Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English: Problems of Control and Interpretation

Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in Englishpresents a corpus-based syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of free adjuncts and absolutes in present-day English. The major function of these constructions is to serve as adverbial clauses, most frequently without any overt specification of which semantic relation they express in a given complex sentence. The central problems of the use and interpretation of both free adjuncts and absolutes is the main focus of the book. These include the range and nature of their semantic indeterminacy, the factors that help resolve it, and, for free adjuncts, the identification of their underlying subject. As many of the basic issues addressed in the book are not confined to English, its findings and hypotheses should also attract the attention of linguists interested in these relevant constructions in other languages.Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in Englishmakes important and challenging claims with regard to thesyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena that may influence the interpretation of these constructions, and, with respect to the way diverse interpretive behavior of free adjunct and absolutes is predictable, from higher functional and pragmatic principles. The conclusions found in this volume will be of great benefit to scholars working in the fields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive and text linguistics.