English Absolutes, Free Adjuncts, and WITH: A Constructional Analysis

English absolutes and free adjuncts, despite their abridged syntactic forms, function as full subordinating adverbial clauses, with their semantic roles varied according to the interpretation of the matrix clauses. This paper investigates how to represent the syntactic structures and semantic variability of absolutes and free adjuncts in a unified way, accounting for overlapping properties among various subtypes of the constructions on the one hand, and differences on the other. In the proposed analysis, the clausal properties of absolutes and free adjuncts are captured by the subject selecting property and the clausal meaning associated with a predicative phrase, thus not calling for a null verb or complementizer. In classifying and defining diverse subtypes of the constructions via type constraints, the present work also provides an account of different uses of with involved in absolutes and free adjuncts.