Absolute participial construction theory: controversial issues

The studyfocuses on current problems associated with the evolution ofabsolute participial construction and its linguistic status in the French language. It has been established that, borrowed from classical Latin, the absolute construction with an ablative was accepted to the Old French language, presumablyin the 13th-14th centuries thanks to translations from the Latin language. Widely used in literature, the construction caused disputes among grammarians and only at the beginning of the 20th centuryit was recognized as normative. In the second part of the article, a review of the Russian and foreign scientific literature is made, the most controversial issues and the author’s own position based on corpus data are formulated. The properties inherent in all types of absolute participial constructions are determined: binarity, semantic duality, expression of predominantlytemporary, causal meaning or value ofan accompanying action, mobility, syntactic optionality in relation to a matrix sentence, the possibility of functioning only as part of a complex sentence. It was revealed that this construction is an economical formal way of expressing a proposition based on a secondary predicative connection. The features of constructions with present participles, past participles and complex past participles are analyzed. The conclusion is made about the need for a differentiated approach to the analysis of these types of absolute structures. The prospect of further studies of linguistic structures is shown.