Revisiting Passive Participles: Category Status and Internal Structure

Abstract

This article challenges 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 Serbo-Croatian have the external syntax and morphology of adjectives, and propose that passive participles in various languages are adjectives that embed varying amounts of verbal structure. Finally, I contend that agentive phrases are always available with stative participles that entail a prior event in languages that obligatorily express grammatical aspect on the verb stem.