This book presents a corpus-based syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of free adjuncts and absolutes in present-day English. The main focus of the book is on central problems of their use and interpretation.

Part I Background; Chapter 1 The structural diversity of free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 2 Problems of terminology; Chapter 3 Previous research; Chapter 4 Aim and scope of the study; Chapter 5 The corpus; Part II The subject in free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 6 Control in free adjuncts; Chapter 7 The subject in absolutes; Chapter 8 The nature of the subject in a definition of free adjuncts and absolutes; Part III The interpretation of free adjuncts and absolutes; Chapter 9 General remarks; Chapter 10 Individual semantic relations; Chapter 11 Factors influencing the interpretation; Part IV Implications for semantic and pragmatic theory; Chapter 12 Free adjuncts and absolutes as instances of minimization in language; Chapter 13 Free adjuncts and absolutes and the semantics-pragmatics distinction;