One's death, another's bread: did case loss enable the functional expansion of the English absolute construction?

One's death, another's bread: did case loss enable the functional expansion of the English absolute construction? The absolute construction (AC) is a non-finite construction consisting of two principal elements: a (pro)nominal head and a predicate. In Old English the AC is marked by a dative case ending on both elements and predicate types are limited to present and past participles (1). The construction typically expresses adverbial relations of time or accompanying circumstance. (1) Ðæt Mercna mægð, ofslegenum Pendan hyra cyninge, Cristes geleafan onfengon. (OEBede, Index) 'The Mercians received Christ's faith, when their king Pendan was slain.' By contrast, the number of predicate types (addition of PrepP, NP, AdjP (2), AdvP,...) and the semantic variety (new elaboration meanings (2) and more frequent occurrence of causal, concessional and conditional relations) of the AC appear to have increased by the Early Modern English (EModE) period, as has the potential for augmentation (i.e. the use of a preposition to introduce an AC) (Author 2013). This strengthens the assumption that the Middle English period has been pivotal in the AC's development. (2) Here was a pretty almond tree in bloome, the flower not unlike a rosemary flower. (PENN) An expansion similar to that of the English AC can be observed in the transition from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European AC to the one found in Latin, which saw an increase in predicate types as well as a broadening of its semantics. This development, according to Ruppel 2013 (217-218), may have been enabled by the syncretism of the Proto-Indo-European instrumental, locative and ablative cases into the Latin ablative. The merger of three cases into a single one which retained the combined functional possibilities of all three removed certain case-imbued restrictions on the AC; i.e. ablative ACs came to express locative and instrumental functions whereas this had previously been impossible. This paper, then, investigates whether the same mechanism of case syncretism, and especially the resulting case loss, may have been crucial in enabling AC expansion in Middle English. After mapping out the semantic and syntactic/structural expansion of the AC from OE till EModE on the basis of a corpus analysis using the YCOE corpus and the PENN-parsed corpora, I will examine the effect of case loss on English ACs. It is shown that the gradual loss of cases facilitated the AC's functional expansion since after case loss we can observe - that the strong restriction of ACs to adverbial and necessarily subordinate meanings disappeared as the nominative/dative distinction was lost, thus enabling quasi-coordinate uses (paraphrasable by and) (e.g. this hill is sixe miles, the way so vneuen ..., that a dogge with three legs will out-runne horse with foure (PENN)) - that the array of prepositions potentially introducing the AC was expanded, leading to an increase in augmentation types -that the AC could modify a single entity within the matrix clause rather than being restricted to providing background to the matrix as a whole (e.g. nature haue ordeyned two Pannicles , the one harde , and the other softe (PENN)) References Ruppel, Antonia. 2013. Absolute constructions in Early Indo-European. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Author. 2013.status: publishe