Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English Problems of Control and Interpretation Germanic Linguistics Series

Free adjuncts and absolutes typically function as adverbial clauses which are not overtly specified for any particular adverbial relation. The book is a non-formal, corpus based study of their current use in English. Its particular focus is on a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of their semantic indeterminacy and the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors that help resolve it.

Part I Background; Chapter 1 The structural diversity of free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 2 Problems of terminology; Chapter 3 Previous research; Chapter 4 Aim and scope of the study; Chapter 5 The corpus; Part II The subject in free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 6 Control in free adjuncts; Chapter 7 The subject in absolutes; Chapter 8 The nature of the subject in a definition of free adjuncts and absolutes; Part III The interpretation of free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 9 General remarks; Chapter 10 Individual semantic relations; Chapter 11 Factors influencing the interpretation; Part IV Implications for semantic and pragmatic theory; Chapter 12 Free adjuncts and absolutes as instances of minimization in language; Chapter 13 Free adjuncts and absolutes and the semantics-pragmatics distinction;

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.