This article presents a corpus-based study of the syntactic and semantic development of the German evaluative adverb leider ‘unfortunately’. The analysis identifies syntactic and interpretative ambiguity as key factors in the reanalysis of leider as a sentence adverb, providing further empirical support for existing accounts of the development of such elements. In addition, the paper proposes a general developmental path for evaluative adverbs in German, highlighting the interplay between syntactic reanalysis and subjectification in their development.
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Elena Ongaro (2025) studied this question.
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