Free Adjuncts and Absolutes in English Problems of Control and Interpretation

This book presents a corpus-based syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of free adjuncts and absolutes in present-day English. The main focus of the book is on central problems of their use and interpretation.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.