The absentive aspect was proposed in 2000 by the Dutch linguist
Casper de Groot. It is a verbal form of
aspect, and denotes that someone was not in a particular place at the time that they were performing some activity.
It is found in the
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany, the country of the Germans and German things
**Germania (Roman era)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
,
Frisian,
Dutch,
Hungarian,
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
,
Norwegian,
Swedish,
Finnish, and
Catalan languages, among others.
[{{Cite web, url = http://www.ub.edu/diccionarilinguistica/content/absentive, title = absentive, date = 7 March 2014, accessdate = 21 July 2014, website = diccionari linguistica, publisher = Universitat di Barcelona, last = Garachana, first = Mar]
Qualities
The absentive expresses the concept of absence grammatically. In order to be able to be classified as absentive, an utterance must express:
* that someone was ''not'' in a given location (e.g. their home or office);
* that they were performing a continuous activity for a limited period of time (e.g. shopping, swimming, jogging);
* that they will return to the given location within the foreseeable future, when they have finished their activity — that is, they have not permanently left that place;
* the construction must be able to express this absence without needing additional lexical information, like 'away', 'out of the house'.
A typical example is when someone asks about someone else, but they are currently out shopping. The question about the person's whereabouts can be answered with the absentive. It is also possible to describe oneself through an absentive construction.
References
Grammatical aspects