<HTML><BODY><br><br><br><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB" data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Dear colleagues,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB" data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; color: rgb(75, 79, 86); background: rgb(254, 254, 254);">Please permit me a philosophical question. We all know that today’s affixes are yesterday’s lexical words. And what about today’s grammatical patterns? I think first of all about “participles”, both active and passive. An example is Latin, with its passive participle used to form analytical tense forms. Intuitively, I would guess no passive participle pattern is ever born as “a passive participle.” </span><span data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE;" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; color: rgb(75, 79, 86); background: rgb(254, 254, 254);">It is rather born as a pattern (or derivation rule) for adjectives with more concrete pattern sense, not with the highly abstract and refined meaning of passive nominalization. The same applies to active participles.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE;" data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE;">Synthetic finite forms of passive raise the same question. Say, inner passive patterns of Arabic and -or, -ris, -tur, -mur, -minī -ntur of Latin. In both Arabic and Latin there are “deponent verbs”. Their existence is an additional hint to the effect that the passive meaning of these markers is not a pristine one, that they used to be the grammatical markers of something else than Passive. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE;" data-mce-style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: #4b4f56; background: #FEFEFE;">Who has worked on how grammatical markers and patterns “refine” and “abstractivize” their meanings? And, in particular, on derivational sources of participles?</span><br><br>Thank you very much,<br><br>Sergey</p><br></BODY></HTML>