Root participles: directive, commissive, expressive and representative participles in Germanic root configurations (original) (raw)
Related papers
The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited (with Artemis Alexiadou, Florian Schäfer)
Lingua 149B:118-138, 2014
In this paper, we argue that adjectival passives across languages do not seem to differ in terms of the presence/absence of verbal layers (v, Voice), and we provide morphological evidence for this claim from German, English, and Greek. Particular restrictions observed with adjectival passives compared to verbal passives, such as a more limited availability of event-related modification, are best accounted for under a semantic explanation. In particular, we propose that it follows from an account according to which the underlying event of adjectival passive remains in the kind domain, due to the category change from verb to adjective.
(2019c) The syntax and semantics of past participle agreement in Alemannic
Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 105., 2019
This paper investigates agreement on past participles in Highest Alemannic dialects of German. We will first show that participle agreement only occurs in contexts where the participle is adjectival, viz., in stative passives and in resultative perfects, but not in eventive perfects. The participles thus pattern with predicative adjectives, which also display agreement in these varieties. In the main part of the paper, we address double compound perfects and eventive passives, which also display agreement on the lexical participle. Even though it is initially not obvious that the participle is adjectival in these cases, we will provide syntactic evidence for their adjectival status. Furthermore, we will pursue the hypothesis that the adjectival head of all agreeing participles is a stativizer, even in the double compound perfect and the eventive passive. At the same time, both the double compound perfect and the eventive passive also clearly have an eventive component. We will model their behavior by treating the participles as mixed categories, viz., as adjectival heads that take a large amount of verbal structure as their complement (VoiceP/AspP). While recent work on German stative passives has argued that even those should be analyzed as containing a substantial amount of verbal structure, the behavior of participles in the double perfect and the eventive passive in the varieties under consideration is clearly different. They thus contribute to the typology of adjectival passives in German and beyond and show that the familiar distinction between 'adjectival' and 'verbal' participles needs to be further refined.
Towards a correlation of form, use and meaning of ge-prefixed predicative participles in German
We argue for a split semantics of German predicative participle constructions, depending on whether or not the formation of the participle involves prefixation with the dedicated morpheme \textit{ge-}. Against the background of the analysis of participles of German \textit{be}-prefixed verbs proposed in Pross (2019), and using the licensing of superlative constructions and \textit{ung}-nominalizations as tests, we show that \textit{ge}-prefixed participles denote a result relation between a property of an event and an individual. In contrast, \textit{be-}prefixed participles, like adjectives, denote properties of individuals. We cast the distinction between event properties and individual properties in a compositional semantics of \textit{ge}-and \textit{be}-prefixed participles and show how the resulting semantic distinction allows to predict the distinction between target and resultant state participles drawn in Kratzer (2000) without using the questionable \textit{immer noch} `still' test.
The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited
Lingua, 2014
The child was combed in a sloppy manner.' (i) Someone (else) (has) combed the child. DISJOINT INTERPRETATION (ii) The child (has) combed him/herself. REFLEXIVE INTERPRETATION b. Das Kind wurde schlampig gekämmt. the child became slopp(il)y combed 'The child was (being) combed in a sloppy manner.' (i) = Someone (else) (has) combed the child. DISJOINT INTERPRETATION (ii) NOT: The child (has) combed him/herself. REFLEXIVE INTERPRETATION Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (2008), building on Anagnostopoulou (2003), argue that this semantic difference between the two types of adjectival (or stativized; cf. fn. 1) participles is a direct reflection of a structural difference, In particular, they propose that Greek stative participles in-tos, which lack event implication, are root-derived (4a). The term 'stative' here is adopted from Embick (2004) who proposes a structural distinction between root-derived stative participles and verb-derived resultative ones. 2 Furthermore, (English, German and Greek-menos) target state participles are argued to be directly derived from vPs (4b), whereas only Greek resultant state (-menos) participles can involve a Voice layer on top (4c); a similar argument in favor of the presence of Voice in participles has been made for Hebrew participles derived from the causative template (Doron to appear). 3 (4) a. [Asp [Root]] (English, German, Greek-tos stative participles) b. [Asp [vP [Root]] ] (English, German, Greek-menos TS participles) c. [Asp [VoiceP [vP [Root]]]] (Greek-menos RS participles, Hebrew causative template) Embick (2004) presented the following argument for the absence of a v layer in purely stative participles (i.e. not necessarily target state participles). Like the adjective in (5a), the participle in (5b) expresses a situation in which the door never participated in a change-ofstate event. (5) a. This door was built open/*opened. b. This door was built closed. Based on data like these and others, Embick concludes that participles that can appear in the complement of verbs like build involve a root-derivation. Recently, this picture has been challenged in various ways. Anagnostopoulou & Samioti (to appear) argue that in Greek even stative-tos participles could involve a verbal layer (vP). They also argue that certain-tos participles expressing possibility/ability can even contain VoiceP (based on Samioti to appear). Furthermore, McIntyre (2013) and Bruening (to appear) show that English adjectival participles can license by-phrases and conclude from this that
Towards a typology of participles (Doctoral dissertation: Table of contents)
2017
Full text available here: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-2958-1 The dissertation is a typological study of participles based on the concept of participle specifically designed for cross-linguistic comparison. In a few words, participles are defined as non-finite verb forms that can be employed for adnominal modification, e.g. the form written in the book [written by my supervisor]. The study is based on the data from more than 100 genetically and geographically diverse languages possessing the relevant forms. The data for the research comes mainly from descriptive grammars, but first-hand materials from native speakers, including those collected in several field trips, are also of utmost importance. The main theoretical aim of the dissertation is to describe the diversity of verb forms and clausal structures involved in participial relativization in the world s languages, as well as to examine the paradigms formed by participial forms. In different chapters of the dissertation, participles are examined with respect to several parameters, such as participial orientation, expression of temporal, aspectual and modal meanings, possibility of verbal and/or nominal agreement, encoding of arguments, and some others. Finally, all the parameters are considered together in the survey of participial systems. The findings reported in the dissertation are representative of a significant diversity in the morphology of participles, their syntactic behaviour and the oppositions they form in the system of the language. However, despite their versatility and multifunctionality, participles clearly exhibit enough idiosyncratic properties to be recognized as a crosslinguistically relevant category and studied in their own right.
Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 2021
The present paper argues that all kinds of verbal and adjectival instantiations of past participles have a common core: a participial head associated with an argument structural effect, on the one hand, and an aspectual contribution, on the other. The former amounts to the suppression of an external argument (if present), which existentially binds the semantic role associated with this argument, and the latter renders simple event structures with change-of-state semantics (and only those) perfective. Based on these ingredients (and the contribution of the auxiliary have, if present), it is not just possible to account for how past participles elicit periphrastic passive as well as perfect configurations, but crucially also for their bare (i. e. auxiliaryless) occurrences in a range of distributions: stative passives, stative perfects, absolute clauses, pre- and postnominal occurrences, and adverbial clauses. These, in turn, differ in their properties on the basis of (a) the presence...