Craig,
 
The term is partly based on a terminological position that's common in traditional American school grammars: "It's not a clause unless it's finite." There's no reason why one can't adopt alternate definitions, of course, and many of us do (e.g. everyone who uses the term "nonfinite clause"). If you're a K-12 teacher whose required student texts repeatedly tell students that clauses must be finite, you'd have to stick to "absolute phrase" or spend a lot of time contradicting their textbooks. It's difficult to overestimate the inertial effects of school grammar books, alas.
 
Bill Spruiell
 
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University  
 
  _____  

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 9:30 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: absolute phrases?
 
I don't want to undercut the whole flow of this talk, but is there any compelling reason to think of an absolute as a phrase and not a clause?  For the most part, the only thing missing in comparison to a matrix clause is the finite auxiliary, which simply reduces the structure to a subordinate status.  Also, if we see participle clauses/phrases as adjectival (largely to avoid the dangling modifier, I suspect) wouldn't we do the same when the structure is subject bearing?
    Paul, holding the bat loosely, waited for the pitch.  (standard participial as nonrestrictive modifier.)
    Paul, his hands holding the bat loosely, waited for the pitch. (absolute in the same position.)
    Paul, with his hands holding the bat loosely, waited for the pitch. (same structure, with a prepositional head.) 
Certainly holding the bat loosely is a predicate like structure, with a transitive verb, direct object complement, and adverbial modifier.  If we add his hands, are we adding a noun for it to modify or are we adding a subject to that nonfinite predicate?  
    Paul's hands held the bat loosely.  He waited for the pitch.
    Isn't his hands holding the bat loosely a downranked (nonfinite) clause? 

Craig 

Karl Hagen wrote:


The summary of this article suggests you might get your answer here, although I haven't had time to read it myself: 

Ineke Sluiter, "Seven Grammarians on the 'ablativus absolutus'" 
in _Historiographia Linguistica_ 27:2/3. 2000. (pp. 379-414) 

Summary 

In this article, the history of the so-called ablative absolute as a descriptive category is traced from the 3rd to the 20th century. Texts by Sacerdos, Diomedes, Priscian, Alberic of Montecassino, Kühner & Stegmann and Harm Pinkster illustrate how the ablative absolute is recognized long before it get its name, and how its role in grammatical description is invented, changes, and disappears again in accordance with the grammatical systems adopted by the respective grammarians. The ablative absolute starts as a kind of appendix to the doctrine of the parts of speech, is moved from the description of the noun to that of the participle, and eventually just fades away as a descriptive label in its own right in the context of Functional Grammar. Its history cannot, of course, prove that the 'God's Truth' metaphysics of grammar is wrong, but it certainly looks like a series of manifestations of grammatical 'Hocus Pocus'. 


Karl Hagen 
Department of English 
Mount St. Mary's College 


Spruiell, William C wrote: 


Nineteenth-century grammars typically classified nouns as being 
"subjective" "objective, or "possessive"; the noun at the beginning of 
an average absolute phrase isn't either of these, so it got its own 
label (typically, nominals that function primarily adverbially, like 
"yesterday," would be considered adverbs in these grammars, so they 
weren't the same kind of problem for the authors).  Harvey 1869.74-5, 
for example, lists "nominative, objective, possessive, and absolute" as 
the English noun cases. He used the same trick, however, to deal with 
"vocatives" in initial position. His example is, "Your *fathers*, where 
are they?" 
Now, the practice may well have been borrowed from Latin, but I'd also 
want to check to see if the *modern* term for the Latin construction 
wasn't based on the same kind of logic. Did Priscian refer to those 
constructions as ablative absolutes (or rather, the Latin equivalent), 
or did the *label* "ablative absolute" develop in English grammars of 
Latin? 

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 Jane Saral 
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 4:00 PM 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Subject: Re: absolute phrases? 

My understanding is that the name comes from the Latin ablative 
absolute, which consists of a noun and an adjectival form. 

Jane Saral 
The Westminster Schools 
Atlanta, GA 

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