Adverbials do not only fulfil various semantic functions and come in various shapes and sizes; they may also be either obligatory or optional. However, it is the status as an optional, often inherently flexible constituent that has resulted in its frequent neglect in previous research. This holds true especially in relation to fronting, commonly defined as the sentence-initial placement of core elements. This paper proposes a distinction between two kinds of fronting phenomena, namely fronting (i.e., the initial placement of optional sentence constituents, enabling the consideration of optional adverbials) and preposing (i.e., the initial placement of obligatory constituents). It investigates the production of adverbial fronting phenomena in German learners of English compared to their native-speaker peers. While some of the results confirm a number of findings attested in previous research endeavours (e.g., the overrepresentation of particular semantic functions in sentence-initial position), others, including the correlation between the likelihood of encountering a fronted adverbial and sentence length and, with regard to the native speaker data, the newness of information, are more surprising. All in all, the paper proves the importance and justification of the consideration of adverbial fronting (as opposed to preposing) as part of the study of non-canonical syntax.