This contribution provides a functional account of adverbs such as Fr. politiquement, It. politicamente, and Sp. políticamente (E. ‘politically’), which can be interpreted as manner or domain adverbs. Based on theoretical frameworks devised to model discourse, specifically the information units of written texts, we offer a detailed account of the functional spaces that these adverbs occupy in the Utterance. Special attention is then devoted to the occurrence of these adverbs in the functional left periphery of the Utterance, where they most clearly work as domain adverbs. We show that, in this pragmatic area, domain adverbs have framing, segmenting, and indexing discourse functions and that these functions can be predicted by the interplay between the meaning of these adverbs and the scoping properties of the left-peripheral discourse space they occupy in the Utterance.