Deverbal adjectives with episodic value in French: evidence for mixed categories

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the semantic and syntactic properties of French deverbal adjectives ending in ¬-ant, and shows that a subpart of these forms, while behaving as adjectives with regards to agreement and predicative position, are episodic and imperfective, similarly to present participles, whose suffix is formally similar. We first observe the various readings of -ant adjectives, i.e. dispositional, potential and habitual (Fábregas, Antonio. 2016. Deconstructing the non-episodic readings of Spanish deverbal adjectives. Word Structure 9-1. 1–41; Fábregas, Antonio. 2020. Morphologically derived adjectives in Spanish. John Benjamins), and show that they parallel those of the corresponding verbs when they occur in generic sentences. We then show that some of these -ant adjectives refer to specific events and that the sentences in which they occur are semantically equivalent to those containing imperfective or progressive verbs forms, as shown by their positive reaction to the imperfective tests. Turning to the verbal bases of episodic -ant adjectives, we observe that they derive from a restricted number of atelic verbs, that surface without direct objects, have non-active subjects, and include a degree component in their lexical meaning. We finally provide a syntactic analysis of -ant adjectives, that relies on the idea that they contain both verbal and adjectival projections in their inner structure. We hypothesize that episodic adjectives are built by the means of a particular adjectival -ant marker, that maintains the imperfective value of the present participle marker. By contrast, other -ant adjectives are built by a homophonous adjectival suffix.