Abstract

English absolute constructions (ACs) are peripheral predicative structures whose category boundaries remain difficult to define, especially where canonical participial patterns shade into augmented, nonverbal, infinitival, or neighboring constructions. This paper aims to provide a boundary-sensitive account of English ACs by specifying how category membership can be diagnosed and how diagnostic cues change across historical periods. Using a qualitative, corpus-informed design, it triangulates representative tokens from diachronic corpora and selected texts with previous descriptive, formal, functional, constructional, and corpus-based studies. The analysis shows that ACs cannot be delimited by a single feature such as formal detachment, overt subjecthood, or adverbial meaning. Instead, membership depends on the convergence of formal, semantic, and contextual diagnostics, including local predication, structural marking, subject anchoring, semantic relation, semantic recoverability, clause position, coreference, and register conditioning. The paper models the category as prototype-structured, distinguishing central ACs, peripheral but network-internal ACs, and neighboring non-AC constructions. It further shows that diachronic continuity lies not in one invariant surface form, but in the reweighting of diagnostics as morphology weakens and augmentation, predicate diversification, position, coreference, and register become more important. The paper concludes that boundary variation is a principled feature of the AC category rather than a classificatory defect.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.