The accusative absolute and gerundial constructions in Late Latin

This paper explores the relationship between the absolute accusative and various gerundial constructions in Late Latin. While absolute constructions probably belong to the stock of inherited morphosyntactic features in Latin, the absolute accusative is comparably recent and first attested in post-Classical Latin. The gerund, on the other hand, seems to be an Italic or Latin innovation. We argue that these two categories are in complementary distribution in Late Latin and that their distribution is determined by different values of three parameters, transitivity/intransitivity of the predicate, subject co-reference with the matrix predicate and telicity/atelicity.