SYNTACTIC DISLOCATION PHENOMENA IN THE ADVERBIAL CLAUSES OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES – A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The present paper presents some important aspects concerning the syntactic configuration of Romanian, Italian, and French clausal adjuncts, as they appear in the articles from the present-day media. I have chosen two international magazines and three representative daily newspapers for each of the three languages. The elements investigated in this paper relate to the syntax-information structure interface, such as scrambling, interpolation, left dislocations, and these are going to be discussed, by comparison, for the complex sentences with temporal and causal adjuncts. Although there are authors arguing that French has a fixed word order (Manoliu, 2011, pp. 505-507, among others) or that “pro-drop languages” (Romanian and Italian) behave differently than “non-pro-drop” language (French) as concerns the relationship between information structure and word order, they are partly contradicted by the results of this analysis which brings evidence that, at least from this point of view, they are very similar. In the end, I conclude that all three Romance varieties have word order preferences and modified configurations, and they share many linguistic features, although French is more restrictive.