Scene setting adverbs: a cross-linguistic analysis of Italian and Russian left periphery

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.