Craig,

I find it difficult to shoehorn absolutes into any category that works
well for other kinds of constructions; they're a bit analogous to the
duck-billed platypus. I think, though, that only your last example
involves a "canonical" absolute - the traditional definition requires
the verb form to be a present or past participle, and the structure as a
whole can't be acting as a subject or object in any sense (the lack of a
standard grammatical relation between the construction and the rest of
the sentence was the motivation for using the label "absolute"). 

Whether or not I (or anyone else) *calls* the structures in your first
two examples absolutes or not, though, they're much more common in
English than canonical absolutes are. I *would* treat them as nonfinite
clauses, rather than as nonfinite predicates with an extra something up
front, and I'd treat a canonical absolute the same way. Now I'm stuck
trying to figure out how to cast the difference between the canonical
absolutes and these other things. They're a kind of nonfinite complement
clause, whereas an absolute is also nonfinite, but isn't a complement. I
suppose absolutes could be treated as nonfinite adverbial clauses, but
I'm always want to start checking myself when I slap the "adverbial"
label on something -- it's the "none of the above" category.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University



-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 9:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Clauses vs. phrases

Bill,
   How do you deal with absolutes? Or instances when they could be 
thought of as subject bearing?

"I watched my father waste away from cancer."

"She felt the wind grow stronger."

"Their legs dangling down, they rode in the boxcar door."

Are these clauses missing just the finite marker?

I think what bothers me more than anything is when absolutes are called 
"phrases." Diana Hacker, in the most recent Writer's Reference, calls 
them "a noun phrase followed by a participial phrase."  Trying to hold 
on to these traditional categories can stimulate  goofy descriptions.

Craig


Spruiell, William C wrote:
> Until the early twentieth century, people who wrote grammar books
tended
> to use terms like "phrase" and "clause" rather unsystematically --
they
> were descriptive labels, but not precisely defined ones. The way the
> terms are used in U.S. K-12 education is the result of a consensus
that
> developed among educators on this side of the Atlantic, but it's not a
> universal consensus. A good many Commonwealth grammarians (for
example,
> many in the Systemics approach, but certainly not limited to it), use
> "group" for what most Statesiders would call a phrase (basically, any
> phrase that all of us would view as endocentric is a "group," but an
> arguably-exocentric constituent without a predicate is a "phrase,"
with
> the prepositional phrase being the prime example). Similarly, the
> requirement that a clause have a subject and finite verb is part of
the
> consensus that developed here, but not elsewhere.
>
> I like to view gerunds, infinitives, etc. as kinds of *predicates* --
> but that's based on an approach in which the clause has three, rather
> than two, major constituents: subject, finite marker, and predicate. I
> derived that from SFL, but there are analogues in other modern
> approaches and there are certainly historical precedents for that
> tripartite division. It's not part of the K-12 consensus, though, such
> that it is, so I don't harp on it much in my pedagogic grammar
classes.
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
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