Abstract:
The following thesis aims to investigate the structure of the left periphery of the sentence, focussing on scene setting adverbs. In the introduction I will be discussing the structure of the left periphery, starting from Rizzi's (1997) analysis and the Cartographic approach. I will be then examining the structure of Topic and Focus, including studies on both Italian and Russian. In the third chapter scene setting adverbs will be analyzed. I will take into account studies on their position in both main sentences and embedded clauses. I will then move on to a comparative analysis between Italian and Russian, taking the Russian examples from the Nacional'nyj korpus russkogo jazyka.
