This paper investigates the diachronically changing syntactic and semantic status of the Spanish Absolute
Construction (AC) on the Communicative Continuum (Koch & Oesterreicher 1990 [2011])
in a corpus of 15th- to 18th-century translations from Latin. Previous research has already demonstrated that the 15th-century
preclassical Spanish AC evolved from a highly formal past participial Latin calque in the realm of Communicative Distance to an
entrenched gerundial absolute in the 18th century, positioned slightly further from the Communicative Distance pole (Del Rey Quesada 2018, 2021, Molenaers 2023).
This study highlights that, besides the altering predicate, other characteristics enhanced the AC’s progression along the
Continuum, including one syntactic (non-augmentation) and two semantic (non-adverbial, coreferential) factors. By means of clause
linkage (Raible 1992, 2001), a development
is traced to a syntactically less dense and semantically less complex gerundial AC, which displays a high frequency of the three
outlined features. Complementary analyses grounded in a functional-pragmatic theory of subordination (Cristofaro 2003) have revealed a moderate widening of the innovative AC’s clausal status beyond strict
subordination. Two language-internal evolutions, the case switch from ablative to nominative in the transition from Latin to
Spanish and priming with the gerundial unaugmented free adjunct (FA), are identified as the driving forces behind the Spanish AC’s
syntactic and semantic promenade beyond the extremes of Communicative Distance.