A Corpus-based Approach to the Genre and Diachronic Distributions of English Absolute Clauses

Traditional grammarians generally hold that English absolute clauses are formal and infrequent. This article is intended to carry out a corpus-based quantitative research on the genre and diachronic distributions of English absolute clauses. We hypothesize that the distribution of absolute clauses in English is significantly different across genres and the diachronic distribution of each function type of absolute clauses in different genres is homogeneous. The British National Corpus (BNC)-based genre distribution research shows that absolute clauses are not frequently used in both the informal spoken texts and the formal academic texts; rather they are mostly used in the narrative texts of fiction. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)-based research shows that over the span of 200 years, the total number of absolute clauses tends to increase but not decrease. This is especially true to absolute clauses of attendant circumstances. Although the number of absolute clauses of clausal adjuncts is decreasing, absolute clauses are by no means disappearing but levelling off during the recent five decades, for absolute clauses of clausal adjuncts have been becoming stereotyped expressions both grammatically and semantically.