---
title: "Absolute constructions in the Old English Gospels: a case-study"
description: "The paper looks at how dative absolute constructions are used in the West-Saxon Old English Gospels and whether they are a native…"
authors: ["Laura Esteban Segura", "Nadia Obegi Gallardo"]
year: 2007
venue: "SELIM 14"
source: "https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/13417"
doi: "10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/segura-2019-absolute-constructions-old-english-gospels/"
---
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# Absolute constructions in the Old English Gospels: a case-study

**Authors:** Laura Esteban Segura and Nadia Obegi Gallardo · **Year:** 2007 · **Venue:** [SELIM 14](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2007](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2007/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105) · [PDF](https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/13417/12149) · [DOI 10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6943869453)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper looks at how dative absolute constructions are used in the West-Saxon Old English Gospels and whether they are a native Germanic pattern or a calque of the Latin ablative absolute. Earlier scholarship disagrees on both the origin and the definition. The authors set a strict morpho-syntactic definition: a dative participle together with its own dative (pro)noun subject, independent of the main clause and not governed by a preposition. They then compare the Latin Gospels with the West-Saxon version, and use the Lindisfarne glosses as a secondary witness. The texts were drawn from a corpus annotated with MAOET and searched with the Old English Concordancer. In no Gospel did translators render even half of the Latin ablative absolutes as dative absolutes, and sometimes fewer than ten percent. They preferred þa/þonne clauses, finite verbs or coordination. The rates differ across the Gospels, which may point to several translators. A diachronic look at Luke shows the construction fading in later English. The study is a contrastive, corpus-based contribution to the calque-versus-native debate.

## Key points
- Sources are the Gospel editions by Skeat and Liuzza. West-Saxon is the main text because it was the standard dialect, and the Lindisfarne glosses serve as a complement.
- In the pipeline, MAOET added lemmas, morphological tags, meanings, punctuation and references. The Old English Concordancer then retrieved all present and past participles using Boolean filters. Results were exported to Excel, where over half were sorted automatically and the rest by hand.
- Several cases were excluded:
  - nominative participles whose subject is the same as the main clause's subject;
  - accusative participles agreeing with an object;
  - genitive participles inside the subject;
  - prepositionally governed participle phrases.
- Counts were normalized per verse, because clause or sentence boundaries depend on unreliable punctuation. Each Latin ablative absolute (AA) was coded by its West-Saxon/Lindisfarne rendering: dative absolute (DA), finite-verb construction (FVC), prepositional phrase (PP) or double rendering (D).
- Luke was traced through the Wycliffe, King James and modern versions. Later English increasingly uses adverbial or coordinated clauses, and the construction is absent from Present-Day English.

## Interesting ideas
- The construction is defined by explicit exclusion tests: a shared subject with the main clause, agreement with a matrix argument, or prepositional governance each disqualify a candidate, which keeps counts reproducible.
- A source text and its translations act as parallel witnesses, showing which structure a translator chose in place of a given source structure.
- A coarse automatic filter on a morphologically tagged corpus sorts most candidates, and only the residue goes to manual classification.
- Frequencies are normalized by a unit that does not depend on noisy segmentation (verses instead of punctuation-defined clauses).
- Diachronic comparison shows translators steadily replacing absolutes with temporal or coordinated finite clauses.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tree): Encode the same tests to recognize English absolutes ("Lunch finished, the guests retired") as a distinct advcl pattern with its own nsubj, rather than misattaching the participle to the main subject.
- **I2** (learn): Aligned paraphrases or translations can supply silver labels showing that an absolute and a "when/after X, ..." clause express the same content.
- **I3** (learn): Run cheap rule-based retrieval first and send only ambiguous leftovers to an LLM teacher tier, which cuts annotation cost.
- **I4** (learn): When comparing parser or construction rates across corpora, normalize by a stable unit so that sentence-splitter errors do not skew the evaluation.
- **I5** (frames): Map absolute clauses onto the same temporal/causal frame as their finite "when/after" equivalents, so the event order in the world model is identical whichever surface form is used.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Laura Esteban Segura and Nadia Obegi Gallardo. 2007. Absolute constructions in the Old English Gospels: a case-study. SELIM 14.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{segura2007absolute,
  title = {{Absolute constructions in the Old English Gospels: a case-study}},
  author = {Laura Esteban Segura and Nadia Obegi Gallardo},
  booktitle = {SELIM 14},
  year = {2007},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.14.2007.87-105}
}
```

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