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Connecting using an absolute phrase

An absolute phrase contains a noun or a pronoun followed by a participle and any other words that are needed to give extra information about the noun or pronoun. Now, normally when you have a subject and a verb, you have an independent clause. However, in the case of an absolute phrase, the participle doesn’t actually fill the role of a ‘proper’ verb. So the words stay as a phrase, rather than a clause.

Connecting using an absolute phrase

In this case the noun or subject of the phrase is ‘his chores’, and the participle is the past participle ‘finished’. The absolute phrase is a nice way to lead in to the rest of the sentence. An absolute phrase tells you extra information about everything in the clause, before or after it. In this case, the phrase ‘his chores finished’ tells us not only about the subject of the sentence ‘Billy’, but also about the circumstances when he ‘went to the movies’.