Evolution of Absolute Participial Construction in Languages of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic Groups

The study was carried out within the framework of the current problems associated with the evolution of the absolute participial construction in several living and extinct languages of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic groups. The controversial issues, versions of the origin and development of the structure in these languages ("Latin", "Greek" and "autochthonous") are discussed. The structural and semantic features of the absolute participial construction are compared. It has been established that in the languages under study, the construction has a binary structure that includes a name (noun or pronoun) playing the role of a logical subject, and a participle in the role of a logical predicate. Together with the main sentence, the construction forms a paratactic syntactic complex, the constituents of which are not connected with each other by means of service words. Similarities include the ability to express definitively or syncretically temporary meaning; as for the differences, they are the expression in some languages of a causal, conditional, concessive, target, connecting meaning. Depending on the peculiarities of the development of grammatical systems of languages, the structure may include participles of different types, prepositions may be present, the structure may take both the general case form and another case fixed by the language for this type of structures. The words order, which can be either direct or inverse or depend on the transmitted meaning or part of speech of the subject, also differs in the languages. In conclusion, the necessity of further comprehensive analysis of this type of structures is substantiated

Germanic languages · Infinitive · Linguistics · Nominative case · Noun · Participle · Romance languages · Sentence · Slavic languages · Verb · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies · Philosophy