Participles and the General Valency Hypotheses

[Andreas Nolda]

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to draw your attention to a problem concerning the 
interpretation of adnominal occurrences of participles in the German 
noun phrases such as (1):

(1) der gestern am Hauptpostamt aufgegebene[Nom, Sg, Mask, Weak] Brief
    'the letter posted yesterday at the main post office'

As far as I known, the only IL discussion of participle meanings can 
be 
found in Marie-Hélène Viguier's dissertation from 2007. There, she 
suggests that the syntactic meaning of French participle occurrences 
involves, as a rule, intensional relations between an entity x, a 
time t, an utterance V, and a speaker V1. Consider example (2):

(2) Seules les lettres envoyées avant le 12 février seront
    prises[Pl, Fem] en considération. (Viguier 2007: 443)
    'Only the letters sent before February 12 will be taken into
    consideration.'

According to her conception, the syntactic meaning of _envoyées_4 in 
(2) involves the following intensional relation (cf. Viguier 2007: 
445; "L", "E", "e", and "^" stand for the lambda operator, the 
existential quantifier, the element relator, and the intersection 
operator, respectively):

(2) L x1 t V V1:
    Ex (<x, x1> e extension(.be sent.)
                  ^ reference-basis(_parties_4, V, V1, .be sent.)
        and <x, t, V, V1, _envoyées_4> e Relevant
        and <time(x), t> e Partially-earlier)

Here, ".be sent." (called ".abgesandt werden." in the German original) 
denotes the 'passivized' version of the concept .send., i.e. of the 
lexical meaning of the verb _envoyer_W. Although I am not quite sure 
about it, it seems to me that Marie-Hélène Viguier takes _envoyées_4 
in (2) to be an occurrence of a form of _envoyer_W, with .be sent. 
being derived from .send. by the interpretation of a syntactic 
category.

Now, whether an analysis along these lines is correct for _envoyées_4 
in (2) or not--it cannot be correct for _aufgegebene_5 in (1) since 
there is no case, gender, or 'strength' inflection of verbs in 
German. Instead, _aufgegebene_5 would commonly be regarded as an 
occurrence of the adjectival lexical word _aufgegebener/e/es_W, 
resulting from (synchronic) conversion of the corresponding verbal 
participle.

Correspondingly, the lexical interpretation .posted. of _aufgegebene_5 
in (1) (i.e. the lexical meaning of _aufgegebener/e/es_W) cannot be 
taken to be identical to the lexical meaning .post. of the verb  
_aufgeben_W. The latter is 'verb-like' in following sense: its 
intension contains a relation between an event of posting, an agent of 
the posting and a posted object. The former, however, should be
'adjective-like': its intension should contain either a property 
of posted objects or, for that matter, a relation between posted 
objects and further entities.

Note that adnominal participle occurrences can, in general, be 
supplemented by the same sorts of modifiers as occurrences of 
corresponding verb forms:

(4) Peter hat den Brief gestern am Hauptpostamt aufgegeben.
    'Peter posted the letter yesterday at the main post office.'

As you will recall, IL (following Davidson 1967) applies the syntactic 
meanings of temporal and local modifiers to the event argument 
denoted by the nucleus. Therefore .posted. should provide an event 
argument, too.

Let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that _aufgegebener/e/es_W is 
directly converted from _aufgeben_W (and not from a verbal participle 
_aufgegeben_W). In addition, let ".be posted." denote the 'passivized' 
version of .post.: a two-place concept whose intension contains a 
relation between events of being posted and posted objects. The 
intension of .posted. might then contain a relation such as (5):

(5) L x e:
    <e, x> e .be posted.
    and 'x is in the state resulting from e'

Alas, as it stands, (5) is incompatible with the General Valency 
Hypothesis (Lieb 1993: 448 f), according to which the valency of a 
non-indexical lexical word with a two-place lexical meaning is 1. The 
valency of _aufgegebener/e/es_W, however, appears to be 0.

Any ideas?

Best wishes,

Andreas Nolda

References

Davidson, Donald (1967). "The logical form of action sentences". In
   "The Logic of Decision and Action", ed. by Nicholas Rescher,
   Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 81-95.
Lieb, Hans-Heinrich (1993). "Integrational Linguistics". In "Syntax:
   Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung/An
   International Handbook of Contemporary Research", ed. by Joachim
   Jacobs et al., "Handbücher zur Sprach- und
   Kommunikationswissenschaft" 9, Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1,
   430-468.
Viguier, Marie-Hélène (2007). "Tempussemantik: Das französische
   Tempussystem: Eine integrative Analyse". Ph.D. thesis, Freie
   Universität Berlin.
-- 
Dr. Andreas Nolda           http://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/~nolda/

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Philosophische Fakultät II
Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik