Ablative Absolute
Posted by JW on March 22, 1998 at 09:38:47:
In response to at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot., written by P. Bingham on March 22, 1998 at 03:05:39
] What is Ablative Absolute? My father tried to make me take Latin but I managed to get out of it and take French and Spanish instead.
] There is a book though (at the risk of sounding like I have my nose in a book 24 hours a day) that was originally published in the seventeenth century (I think) that was about language and sentence structure and the various ways that writers can influence the reader through writing techniques. For the life of me I can't recall the title but each structure (such as an idiom) was named after an animal. The book was filled with these beasts of the English language and very very fascinating. I find myself using these techniques all the time simply because I read this book.
JW:'The rising sun' is an ablative absolute--a combination of a noun with a participle expressing direction in place or time.
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