Abstrakt:
Adverbial participial clauses are often considered semantically indeterminate. Nevertheless, their semantic roles may be determined jointly by semantic and pragmatic factors. Four types of participial clauses (with/without an overt subject, with/without a subordinator) will be examined with respect to their degree of integration into the superordinate clause, and to the position on a scale of “informativeness” for semantic relations. The “more informative” the semantic role of the adjunct is, the stronger its syntactic ties to the superordinate clause are. The subordinators introducing subjectless clauses differ from those introducing absolutes in the way they contribute to the semantic and syntactic ties.
