The development of prepositional absent in Contemporary American English: A corpus- based constructional approach.
Résumé
We focus here on the use of absent in such utterances as "Absent any other facts, there arises an implied contract".
This usage is labelled “preposition” in dictionaries of English. The question we ask is whether "absent" really
functions as a preposition in English nowadays. This would involve a change from a lexical category (that of
adjective) to a grammatical one (preposition) – in other words, a grammaticalization process. After explaining how we collected the data used in this study (section 2), we consider how absent might possibly have grammaticalized into a preposition (section 3). We argue that the change is not so much about the grammaticalization of an individual item as about the emergence of a new construction, a process known as constructionalization. In section 4 other contemporary usages of "absent" are examined, and evidence that the item has acquired prepositional status is adduced. Finally, since we posit matching through analogy with the construction to be key in that process, a comparison between the prepositions "without" and "absent" is drawn in present-day English (section 5).