The lexicon-grammar of the sentence adverb in Italian: a proposal for a classification

Traditionally, the adverb is an ill-defined category (see Elia 1982; Pecoraro, Pisacane 1984), considered to be an additional, unnecessary part of the speech, which is certainly not necessary to produce minimum speech such as a sentence. As a matter of fact, all the elements converging into the class of adverbs determine a far more complex group than the one outlined by traditional grammar. Sentence adverbs are in fact a heterogeneous class of words that can assume different semantic values and syntactic behaviours. Because of this heterogeneity, it is difficult to find a univocal definition. The main perspective adopted in this paper is a clarification of some of Zellig Harris' and Maurice Gross' themes. Starting from the research on sentence and distributional equivalence classes we propose a different interpretation of some classes of unary operators.