Big Events, Small Clauses

This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration
across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,
French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small
clauses (absolutes), participle constructions and related clause-like but
non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to
constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest
sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected
with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two
parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive
interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of
participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions
function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures
that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical
cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that
are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific
construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a
specific construction is rendered in other languages.

Autorentext

Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and Dag Haug, University of Oslo, Norway.

Klappentext
This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian, French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small clauses ( absolutes ), participle constructions and related clause-like but non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a specific construction is rendered in other languages.