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book: The Underspecification of Past Participles
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The Underspecification of Past Participles

On the Identity of Passive and Perfect(ive) Participles
  • Dennis Wegner
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2019
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Studia grammatica
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About this book

Are the past participial forms that occur in passive and perfect periphrases substantially identical or should they rather be distinguished into accidentally homophonous passive and perfect(ive) participles? This book discusses the long-standing mystery of past participial (non-)identity on the basis of a broad range of synchronic data from Germanic and Romance, eventually focussing on German and English as these draw the most relevant distinctions (e.g. auxiliary alternation, a passive auxiliary that is not BE). Together with some contrastive insights from Slavic as well as the diachrony of passive and perfect periphrases, this clearly points to an identity-view. The novel approach that is laid out suggests that past participles conflate diathetic and aspectual properties. The former cause the suppression of an external argument, whereas the latter impose event-structure sensitive perfectivity, which only induces the completion of a situation if the underlying eventuality denotes a simple change of state. An approach along these lines sheds light on the intricate properties of past participles and the auxiliaries they occur with, the determinants of auxiliary selection as well as the interplay of argument and event structure.

Author / Editor information

Dennis Wegner, University of Wuppertal & University of Kassel, Germany.


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 19, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9783110616149
Hardcover published on:
February 19, 2019
Hardcover ISBN:
9783110613513
Paperback published on:
December 7, 2020
Paperback ISBN:
9783110736489
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
12
Main content:
356
Illustrations:
36
Tables:
1
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