This research aims at bridging the gap between traditional historical linguistics and modern formal approaches, combining philological accuracy and syntactic expertise in the study of a large amount of linguistic evidence.
The various chapters provide: a survey of ancient grammarians’ theories about Absolute Participial Constructions (APCs); a study of later or marginal developments in some Indo-European branches (dative absolute in Greek, genitive absolute in Latin, APCs in Gothic and in the Italic languages); a contrastive analysis of the syntactic properties of the Greek genitive absolute and the Latin ablative absolute (with a look at Sanskrit APCs); and, finally, a sociostylistically grounded distinction of two varieties of ancient Greek, based on specific clusters of syntactic phenomena.