Past participles in reduced relatives: A cross-linguistic perspective (original) (raw)
2003, Linguistica
https://doi.org/10.4312/LINGUISTICA.43.1.141-160
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Abstract
AI
This paper explores the distribution of Active Past Participles in Reduced Relatives (RRs) across various languages, specifically Bulgarian, English, Italian, and Slovenian. It addresses how Bulgarian differs from others in allowing Active Past Participles of all verb classes, while the other languages restrict their usage to passive and unaccusative verbs. The analysis highlights the implications of unaccusativity and grammatical aspect on participle selection in RRs.
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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...
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This paper focuses on the e/i theme vowel class of verbs in Slovenian to bring together two seemingly unrelated debates: (i) the debate on the correlation between theme vowel classes with certain argument structures and (ii) the debate on the status of derivational affixes within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Our core data come from a list of 108 unaccusative verbs obtained using the adjectival active l-participles as an unaccusativity diagnostic. We show that (i) no unaccusative verbs belong to the two largest theme vowel classes in Slovenian (a/a and i/i), whereas (ii) the two big theme vowel classes tend to get accusative arguments quite frequently. Most importantly, (iii) the e/i-class stands out since more than one half of the unaccusative sample falls into it. The e/i-class is furthermore exceptional in that its theme vowel surfaces in adjectival l-participles, it is the theme vowel class to which inchoatives in inchoative-causative pairs belong and it behaves unifo...