The development of prepositional absent in Contemporary American English: A corpus- based constructional approach.

International audienceWe focus here on the use of absent in such utterances as "Absent any other facts, there arises an implied contract".This usage is labelled “preposition” in dictionaries of English. The question we ask is whether "absent" reallyfunctions as a preposition in English nowadays. This would involve a change from a lexical category (that ofadjective) to a grammatical one (preposition) – in other words, a grammaticalization process. After explaining howwe collected the data used in this study (section 2), we consider how absent might possibly have grammaticalizedinto a preposition (section 3). We argue that the change is not so much about the grammaticalization of an individualitem as about the emergence of a new construction, a process known as constructionalization. In section 4 othercontemporary usages of "absent" are examined, and evidence that the item has acquired prepositional status isadduced. Finally, since we posit matching through analogy with the construction to be key in thatprocess, a comparison between the prepositions "without" and "absent" is drawn in present-day English (section 5)