of well-formedness that are language-specific (see, in particular, the tendency to avoid the juxtaposition of two or more AdvPs formed with the stress-bearing suffix -mente in Italian). DAials cannot be differentiated according to their position in German. In contrast, while AdvPs mainly occur in the middle of the clause in Italian, PPs with adj. and PPs with noun show a more variable distribution. Combined with a qualitative analysis, this result suggests that the three adverbial forms tend to perform distinct and specialized functions in the Italian online press: i) because of their low morphosyntactic complexity and informational weight, AdvPs frequently work as phrase modifiers in the middle of the clause; ii) PPs with noun can be - and indeed are often - modified by other constituents. Thus, they tend to refer to very specific domains and to operate locally in a detached position at the end or the middle of the utterance; iii) because of their form, PPs with adj. can be more effectively used as specifying DAials, fronted in the initial position and having an indexation function. Furthermore, by focusing on the initial slot of the sentence, we identified a third context where Italian DAials may occur in our corpus of online newspapers. At the Marta Lupica Spagnolo 168 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 beginning of a VS-clause, Italian DAials do not properly restrict the application of a predication, since no predication can be identified. Moreover, they do not extend their scope to the ongoing discourse, as specifying DAials with an indexation function usually do. Rather, they perform an anchoring function (cf. Lambrecht 1994 for the term); that is, they facilitate the (re)initialization of the ongoing discourse by linking the utterance in which they occur to a specific domain and, sometimes, to the previous context, thereby facilitating its interpretation. This anchoring function seems to be specifically carried out by PPs (with adj. and, above all, with noun) in our Italian corpus. Finally, regarding German DAials, we cannot detect analogous tendencies in pairing form, position, and meaning/ function in our corpus. Rather, our data suggest that German AdvPs (which are extremely numerous and distributionally very flexible) are more grammaticalized as domain modifiers than analogous forms in Italian 47 . More specifically, probably because of their frequency, AdvPs seem to be well-established members of the functional class of DAials in German. Therefore, they may more easily have a specifying function and carry out those textual functions which, in contrast, are mostly reserved for analytic and, therefore, semantically less ambiguous expressions in Italian. The coexistence of different means of expressing domain modification in our two sub-corpora may be partially due to the high composite nature of the text typology under scrutiny, where well-established and innovative communicative strategies may coexist. Data from other registers and diachronic studies would help to better assess the reasons for the differences in the synchronic distribution of DAials in both languages. Appendices AdvPs -lich, -isch, -ell, -al, -är, -iv, -mäßig, -technisch PPs with adj auf [adj.] Ebene aus/ in [adj.] Perspektive aus [adj.] Sicht in [adj.] Bereich in [adj.] Feld in [adj.] Hinsicht unter [adj.] Gesichtspunkt von [adj.] Gesichtspunkt her von [adj.] Aspekt her von [adj.] Standpunkt aus 47 Grammaticalization is understood here in the broad sense of a stronger association between form and function(s) (Sarda et al. 2014: 20). 169 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German PPs with noun [noun] betreffend auf Ebene [noun] aus Perspektive [noun] aus Sicht [noun] hinsichtlich [noun] in Bereich [noun] in Bezug auf [noun] in/ auf Feld [noun] in Hinsicht auf [noun] in puncto [noun] qua [noun] von [noun] her CPs [AdvP] gesehen/ betrachtet was [noun] betrifft/ angeht/ anbelangt wenn man es [AdvP] sieht/ betrachtet Appendix 1. List of formation patterns of German DAials provided in the literature PPs with adj. a livello [adj.] da prospettiva [adj.] da punto di vista [adj.] in ambito [adj.] in campo [adj.] in materia [adj.] in senso [adj.] in settore [adj.] in termini [adj.] sotto aspetto [adj.] sotto profilo [adj.] su piano [adj.] PPs with noun a livello di [noun] da prospettiva di [noun] da punto di vista di [noun] in ambito di [noun] in campo di [noun] in materia di [noun] in merito di [noun] in senso di [noun] in settore di [noun] in termini di [noun] sotto aspetto di [noun] sotto profilo di [noun] su piano di [noun] Marta Lupica Spagnolo 170 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 CPs [AdvP] parlando/ parlando [AdvP] che attenere/ riguardare/ concernere [noun] osservare(ndo) da una prospettiva/ punto di vista [adj./ noun] Appendix 2. List of formation patterns of Italian DAials compiled based on the literature and the search in the europarl7_de corpus Acknowledgments The research presented in this contribution has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the project Italian Sentence Adverbs in a Contrastive Perspective [https: / / p3.snf.ch/ Project-159273], coordinated by Anna-Maria De Cesare at the University of Basel. I am very grateful to the other members of the ISAaC research group, Anna-Maria De Cesare, Ana Albom, and Doriana Cimmino, for the numerous discussions and comments on previous versions of this paper. Also, I would like to thank Annette Gerstenberg, Felix Golcher, Valerie Hekkel, Julie Kairet, Friederike Schulz, Eman El Sherbiny, Sascha and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I also thank Anne Popiel for proofreading the text. All remaining errors are of course my own. 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Sasse, H.-J. 1996: «Theticity», Arbeitspapiere des Instituts für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität zu Köln, 27 NF: 1-55. Venier, F. 2002: La presentatività: Sulle tracce di una nozione, Alessandria, Edizioni Dell’Orso. Virtanen, T. 1992: «Given and new information in adverbials: Clause initial adverbials of time and place», Journal of Pragmatics 2/ 17: 99-117. 173 DOI 10.2357/ VOX-2021-005 Vox Romanica 80 (2021): 133-173 Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of DAials in Italian and German Politically (speaking): Form, position, and function of domain adverbials in Italian and German Abstract : In this paper, the functional category of domain adverbials (DAials) in Italian is investigated in a contrastive perspective with German. The first part examines how German DAials are translated into Italian in the Europarl Corpus. As a result, we compile a list of formation patterns for creating DAials in the two languages. In addition, we point out a difference between DAials occurring as adverbs (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) with adjective, on the one hand, and as PPs with noun and clauses (CPs), on the other hand: only the latter two introduce a referential expression that can be modified by adjectives, nouns, and/ or other PPs. In the second part, we focus on the interrelations between form, position in the clause, semantic value, and pragmatic function of a series of DAials - referring to the domain politics/ policy - in a corpus of online newspapers. DAials and, among these, AdvPs are more frequently used in German than in Italian. Moreover, independently of their morphosyntactic complexity and informational weight, DAials mostly occur in mid-clause position in German. By contrast, in Italian, AdvPs, PPs with noun, and PPs with adj. tend to show a more variable distribution in the clause and to have different semantic and pragmatic properties. Particular attention is reserved for the textual functions of DAials at the beginning of clauses with Verb-Subject order in Italian. Keywords : Domain adverbials, Italian-German contrastive analysis, Corpus linguistics, Translation studies, Online newspapers, Adverbial formation patterns, Semantic and pragmatic properties, Adverbials in VS-clauses