Preliminary Observations on the Nominative Absolute in Latin

This paper is devoted to the so-called absolute nominative construction in literary Latin, especially from late antiquity, and consists of four sections. The first provides a general definition of the syntagm and a short bibliographical survey on the topic. The second presents the analysed corpus, pointing out the criteria by which a number of instances mentioned in previous studies have been left out. The third and largest section is devoted to the discussion of the outcomes of the research and includes, among other things, a comparison with the ablative absolute. The main results are summarized in the concluding paragraph.