Re: Absolute constructions

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:00:05 -0000, caeruleancentaur
<caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:

>In the most recent issue of "The Journal of Indo-European Studies" is
>an article entitled "Absolute Constructions in Slavic: Case Diversity
>and Orginality" by Daniela S. Hristova.
>
>It was fascinating to learn that different IE languages use different
>cases for their absolutes.  Slavic uses the dative, Latin uses the
>ablative, Sanskrit uses the locative, and Greek the genitive.  The
>purpose of the article was to demonstrate that absolute constructions
>in the Slavic languages were in the dative case and not some other
>construction.  With her data, the author supports the assumption that
>absolute constructions in the daughter languages are inherited from
>the protolanguage.
I agree.  This thread inspired me to look more into the absolute
constructions of various IE languages.  It seems that the different case-
endings were able to give different nuances or shades of meaning:

Genitive: durative 'while/as X...'
Locative: punctual 'with X...'
Ablative: resultative 'because of X...'

So, probably all the cases used in the daughter languages for absolute
constructions were used as such in IE.

- Rob