The Diachronic Evolution of English Absolute Constructions: a Quantitative-Corpus Prototypical Approach

This article studies the diachronic evolution of English absolute constructions (ACs) from the perspective of a quantitative-corpus approach, reconceptualizing these syntactic patterns as dynamic, frequency-sensitive structures that form flexible constructional networks. The study identifies the patterns of transformation in the prototypical and peripheral features of ACs across historical stages of English. The theoretical and methodological framework of the research combines diachronic analysis, quantitative-corpus research, and construction grammar.

The development of absolute constructions in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English is analysed through the interpretation of findings from previous historical-linguistic and corpus-based studies. The analysis of ACs in Modern English represents the author’s quantitative-corpus research, conducted on the data from the British National Corpus. The empirical database comprises 35 morphosyntactic types of ACs, represented by 11,000 corpus realizations. The applied methodology of multiparametric linguo-quantitative profiling allowed for the verification of 13 parameters, including the morphological properties of the subject and predicate constituents, syntactic functions, syntactic connection, position within the sentence, and register distribution.

As a result, a hierarchy of prototypical features has been constructed, where the central position is occupied by the binary scheme [NP XP] with an explicit subject and a non-finite predicate. It is established that the frequency can serve a key factor determining the status of a construction in the network. The findings confirm the effectiveness of the quantitative-corpus approach for describing the dynamics of grammatical systems.