A Tentative Study Of The Absolute Clause From The Discoursal Approach

This paper is an empirical study of the Absolute clause (termed A-clause hereafter) from the discoursal approach. The study is conducted on two levels the syntactic level and the discoursal level; and is carried out in the illumination of the Systemic-Functional Grammar.The study shows that1. the A-clause has 4 types of Semantic Roles;2. the distribution of the A-clause in the 3 kinds of positions (the Front, Middle,and End position) is unbalanced; the End position is an unmarked position; the Front and Middle position is marked positions, in which the A-clause acquires a discoursal function as transitional marker;3. the A-clause performs the backgrounding function in discourse.The study also shows that it is necessary to study grammatical features empirically via the corpus from the discoursal approach.