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Title
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Why is there a present-day English absolute?
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Author
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Abstract
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| 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. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Studies in language. - Amsterdam
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Publication
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Amsterdam
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2015
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ISSN
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0378-4177
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DOI
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10.1075/SL.39.1.07POL
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Volume/pages
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39
:1
(2015)
, p. 199-229
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ISI
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000358275700007
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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