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What participles are a mixture of

  • Frank Van Eynde EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistics

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that participles show a mixture of verbal and adjectival properties, but the issue of how this mixed nature can best be captured is anything but settled. Analyses range from the purely adjectival to the purely verbal with various shades in between. This lack of consensus is at least partly due to the fact that participles are used in a variety of ways and that an analysis which fits one of them is not necessarily equally plausible for the other. In an effort to overcome the resulting fragmentation this paper proposes an analysis that covers all uses of the participles, from the adnominal over the predicative to the free adjunct uses, including also the nominalized ones. To keep it feasible we focus on one language, namely Dutch. With the help of a treebank we first identify the uses of the Dutch participles and describe their properties in informal terms. In a second step we provide an analysis in terms of the notation of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. A key property of the analysis is the differentiation between core uses and grammaticalized uses. The treatment of the latter is influenced by insights from Grammaticalization Theory.


Corresponding author: Frank Van Eynde, Department of Linguistics and Leuven AI Institute, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this text were presented at the 25th International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (University of Tokyo, 2018) and at a meeting of the Research Unit on Formal and Computational Linguistics (University of Leuven, 2019). I wish to thank the participants at these occasions for their remarks and suggestions. Special thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers and Jong-Bok Kim for their comments on the prefinal version.

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Received: 2019-08-12
Accepted: 2021-01-10
Published Online: 2021-05-04
Published in Print: 2021-07-27

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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