“Sentence adverbials: Defining the research object and outlining the research results

The aim of this contribution – functioning as preface to the special issue of Linguistik online entitled Formal and functional perspectives on sentence adverbials in the Romance languagesand beyond – is to give a general overview of its research object and agenda. We start by providing a morpho-syntactic definition of the category of adverbials and then present a functional classification of these expressions, paying particular attention to the category of sentence adverbials. After having clarified the research object of this special issue, we present the content of the ten contributions collected, by identifying the lines of analysis which they addres