The development of functional roles and the Romance languages: processes and patterns

This chapter takes up the main topics within the volume, highlighting the shared insights of an integrated approach to comparative
developments of discourse and pragmatic markers in Romance languages. The peculiarities of developments giving rise to functional items in Romance languages are considered in the light of different lines of research which constitute the volume. Terms and processes discussed in Chapter 2 are here redefined on the basis
of formal peculiarities and similarities in developments of different sources (i.e. verbs
and adverbs). These notions are compared in order to highlight new insights that this volume brings to the scholarly debate on the subject.