Simetries de mirall en l’ordre intern de les construccions absolutes: del català antic al català actual = Mirror symmetries in the internal order of absolute constructions: from old Catalan to contemporary Catalan

摘要

Absolute constructions are supposed to display the main syntactic and interpretive propertiesof adverbial subordinate clauses but, in contrast to them, they lack any overt subordinatingelement. This article provides arguments against this hypothesis. On the basis of the argument fronting in Old and Modern Catalan, it will be claimed that absolute constructions introducedby una vegada and un cop in Catalan do have a subordinator which is compositionally builtup from two discontinuous portions: on the one hand, a preposition which is incorporatedin the sub-lexical structure of the participle, as proposed by Gallego & Hernanz (2012) and, onthe other hand, a time expression (una vegada, un cop) that encodes an anteriority value withrespect the event taking place in the main clause