Big Events, Small Clauses

This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaborationacross seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative smallclauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like butnon-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect toconstitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowestsense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connectedwith but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in twoparts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventiveinterpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax ofparticipial and converb constructions? How do these constructionsfunction at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structuresthat are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empiricalcross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters thatare based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specificconstruction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how aspecific construction is rendered in other languages.