Abstract: Clausal Adjuncts of Romance Languages – a Corpus-Driven Comparison. Continuing the traditional comparative analysis of Romance languages, the present paper brings evidence for the fact that the syntactic configuration (the word order) of a Romance complex sentence (henceforth CS) with clausal adjuncts is the result of many competing forces. The analysis is based on an original media discourse corpus, collected from three Romance varieties (Romanian, Italian, and French), and the focus will be both on the word order of the temporal, causal, and concessive adjuncts (their occurrence in sentence-initial, in sentence-final position, sometimes even in sentence-middle position), and on the comparative analysis of the results. What I intend to prove is that the ordering of a CS in the three Romance languages is motivated by three types of factors: discourse pragmatics, semantics, and parsing.

Keywords: clausal adjuncts, morphosyntactic analysis, word order, Romance languages