ABSOLUTE PARTICIPIAL CONSTRUCTION THEORY: CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES

Abstract

The study focuses on current problems associated with the evolution of absolute participial construction and its linguistic status in the French language. It has been established that, borrowed from classical Latin, the absolute construction with an ablative was accepted to the Old French language, presumably in the 13 th –14 th centuries thanks to translations from the Latin language. Widely used in literature, the construction caused disputes among grammarians and only at the beginning of the 20 th century it was recognized as normative. In the second part of the article, a review of the Russian and foreign scientific literature is made, the most controversial issues and the author’s own position based on corpus data are formulated. The properties inherent in all types of absolute participial constructions are determined: binarity, semantic duality, expression of predominantly temporary, causal meaning or value of an accompanying action, mobility, syntactic optionality in relation to a matrix sentence, the possibility of functioning only as part of a complex sentence. It was revealed that this construction is an economical formal way of expressing a proposition based on a secondary predicative connection. The features of constructions with present participles, past participles and complex past participles are analyzed. The conclusion is made about the need for a differentiated approach to the analysis of these types of absolute structures. The prospect of further studies of linguistic structures is shown.

Keywords

• absolute participial construction
• history of the french language
• syntax
• secondary predicativity
• participle