Non-categorical categories

This paper aims at circumscribing the range of structures that underlie participial constructions, with a particular emphasis on Romanian data. Participial constructions exhibit high flexibility, e.g., the participial stem labeled “supine” in Romanian grammars, which can be used in both nominal and verbal environments: (i) a. cărţi de citit b. cititul cărţilor c. am citit books of read.Sup read.Sup.the books.Gen have read books intended for reading the reading of books I have read The challenge these data raise to linguistic theory is to find the key property that would allow distinguishing a natural class of participles inside the larger class of non-­finite verbal forms. It is assumed, in line with much recent work, that this common property should be their truncated character: participles are deprived of some verbal layers; they are lower verbal domains. Taking this as a working definition, the term ‘participle’ is given a wider use; for instance, it is argued that a part of Romance infinitivals are participial constructions; apparently the same morphology can be used to cover different structures from language to language – defining morphology as the locus of variation. The main idea is that participles are truncated clauses of different heights, and not categories of a special kind. In the view that I propose, having a theory of lexical categories is not an interesting goal in itself (contra Baker 2003–2005). Rather, I show how the structural make-up of the different kinds of participles accounts for their overall behavior, making them behave like nouns, verbs, or adjectives. I make a distinction between non-finite clauses which (i) include a subject layer and (ii) involve defective Tense, like infinitives and English Acc-Gerunds, and participial constructions that (i) do not include a subject layer (ii) do not involve Tense, even defective, but at most personal and agreement marking. I focus on reduced participial domains and refer to non-finite tensed domains and participial nominalizations for comparative matters. I base my study mainly on Romance data (with key data from Romanian), and punctually refer to English for comparison.