888 - Maša Bešlin / Revisiting Passive Participles: Category Status and Internal Structure
888 - Maša Bešlin / Revisiting Passive Participles: Category Status and Internal Structure
March 7, Maša Bešlin defends her 888, "Revisiting Passive Participles," with a committee of Omer Preminger, Maria Polinsky and Alexander Williams.
Revisiting Passive Participles: Category Status and Internal Structure
I will challenge the view that eventive and stative passive participles are verbs and adjectives, respectively. Instead, I argue that existing diagnostics are sensitive to the eventive/stative contrast and to independent restrictions on word-order. I show that both eventive and stative participles in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian have the external syntax and morphology of adjectives, and propose that passive participles in various languages are adjectives which embed varying amounts of verbal structure. Finally, I contend that agentive phrases are always available with stative participles which entail a prior event
in languages that obligatorily express grammatical aspect on the verb stem.