Abstract
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.
Highlights
Adjectival vs. verbal participles Traditionally, participles are regarded as a hybrid category with both verbal and adjectival properties
On a more general level, we argue in favor of a close between agreement and category, i.e., participles agree in Highest Alemannic dialects when they are adjectival, but not when they are verbal
5.2 Eventive passives as adjectival structures While there is solid evidence for a large amount of verbal structure in eventive passives, the only evidence we have provided in favor of their adjectivehood so far is the agreement on the participle and the fact that the participle occurs in the same slot as adjectival predicates when choo ‘come’ is used as a copula
Summary
Adjectival vs. verbal participles Traditionally, participles are regarded as a hybrid category with both verbal and adjectival properties. One possible way of explaining the difference is to assume that the so-called stative passive is a combination of an adjectival participle and the copula be – while the eventive passive involves the auxiliary be embedding a fully-fledged verbal structure so that VP-related modifiers are licensed. The difference between German/English stative participles on the one hand, and Greek stative participles, on the other, is modelled by postulating more structure for Greek participles: While in both languages, stative participles can contain VoiceP, only Greek stative participles involve an aspect-phrase on top, which is argued to be necessary to instantiate an event-token (and license event-related modifiers of all sorts). We will not take a stand on whether stative passives involve any (phrasal) verbal structure, we believe that the facts discussed below with respect to the double compound perfect tend to argue against a VoiceP in German stative passives. 4 Many of the authors postulate category-neutral roots instead of V/VP; we will abstract away from this difference in what follows as it is orthogonal to our concerns and will adopt two layers for the verb phrase with V introducing the internal argument(s) and Voice the external argument
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