Deriving Latin Ablative Absolute: Labels and Phases*

Abstract

The Latin ablative absolute construction is usually considered a unitary phenomenon with regard to its external syntax, being a clausal participial adjunct, mostly appearing in the left–peripheral area of their hosts. A closer analysis carried out in the framework of the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1993, 1995), with theoretical proposals put forward in Chomsky (2013, 2015b, 2020b, 2021) and related work as the specific background, allows accounting for their properties as a result of Set‐Merge and interaction of independently motivated properties of syntactic operations. The behaviour of ablative absolute with regard to accessibility to operations targeting them from outside and their labeling properties follow from specific featural specification of their constituents. It is also argued that accounting for syntactic properties of different kinds of the ablative absolute construction does not require positing any language–particular or construction–specific rules.