Examples of absolute phrases with adverbs instead of participles

Question

I'm looking for examples / explanation of absolute phrases with adverbs instead of participles.

What about the following:

• She walked into the room, gracefully.

Is the adverb, gracefully, an absolute phrase

An absolute phrase is a modifier (quite often a participle), or a modifier and a few other words, that attaches to a sentence or a noun, with no conjunction.

Obviously you would normally want to say

• She walked gracefully into the room

But I wondered if shifting the adverb like that made it absolute.

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I am especially interested in whether any authority on grammar would claim it is an absolute phrase.

Answer 1

Here are some examples:

• We fell asleep happy for once, our bellies full and our beds warm.

• The newlyweds checked into the motel, unaware they'd never check out.

• Jack and John strip off their shirts and run towards the lake, the happiest they'll ever be.

• Aware that time was about up, I made a wild guess and hoped I was right.

• Dressed to the nines, she walked gracefully into the room.

• Her hat in hand, she walked gracefully into the room.

• She walked gracefully into the room, neck-deep in grief but head held high.

Your example isn't an absolute phrase for a couple of reasons. The first is that a phrase, by definition, contains more than one word. "Gracefully" is only one word. The second is that an absolute phrase modifies the entire sentence, not just one word in the sentence. Since you say that "She gracefully walked into the room" is the sentence and don't mention that you're changing the meaning of the sentence but are merely moving "gracefully" to the end, it's clear that "gracefully" is only modifying "walked" because that's all it modifies in "She gracefully walked into the room." It is not modifying the entire sentence but still just the verb, appearing after the indirect object instead of before the verb being the only difference.

Per @Edwin Ashworth's request for source information:

"An absolute phrase is a group of words that modifies an independent clause as a whole." (https://www.thoughtco.com/absolute-phrase-grammar-1689049 )

"An absolute phrase is a grammatically independent group of words that serves to modify or add information to an entire sentence." (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Absolute-Phrases.htm )

Absolute Phrases - Definition: a group of words consisting of a noun or pronoun and a participle, that is attached to a sentence without a conjunction in order to modify it (https://prezi.com/fd85xqfskwaw/absolute-phrase/ )

Answer 2

An adverb or adverb phrase, though it may modify an entire clause just as an absolute phrase does, fails to fulfill a basic criterion for that construction: it is grammatically impossible for an adverb phrase to have a subject.

The analogous construction, however, is the sentence adverb, a disjunct which takes the reader outside the argument of the sentence and expresses a resultant attitude or opinion. As the name implies, a sentence adverb does not attach grammatically to a verb, but, as an absolute phrase, to an entire clause.

Sentence adverbs, of course, need not be phrases, but for the sake of illustration, here are a few examples:

Unfortunately for researchers, people under the age of 65 have no identifiers other than their Social Security numbers and have no population-wide insurance system that could (like Medicare) be used to track medical events over time. — Tools For Evaluating Health Technologies, 2004.

A common construction in which an adverb phrase modifies a sentence or clause is adverb + enough:

Ironically enough, British victory in the Seven Years' War set the stage for the revolt, for it freed the colonists from the need for British protection against a French threat on their frontiers and gave free play to the forces working for separation. — Robert W. Coakley, Stetson Conn, The War of the American Revolution, 2002, 24.

What is a Society? Curiously enough, it is not easy to find social scientists who seem to know – and are ready to explain – what a "society” is. — Claus Offe, “Is there, or can there be, a ‘European Society’?” in: Ines Katenhusen, Wolfram Lamping, eds., Demokratien in Europa, 2013.

The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was small and very crammed. The largest room in the whole house was the bathroom, surprisingly enough. — Meagan M. Donohue, Sincarian, 2009, 139.

Since gracefully describes the manner in which an action is performed rather than express an authorial comment, it is difficult to imagine its use as a sentence adverb even in the same construction:

Nandini had made up her mind to go with them, had even changed into outdoor clothes, but she had backed out, gracefully enough, without rancour. — Ambika Sirkar, No Crystal Stair, 2011, 56.

Despite the parentheses and the adverb + enough phrase, gracefully enough still expresses the manner in which Nandini backed out, i.e., it still modifies the verb, not the clause, as, say, surprisingly enough, which would be a comment on her behavior and personality, not how she backed out of a planned engagement.