I have been observing the behavior of the sforzando in Beethoven violin sonatas lately, and in Beethoven (where he indicates them as "sf" without the "z") they really seem to function as a kind of a springboard to help organize the music horizontally into phrases.
Here are a couple of indications of how they behave in their habitat (Beethoven Violin Sonata Opus 23):
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The sf is often used where a composer today might rebar the music. In the example, the “downbeat” is displaced by the sf to the middle of the bar.
Sf was often used, in other places, simply to mean “this is louder” until canceled by a p. Lots of this in Mozart and Haydn, but definitely still operative in Mendelssohn “Reformation” Symphony movt 2.
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