On participle-to-adjective conversion
Bożena Cetnarowska
University of Silesia
This paper examines the lexical process of adjectivalization of participles, focusing on the data from English and Polish.
(1) a. pictures of a weeping president (participle weeping)
b. weeping willow (adjective weeping)
(2) a. dokładnie zmielone mięso 'carefully minced meat' (participle zmielone)
b. mielone mięso 'minced meat' (adjective mielone)
A brief comparison is offered of the treatment of the distinction between verbal participles and (de)participial adjectives in several theoretical frameworks, e.g. the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar developed in Bresnan (1995) and Laczkó (2001), the model of Parallel Morphology advocated in Schoorlemmer (1995), the theory of Distributed Morphology postulated in Marantz (1997), the approach adopted in Spencer (1999), or Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology (Beard 1995).
It is shown that the syntactic behaviour of participle-like forms does not always provide a clear clue whether the forms in question should be treated as verb forms (i.e. inflectional participles) or as adjectives. Although it is frequently argued (e.g. in Bresnan 1995) that only adjectivalized participles can act as premodifiers in English, verbal participles can occur in this position as well (as shown in 1a). In Polish adjectivalized participles can optionally exhibit the internal syntax of verbs and occur with object DPs (as in 3).
(3) wybielająca zęby pasta
whitening.nomsgfem teeth.acc paste.nom
'whitening tooth-paste'
It is suggested that the semantic effect of the adjectivalization process, namely the lack of the eventive reading, is the best indication of the status of a given form as a verbal participle or a departicipial adjective.
(4) a. a weeping president (participle, eventive reading)
b. weeping willow (adjective, stative reading)
(5) a. the recently sent letter (participle, eventive reading)
broken dreams (adjective, stative reading)
I argue that it is advisable to postulate participle-to-adjective conversion within a theoretical model which adopts Beard’s Separation Hypothesis in morphology (contra the view expressed in Beard 1995 and Don 1993). Conversion is viewed here as a rule of semantic derivation which is not linked to any rule of affixation. It is investigated whether the adjectivalization of participles exhibits properties of uncontroversial instantiations of conversion, such as the verb-to-noun conversion, or adjective-to-verb conversion in English.
Selected references:
Beard, Robert (1995). Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bresnan, Joan (1995). Lexicality and argument structure. Paper presented at the Paris Syntax and Semantics Conference, Paris 1995.
Don, Jan (1993). Morphological Conversion. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht University.
Laczkó, Tibor (2001). " Another look at participles and adjectives in the English DP." In Butt, Miriam and Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG01 Conference, CSLI online Publications.
Marantz, Alec (1997). "No escape from syntax: don't try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon". University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4.2, 201-225.
Schoorlemmer, Maaike (1995). Participial Passive and Aspect in Russian. Doctoral dissertation, OTS, Utrecht University.
Spencer, Andrew (1999). " Transpositions and argument structure." In Booij, Geert and Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1998. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 72-102.