Article published in:
Outside the Clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents
Edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 178] 2016
► pp. 177–202

Towards a unified constructional characterisation of the nonfinite periphery

On verbal free adjuncts and absolutes in English

| University of Vigo
| University of Vigo
This study focuses on two extraclausal verbal constructions: free adjuncts (FAs: Not feeling at first the Pain of the Stroke, he wondered what was become of the Ball, DODDRIDGE-1747,10.72) and absolute constructions (ACs: Your Barrels being ready, strow the Bottom with Salt: DRUMMOND-1718,32.359). Adopting a quasi-synchronic approach applied to Modern and Present-Day English (PDE), we treat FAs and ACs as constructions (sufficiently frequent compositional form-meaning pairings); more specifically, we consider them two variants of a nested ‘nonfinite-periphery construction’ in which the parameter ±subject in the nonfinite periphery determines the ascription of the construction to either the FA or the AC type. In order to relate our findings to those of Río-Rey (2002) for Early Modern English and Kortmann (1991) for PDE, we analyse more than 3,000 FAs and ACs from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, a multi-genre parsed corpus of Late Modern English (1700–1914), and from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). We hypothesise that FAs and ACs deserve unitary constructional treatment in Modern and PDE, on the basis of the statistical homogeneity of their frequencies, the fixation and reduction of the set of potential introducers, the comparable proportions of FAs and ACs semantically related to the clause, their preference for sentence-final position, and the increase of the less informative types.
Published online: 03 October 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.178.07bou
References

References

Bäcklund, Ingegerd
1984 Conjunction-headed abbreviated clauses in English. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis [Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 50]. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Breivik, Leiv Egil & Swan, Toril
1994 Initial adverbials and word order in English with special reference to the Early Modern English Period. In Studies in Early Modern English, Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), 11–43. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beukema, Frits H.
1980 Prepositions and tenseless sentence adverbials in English. In Linguistics in the Netherlands 1980, Saskia Daalder & Marinel Gerritsen (eds.), 69–79. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
1985 Lexical structures in English free adjuncts. In Meaning and the Lexicon, Geer A.J. Hoppenbrouwers, Pieter A.M. Seuren & Anton J.M.M. Weijters (eds), 190–199. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Callaway, Morgan Jr
1889 The absolute participle in Anglo-Saxon. The American Journal of Philology 10(3): 316–345. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Croft, William
2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik
2010 English ing-clauses and their problems: The structure of grammatical categories. Linguistics 48(6): 1153–1193. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Declerck, Renaat
1991 A Comprehensive Descriptive Grammar of English. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.Google Scholar
Dik, Simon C.
1997 The Theory of Functional Grammar, Part 2: Complex and Derived Constructions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fanego, Teresa
2004 On reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change: The rise and development of English verbal gerund. Diachronica 21(1): 5–55. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fonteyn, Lauren & van de Pol, Nikki
2016 Divide and conquer: The formation and functional dynamics of the Modern English ing-clause network. English Language and Linguistics 20(2): 185–219. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.
1995 Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2006 Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hasselgård, Hilde
2010 Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin
2013 Constructional change in English. Developments in Allomorphy, Word Formation, and Syntax. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.. et al.
[R11] 2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard A.
2007 Language Networks: The New Word Grammar. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther, Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania
2011 On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4): 848–893. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Killie, Kristin & Swan, Toril
2009 The grammaticalization and subjectification of adverbial –ing clauses (converb clauses) in English. English Language and Linguistics 13(3): 337–363. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd
1991 Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and Interpretation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
1995 Adverbial participial clauses in English. In Converbs in Cross-linguistic Perspective: Structure and Meaning of Adverbial Verb Forms – Adverbial Participles, Gerunds, Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König (eds), 189–237. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kruisinga, Etsko
1932 A Handbook of Present Day English, Vol. II: English Accidence and Syntax 3. Groningen: P. Noordhoff.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
2005 Construction grammars: Cognitive, radical, and less so. In Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & M. Sandra Peña Cervel (eds), 101–159. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lenker, Ursula
2010 Argument and Rhetoric. Adverbial Connectors in the History of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Guerra, Javier
1999 Historical English Syntax. A Statistical Corpus-based Study on the Organisation of Early Modern English Sentences. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Pérez Quintero, María Jesús
2002 Adverbial Subordination in English: A Functional Approach. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Riehemann, Susanne Z. & Bender, Emily
1999 Absolute constructions: On the distribution of predicative idioms. In WCCFL 18: Proceedings of the 18th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics , Sonya Bird, Andrew Carnie, Jason D. Haugen & Peter Norquest (eds), 476–489. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Río-Rey, Carmen
2002 Subject control and coreference in Early Modern English free adjuncts and absolutes. English Language and Linguistics 6(2): 309–323. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Charles Hunter
1893 The absolute participle in Middle and Modern English. PMLA 8(3): 245–302. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory T.
1985 The Semantic Variability of Absolute Constructions. Dordrecht: Reidel. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C.
2008 Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English. In Variation, Selection, Development: Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Change, Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger & Tonjes Veenstra (eds), 219–250. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2015 Investigating ‘periphery’ from a functionalist perspective. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1): 119-130. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Trousdale, Graeme
2013 Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme
2012 Theory and data in diachronic Construction Grammar. The case of the what with construction. Studies in Language 36(3): 576–602. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014 On the relationship between grammaticalization and constructionalization. Folia Linguistica 48(2): 557–577. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme & Norde, Muriel
2013 Degrammaticalization and constructionalization: Two case studies. Language Sciences 36: 32–46. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van de Pol, Nikki
2012 Between copy and cognate: The origin of absolutes in Old and Middle English. In Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, Lars Johanson & Martine Robbeets (eds), 297–322. Leiden: Bril. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 Three is company? On the use and characteristics of augmentation in English absolutes. Delivered at SLE46 . Split, 18–21 September.
van de Pol, Nikki & Cuyckens, Hubert
2013 Gradualness in change in English (augmented) absolutes. In Synchrony and Diachrony: A Dynamic Interface [Studies in Language Companion Series 133], Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri & Piera Molinelli (eds), 341–365. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van de Pol, Nikki & Hubert Cuyckens
2014 The diffusion of English absolutes: a diachronic register study. In Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 63], Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière & Lieven Vandelanotte (eds), 265–294. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Visser, Fredericus Theodorus
1972 An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part II: Syntactical Units with one Verb. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Yoo, Eun-Jung
2008 English absolutes, free adjuncts, and with: A constructional analysis. Language and Information 12(2): 49–75.Google Scholar