ADDITIVE AND ASPECTUAL ADVERBS: TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN MAI

This paper is concerned with the semantics of the Romanian adverb mai in its occurrence as a VP-modifier. We propose that mai has the core meaning of an additive particle whose argument is a predicate of events. Following this monosemic analysis, we are able to explain the different interpretations of mai (its continuative, iterative and 'experiential' readings) by considering the aspectual information of the sentence and the structural properties of the predicate. Our claim is also supported by a comparison with additive and aspectual adverbs in Italian.

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