This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration

across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,

French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small

clauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like but

non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to

constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest

sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected

with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two

parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive

interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of

participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions

function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures

that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical

cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that

are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific

construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a

specific construction is rendered in other languages.