[Grammar] adverbial participle

[mmasny]

Adverbial participle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
After reading the above, I got an impression that the adverbial participle is said not to exist in your beautiful language. Which is surprising, as I'm sure I have seen sentences of this kind:
Doing my homework, I fell asleep.
If doing is not an adverbial participle in the above sentence, then what is it? I can translate this sentence word by word into my language and I have to replace 'doing' with the Polish (present) adverbial participle (which in Polish has its own, separate form).

 

[TheParser]

Adverbial participle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
After reading the above, I got an impression that the adverbial participle is said not to exist in your beautiful language. Which is surprising, as I'm sure I have seen sentences of this kind:
Doing my homework, I fell asleep.
If doing is not an adverbial participle in the above sentence, then what is it? I can translate this sentence word by word into my language and I have to replace 'doing' with the Polish (present) adverbial participle (which in Polish has its own, separate form).

***NOT A TEACHER***Good afternoon. I read the short Wikipedia paragraph. I did NOT get the same impression that you did. Let's look at your sentence: Doing my homework, I fell asleep. According to my books, your sentence is an excellent example of an adverbial participle. As the Wikipedia article said, in English it equals an adverbial clause. That is, your sentence is simply a short way of saying: (While I was) doing my homework, I fell asleep. Thank you and have a nice day.

 

[mmasny]

Well, they mention some languages that have such participles (as Slavic) but fail to mention English which (in English wikipedia) seems to be a strong clue that English doesn't have it.
But thank you very much anyway. I was confused and now I am not.

 

[TheParser]

Well, they mention some languages that have such participles (as Slavic) but fail to mention English which (in English wikipedia) seems to be a strong clue that English doesn't have it.
But thank you very much anyway. I was confused and now I am not.

***NOT A TEACHER***Thank you for asking such a good question. It really made me think more about my native language. Have a nice day.

 

[gabber]

Some English grammarians call a sentence such as yours a "supplementive clause." The subject of the suplementive cl. is understood to be the subject of the clause that it is attached to, in this case the personal pronoun "I."

 

[mmasny]

Thank you for your response. That's the way we think of it in Polish too. Such clauses are the only reason for adverbial participles' existance in Polish (both past - having done and present - doing). But still, we use them quite often, at least the present participle. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that it's not that common in English, right?