Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field

Abstract

Romanian constructions in which a sentential adverb precedes a ‘that’ clause raise questions about the status of the adverb, the status of the selected clause, and the structure of the left periphery that allows for such a word order. The proposal is that certain pragmatic features ensuring the evidential reading on the adverb (i.e., features of speech acts in Speas & Tenny 2003) become visible to the syntactic computation. Accordingly, the structure of the left periphery extends further than ForceP (Rizzi 1997), as it also maps out the discourse set-up at the pragmatics-syntax interface.