(Past) Participle Agreement (original) (raw)
Related papers
(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.
The properties of perfect(ive) and (eventive) passive participles: An identity approach
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2019
This paper sheds light on the properties of perfect(ive) and (eventive) passive participles on the basis of a discussion of the issue of past participial (non-)identity. In fact, as there is no evidence for the substantial non-identity of the two forms, a principled case is made for the identity of past participles in passive and perfect periphrases based on diachronic as well as synchronic considerations. While the historical predecessors of past participles boil down to deverbal adjectives that combine argument structural effects (the absence of an external argument) as well as aspectual properties (resultativity), synchronic data indicates that the contribution of the reanalysed eventive past participles is still twofold: (i) the (syntactic) suppression of an external argument (if present), and (ii) aspectual properties that render a given situation perfective iff the underlying predicate denotes a simple change of state. This accounts for the interpretations of past participles when combined with semantically vacuous auxiliaries (be and become): passive properties arise if (i) applies and (ii) thus cannot impose perfectivity (the eventive passive), and perfect properties ensue if (ii) applies but (i) does not (the be-perfect in languages showing auxiliary alternation). The perfect auxiliary have, on the other hand, may overtly license an argument that would otherwise remain suppressed and contributes relevant perfect properties (posteriority) so that combinations with have elicit active perfect interpretations (where perfectivity may but need not come about via implication).
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...
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.
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.
Journal of comparative Germanic linguistics/The Journal of comparative Germanic linguistics, 2024
The present paper investigates participial root configurations, i.e. participial clauses that are grammatically independent of a host clause. Unlike previous work, which has focussed on either directive or (non-directive) performative uses of so-called past participles (i.e. participles that have passive and/or perfect(ive) interpretations), the present paper establishes a typology of 'root participles' in Germanic and contrasts the properties of four main types: (1) directive (RP dir), (2) expressive (RP exp), (3) commissive (RP com), (4) representative root participles (RP rep). The main claim with respect to the properties of these distinct types is that they differ in terms of whether they include a verbal or an adjectival (passive) participle. In fact, arguments based on argument structure, orientation, aspect, and adverbial modification are presented to substantiate the claim that types (1) and (2) are formed with verbal and types (3) and (4) with adjectival participles. Additionally, the distinct types will be shown to differ in their status of either being nonsentential (i.e. structurally different from potential clausal counterparts) or merely elliptical (just phonologically reduced): types (1) and (3) can be shown to be nonsentential and hence receive a dedicated syntactic analysis, where special attention is paid to the contribution of the (imperative vs. declarative) left periphery.
Competition in Frisian Past Participles
Competition in Inflection and Word-Formation, Studies in Morphology 5, 2019
This paper evaluates recent developments in the inflection of Frisian past participles and how to account for them with the aid of a model of morphological productivity. In Frisian, there are two alternative types of past participles which both have their origin in the South-western dialect region of Fryslân, but of which only one is spreading productively across the whole language area. The natural existence of contact between the original dialect region and the rest of the language area, in theory enables both alternative types to spread. Also, both of them can be described with rules. We will therefore argue that the reason for the spread of only one of the alternatives is due to the productivity of its underlying rule. Specifically, we will argue that the Tolerance Principle (Yang, Linguis Var Yearb 5(1):265–302, 2005, The price of linguistic productivity: how children learn to break the rules of language. MIT Press, 2016) predicts both the difference in productivity between the two alternatives, as well as the productive spread of one of the alternatives outwards from the dialect region in which it originated.