The aim of the international conference, entitled “Linguistically knotty. Current Issues on Sentence Adverbs”, which will take place at the University of Basel on January 19-20, 2017, is to bring together a selected group of researchers to examine the category of adverbs from different angles (both diachronic and synchronic) and in different languages (Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, English and German).

Specifically, the conference aims at fostering a better understanding of the category of sentence adverbs (SAs). SAs are typical of the European languages, in particular of their written varieties, and are defined on syntactic grounds, as extrasentential lexical adverbs (such as linguistically in linguistically, it is interesting). Because they are defined primarily on syntactic grounds, SAs are a rather heterogeneous semantic and pragmatic category. Their contribution to the meaning of a sentence and utterance varies significantly from one subclass of SAs to another and so do their communicative functions in discourse: SAs give instructions about the attitude of the speaker towards the propositional content expressed in his/her utterance; the illocution performed by the utterance; the form of his/her utterance etc.