This book presents 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 (e.g Time, Cause, Condition) they express in a given complex sentence. The main focus of the book is on central problems of their use and interpretation. These include the range of their semantic indeterminacy, the factors that help resolve it, and, for free adjuncts, the identification of their underlying subject (or controller). It is the most detailed and comprehensive study available on English free adjuncts and absolutes. Its scope and the size of its database (over 1700 constructions) make this book essential reading for linguists working in descriptive or theoretical studies of English grammar. However, the basic issues addressed in the book are not confined to English: its findings and hypotheses will be important for linguists concerned with the same constructions in other languages.
Important and challenging claims are made with regard to the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena that may influence the interpretations of these constructions, and with respect to the way the diverse interpretative behaviour of free adjuncts and absolutes is predictable from higher functional and pragmatic principles. In this it will greatly interest those working in the fields of syntax and semantics, pragmatics, cognitive and text linguistics.

Author Biography

Bernd Kortmann received his university education at Trier, Lancaster, and Oxford. He is currently junior research fellow at the Free University of Berlin, and was previously at the University of Hannover. Apart from his work in this area, he has published essays and articles on tense and aspect, lexical semantics, grammaticalization, and functional categories.

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