Adjectival Passives

Within the literature on event types, there is a well-established distinction between dynamic eventualities, which involve some sort of change, and stative eventualities, which do not. Recent neoconstructionist theories seek to derive event types and the interpretation of event participants—thematic roles—from the syntax of the verb phrase—argument structure. These models uniformly assign a privileged status to dynamic events either in focus or in the theoretical tools they assume, relegating states to a secondary status within the theory and as worthy objects
of empirical research.
However, states are not as different from events as it may seem: upon closer inspection, aspectual and thematic notions generally assumed to be exclusive to dynamic events, like agentivity, causativity and resultativity, can apply to states as well. More strikingly, a rich variety of thematic roles can be found within stative predicates (Experiencer/ Stimulus, Figure/ Ground, Initiator/ Resultee...), which raises the non-trivial question of how this diversity can be derived from an impoverished structure.
This dissertation addresses stative predicates within a general theory of event types from a neoconstructionist prism. I analyze a set of Spanish verbs, the gobernar ‘govern’-type and argue that they are derived by a bi-phrasal structure that is unambiguously interpreted as a stative causative eventuality, i.e. two states related causally. In so doing, I enrich the typology of event types taxonomically and theoretically, the latter by integrating stative causatives within a comprehensive syntactic model of event structure.
I also explore adjectival passives as a case study of derived statives. I show how these constructions are truly stative—and not perfective or resultative, as is often argued. The underlying participle is fed by different kinds of stative structures—unaccusative or causative. The former is lexicalized by typical telic verbs—i.e. verbs of change with an endpoint, e.g. break—whereas the latter is lexicalized by stative causative verbs—the gobernar-type. This explains many properties of adjectival passives crosslinguistically, and reinforces the idea that states also come in different types crosscategorially.
Finally, I uncover a series of crosslinguistic grammatical parallelisms be- tween stative object-experiencer psychological verbs (e.g. worry, amaze...) and locative verbs (e.g. surround, cover...). I argue that they share a uniform struc- ture, articulated by a silent birrelational preposition. This structure denotes an abstract relation between two entities that can be understood as locative or psy- chological depending on the lexical type of verb that lexicalizes it. I show how this proposal correctly derives the thematic interpretation of these stative pred- icates without the need to resort to thematic roles as grammatical primitives, in the spirit of the neoconstructionist program.

This paper studies the disjoint reference effect in passive constructions with ser and estar ‘to be’, which consists in the impossibility of having a reflexive reading. I show, based on an empirical study undertaken with speakers of Peninsular Spanish, that said effect holds in passives with ser, but not with estar. I develop a theoretical proposal to account for the data. My study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the properties of passive participles with ser and estar in Spanish, as well as to the current study of verbal and adjectival passives in other languages.

In this paper, we report an experimental study that addressed the comprehension of adjectival passives in German, e.g., Das Fenster ist geöffnet (The window is opened). We drew on recent linguistic accounts (Gehrke to appear; Maienborn 2009) that propose that the interpretation of such forms necessitates the involvement of a contrasting state (e.g., closed window). In line with this proposal, the results of our experiment indicate that contrasting states are mentally better available after reading a sentence with an adjectival passive than after reading a corresponding sentence with an adjective, e.g., Das Fenster ist offen (The window is open).

This chapter discusses the nature of participles and gerunds in Spanish. As they are considered hybrid categories with a cross-categorial nature, we will focus in particular on their category distribution: traditionally, participles are verbal forms that share properties with adjectives, while gerunds are verbal forms with adverbial properties. Both are ultimately used to express different grammatical aspects
of the base verb; therefore, another issue discussed in this chapter is whether the traditional view
that participles express (result) states and gerunds express imperfective ongoing activities is correct.

This paper investigates agreement on past participles in Highest Alemannic dialects of German. We will first show that participle agreement only occurs in contexts where the participle is adjectival, viz., in stative passives and in resultative perfects, but not in eventive perfects. The participles thus pattern with predicative adjectives, which also display agreement in these varieties. In the main part of the paper, we address double compound perfects and eventive passives, which also display agreement on the lexical participle. Even though it is initially not obvious that the participle is adjectival in these cases, we will provide syntactic evidence for their adjectival status. Furthermore, we will pursue the hypothesis that the adjectival head of all agreeing participles is a stativizer, even in the double compound perfect and the eventive passive. At the same time, both the double compound perfect and the eventive passive also clearly have an eventive component. We will model their behavior by treating the participles as mixed categories, viz., as adjectival heads that take a large amount of verbal structure as their complement (VoiceP/AspP). While recent work on German stative passives has argued that even those should be analyzed as containing a substantial amount of verbal structure, the behavior of participles in the double perfect and the eventive passive in the varieties under consideration is clearly different. They thus contribute to the typology of adjectival passives in German and beyond and show that the familiar distinction between 'adjectival' and 'verbal' participles needs to be further refined.

