Case marking in absolute constructions: further evidence for a semantically based alignment in Late Latin

The argument structure of the Latin clause normally patterns according to a nominative/accusative alignment, because – regardless of their semantic role – transitive and intransitive subjects are marked in the same way, as opposed to direct objects. A semantically based alignment is nevertheless attested in some domains of Latin grammar, overtly marking the semantic opposition between active/agentive and inactive/non-agentive arguments – regardless of their syntactic role. In Late Latin, this minor pattern results in the “extended accusative/restricted nominative,” a syntactico-semantic phenomenon that testifies to a re-alignment of the encoding of the argument structure in the transition from Latin to Romance. However, while there is direct evidence for the extension of the accusative, the parallel restriction of the nominative is not easy to prove, since a number of social and stylistic factors obscure the distribution of the different alignments in the late documents. New evidence for such a re-alignment may be probably drawn from some fluctuations of case marking in the ablativus absolutus. The subject argument of this non-finite clause is always marked by the ablative case in the Classical language, but either the nominative or the accusative can also occur with this function in Late Latin, and their distribution seems to express a distinction between active/agentive and inactive/non-agentive arguments.