[Grammar] "The weather being fine, ..." Is this a participle? Conditional?

[mogsta]

I was wading through the details of Gerunds, Participles, Participial Phrases, Conditionals etc, when I came across a sentence structure that I'm not sure how to explain grammatically.

Example: The weather being fine, they will likely go fishing.

To me it looks like a first conditional (If..., then I will...) more than a participial phrase. Yet, in the book I was reading (a Russian-language English grammar course), this particular example came under the heading of "Participles".

Would you say that "The weather being fine" is probably the participial phrase I'm looking for? I had thought participial phrases needed to link to the subject of the adjoining sentence. Example "Running across the line, Tim easily won the race." (i.e. it was Tim that was running across the line)

Thanks for any feedback/guidance/grammar you guys can offer.

--Brett :?:

 

[5jj]

It's an absolute participle construction. It's the weather that is 'being fine' so there is no question of a dangling partciple. It's not a conditional sentence; it's meaning is similar to 'As the weather is fine'.