Bill,
In my dealings with traditional school grammar, I don't think the
term "finite" generally comes up. In other words, we can see that this
is their thinking, but they haven't theorized it out for themselves. I
think you are giving them more credit than they deserve by implying that
this is merely a disagreement in how we apply the term.
I'm a big fan of Understanding English Grammar, but Martha defines a
clause as a group of words that includes a subject and predicate and
defines absolute as a noun plus modifier. She does require a main or
predicating verb for a predicate, so perhaps she is covered there.
Diana Hacker, in her Writer's Reference, defines subordinate clause as
a word group that "contains a subject and predicate, but it functions
within a sentence as an adjective, an adverb, or a noun; it cannot stand
alone." The predicate for her is a verb plus its complements and
modifiers, which would seem to leave the door open for nonfinite
predicates (which have verbs and complements and modifiers.) Her
definition echoes the definition I was raised on, that a clause is a
group of words with subject and predicate ( in the case of commands, at
least, the subject is sometimes implied.)
In the one hand holding the bat loosely was his good one, "holding
the bat loosely" is clearly a restrictive modifier of "the one hand",
but I don't think you can make that case for the meaning structure
within an absolute.
His feet planted solidly, legs flexed, hands holding the bat loosely,
Paul waited for the payoff pitch. If these were nonrestrictive
modifiers, we would ask for commas, which clearly don't work; if
restrictive, they would be telling us which feet, which legs, which
hands, and so on, which is clearly not the case. The internal structure
is clause like, and traditional grammar obscures that reality.
I think we certainly should contradict textbooks when they are
clearly wrong, especially when we have some hope of making
understanding useful. Nonfinite clause is not a difficult concept.
Craig
Spruiell, William C wrote:
> 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] <mailto:[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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