Romanian Sentence Adverbs and Root Complementizers

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In this paper I argue that the distribution and peculiarities of Romanian sentence adverbs receive the best explanation within Cinque's (1999) theory of adverbs as specifiers of functional projections and thus constitute new and strong evidence for this theory. In Romanian, the presence of a sentence adverb (sigur `certainly', bineinteles `of course', etc.) in a root clause triggers the obligatory overt realization of the complementizer ca `that', which invariably introduces finite subordinate clauses. Adverbs such as these are called predicative adverbs and defined as adverbs which can from the predicate of a main clause by themselves and which obligatorily select a sentential complement (Graur et al. 1963). Hill (2007) claims that the adverb is a Speech Act head selecting a CP in which ca `that' fills the ForceP head. I argue that Hill (2007) fails to take into consideration crucial data and that her analysis, and the traditional one, cannot be correct. A closer look at the distribution of sentence adverbs, through the looking glass of the generative approach, reveals interesting properties which are best explained if we assume, with Cinque (1999), that adverbs are specifiers of functional projections. One piece of criticism leveled at Cinque's theory of the distribution of adverbs is that the putative heads of the functional projections hosting the adverbs are usually empty and so the evidence for the existence of such projections is weak. If the analysis here is on the right track, the case of Romanian ca `that' serves to counteract such criticism: here we have a functional projection in which both the adverbial phrase in Spec and the functional head are filled.

Romanian Sentence Adverbs and Root Complementizers

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