The position of adverbials in the sentence. A comparison between German and Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper analyses the syntactic behaviour of non-clausal adverbials in German and Brazilian Portuguese in a comparative perspective. Six classes of adverbials are examined, whose semantic functions reach from the description of the state of affairs to the description of the speaker's attitude. On the whole, the syntax of adverbials shows great similarity in the two languages. In German, there seems to be a somewhat stronger tendency towards syntactic integration of adverbials, whereas Portuguese offers more possibilities of syntactically disintegrated uses.