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In:Adjectives in Germanic and Romance
Edited by Petra Sleeman, Freek Van de Velde and Harry Perridon
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 212] 2014
► pp. 171–198

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From participle to adjective in Germanic and Romance

 | ACLC, University of Amsterdam
Published online: 18 February 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.212.07sle
Being mixed categories, participles can be fully verbal, fully adjectival, but they can also have a mixed interpretation, viz. as resultatives, which are considered to be a second adjectival type, one that is the result of an event. Parallel to the two types of adjectival participles and the eventive one, a second type of eventive participle has been distinguished, one with an ‘eventive property’ reading. These four interpretations have been distinguished on the basis of Germanic languages, partly determined by the prenominal or postnominal position of the participle within the noun phrase. In this paper it is argued, based on the combination of the adverbs of degree très “very” and beaucoup “much” with passive/past participles in French, that participles can also have the four interpretations in Romance.
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