The absolute participial construction in the French language and the adjoining phenomena

The article is about the French absolute participial construction. The absolute participial construction (APC) is one of the most complicated and understudied elements of the syntactic system of French. Domestic linguists disregarded many aspects of this linguistic phenomenon that requires a comprehensive study. These constructions allow to diversify the syntactic pattern of the text and serve as an alternative to subordinate clauses by shortly rendering their rich content. The existing definition does not fully reflect the complexity of the syntactic and semantic nature of this phenomenon. The aim is to identify certain related phenomena and develop explicit criteria for APC identification. The participle clause, the absolute construction with a noun and the absolute construction with a gerund are classified as adjacent constructions. Some constructions found in contemporary fiction are analyzed. The authors clarify the definition of APC and lay emphasis on its features. The attention is focused on a particular type of APC - construction without a verbalized subject, as well as one of the specific written options- parceling. The authors understand APC as an unattached construction to be formed by a participle acting as a predicate and its own subject - a noun or a pronoun that does not coincide with the subject of the main clause. The detached position of the construction and its own subject contribute to the establishment of subject-predicate relationship between these elements. APC has an adverbial meaning of time, cause, condition, concession, accompanying actions and is usually used in a postpositive (and prepositive, less frequently) position to the main clause. It is acceptable to omit the subject in a particular -archaic - APC type, and this subject is understood from the context of the whole sentence. APCs have some related phenomena: constructions being close to APC in the morphological sense (with a participial stem) and "absolute" constructions combined by the presence (or absence, but for constructions with gerund, when it is possible to understand the subject from the context) of their own logical subject. Absolute constructions with a noun have an adverbial meaning of manner, include the possession relationship such as "integral part - integer". Absolute constructions with a gerund are marked by the particle en, they do not have their own subject related to this non-finite verb form, they have only an adverbial meaning of time and express an action concurrent with the predicative action in the main clause.

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