Focus on Additivity Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages

The volume is centered on the notional domain of additivity. Many linguistic phenomena are based on additivity (i.e. are incremental) and additive relations are a mechanism that underlies a wide array of text types. Specifically, the volume is centered on the class of function words which have been labeled, among many others, Additive Focusing Modifiers (AFMs). The chapters gathered in the volume deal with the syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic properties of AFMs and new lines of research on these items are pursued, including (i) the historical development of AFMs and the use of these forms in older stages of the European languages; (ii) the pragmatic and sociolinguistic properties of AFMs, in particular of the functions they play in discourse and their distribution in different language varieties; (iii) the processing of AFMs by adults, in particular by relying on reading experiments involving eye tracking and self-paced reading; (iv) the use of AFMs in language contact situations and (v) the acquisition of AFMs by different learner groups.