The categorial, argument structural and aspectual indeterminacy of past participles: A holistic approach

Abstract 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 of a stativising PredP, (b) the availability of an adjectival head that triggers λ-abstraction of an internal argument, and (c) the complexity of the underlying verbal structure in terms of the availability of vP. This eventually allows for a ‘holistic’ approach to the flexibility of past participles that delineates a common core supplemented by distinct functional surroundings.