Why is there a Present-Day English absolute

Bibliographic Data

ID20381642
AuthorsNikki Van De Pol (KU Leuven), Peter Petré (0000-0002-6503-1380, Université de Lille)
Year2015
Volume39
Issue1
Pages199-229
Publication date2015-06-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueStudies in Language (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0378-4177 • E-ISSN: 1569-9978
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/sl.39.1.07pol
OpenAlexW2269711661
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited34

This paper examines the divergent evolutions of the Absolute Construction (AC) in the history of the Germanic languages, with a focus on English and Dutch, and provides an explanation of why only the English AC retained its frequency and productivity rate. Three language-internal factors are appealed to in order to account for this divergence: (i) increased with-augmentation of ACs results in fuzzy boundaries with the more frequently used gerunds as well as (regular) prepositional postmodifying constructions; (ii) the overall higher frequency in English of constructions with -ing-forms (gerunds, free adjuncts, and progressives) invites structural priming; and (iii) a possible typological shift of English from strictly bounded construal to a mixture of bounded and unbounded construal. An additional language-external factor is found in different prescriptivist traditions. English never really opposed the use of ACs whereas prescriptivism in other Germanic languages emphatically did

Bounded function · Germanic languages · Grammaticalization · Linguistics · Physics · Plural · Second-language acquisition · Universal Grammar · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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