Since Belletti & Rizzi (1988), there has been a considerable debate over whether object experiencer psychological verbs (OEPVs) are able to form verbal passives or not. Some authors (Grimshaw, 1990; Legendre, 1993) agree with Belletti & Rizzi (1988) in considering that OEPVs are unaccusative and, that therefore, they cannot form verbal passives, but only adjectival passives. Other authors (Pesetsky, 1995; Bouchard, 1995) argue that OEPVs are normal transitive verbs and, that therefore, they are able to form verbal passives. Related to this, Landau (2002) distinguishes two types of languages: (i) A languages (e.g. English, Dutch, Finnish), in which (eventive) OEPVs are allowed to form verbal passives, and (ii) B Languages, where OEPVs are only allowed to form adjectival passives. However, as Landau himself acknowledges, most of the tests that are supposed to distinguish verbal and adjectival passives are not very clear-cut.
Interestingly, because of the alternation between the two copulas ser and estar, Spanish provides such a clear-cut diagnostic: (eventive) verbal passives are formed with ser, while adjectival passives are formed with estar (Marín, 2001). In this presentation, I will show that, according to the aforementioned criterion, Spanish OEPVs fall into two groups: (i) those such as asustar ‘frighten’ or molestar ‘annoy’, which are able to form both verbal passives and adjectival passives, and (ii) those such as preocupar ‘worry’ or aburrir ‘bore’, which are only able to form adjectival passives. The existence of these two groups is clearly related to agentivity: asustar-verbs that have an animate subject are agentive, while preocupar-verbs are never agentive. Contrary to the received view, I will demonstrate that these two classes do not differ with respect to aspect: both denote inchoative states (Marín & McNally, 2005; 2011).

In the recent literature, it is widely assumed that adjectival passives are stative, while verbal passives are eventive. Regarding Spanish, it is also mostly assumed that adjectival passives only come with estar (El edificio está bien construido, «The building is well built»), while verbal passives only come with ser (El edificio ya ha sido construido, «The building has already been built»). However, there is at least a group of verbs, that of subject experiencer psych verbs (SPEVs), which poses a serious problem to these generalizations, given that passives of SEPVs, although being unquestionably stative, are constructed with ser: Pedro es temido, «Pedro is feared». In this paper it is argued, that SEPV passives are not verbal, but adjectival, and that they take ser because they denote individual-level states.

In this paper I argue that, in addition to Cinque’s (2010) direct and indirect modification, there is also a third type of adjective modification, analyzed higher, at the left periphery of DP. A closed set of Serbo-Croatian (S-C) adjectives (such as pomenuti/navedeni “mentioned” and izvesni/određeni “certain”), after being merged as indirect modification adjectives, move to a structural position, where they value d-features, providing the co‑locutor with information about the referential (pomenuti/navedeni “mentioned”) or epistemic (izvesni/određeni “certain”) aspects of the denotation of an expression. These adjectives always precede other adjectives, including superlatives and comparatives, and they must bear the long, so-called “definite aspect” form. Moreover, they can serve as a barrier for left-branch and adjunct extraction in their referential/epistemic reading. Finally, these adjectives can precede short-form adjectives, a fact not previously discussed in the literature. It is concluded that there is a functional projection above S-C NPs that is sensitive to discourse properties.

To date, it has generally been assumed that most contemporary uses of Spanish estar ‘be.loc’ arose some time after the use of ser ‘be’, and that the former eventually took over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of diachronic change in estar claim that the usage of this verb became generalized as a result of some reanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over the result state and locative uses of ser. In this paper we wish to go one step further and investigate the questions of how adjectival passive estar + participle emerged in Spanish and how it extended its usage at the expense of ser based on an empirical analysis of data coming from a large corpus of Spanish texts from the 12th to the 20th century. We propose that the first and most frequent uses of estar determined the way the participial construction emerged and further extended itself, gradually usurping uses of ser, and that the language change mechanism which drove this development was analogy. More specifically, we argue that this development was driven by the analogical relations established between participles appearing with this verb and locative prepositional phrases.