Participles and the General Valency Hypotheses

[Monika Budde]

Dear Andreas,

>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.

According to Lieb (1983) it is possible that the syntactic meaning
composition uses some part of the morphological structure (cf. p. 262f.
for a discussion of constructions like "deutsche Sprachwissenschaft" and
p.203, c.4, for an independent motivation of morphological structurings as
input for sentence semantics). In this case there is no need for an event
argument in the adjectival meaning, since the meaning composition can
directly use the morphologically present verbal meaning. For example, the
(syntactic) word form _aufgegebener_ can be analyzed morphologically into
the morph sequence _auf ge geb en er_ and the _auf(1) geb(3)_-Part is
related to the verb meaning "aufgeben" (for reasons of time and space I
will not discuss the problems with particle verbs here: we need bound
stems that correspond to idioms not only in this case but also for
substantives like _Aufwand_ that are related to particle verbs like _auf
wenden_). As far as I see this is the best solution in this case (I have
spent some time on this problem some month ago, the results will be
discussed in the book I'm just working on). But I have not checked whether
this solution is compatible with the new morphological theory of Lieb
since I prefer some version of the 'old' account.

Some Remarks may be helpful:
(1) participles are *not* a case of conversion: Adjectives and verbs are
related, but synchronically the relation has no specific direction.
Historically, the adjective stem is derived from the verb stem and then
the adjective word form is reanalyzed as verb form (for building
analytical verb forms). Synchronically, the verb form building on the one
hand and the adjective stem and word form building are morphologically
independent but 'related' (this is *not* a contradiction but has to be
spelled out carefully).

(2): Syntactically free participles are *always* occurrences of an
adjective (and I would defend the hypothesis that this is part of the
concept "participle" itself); and participles that occur as part of an
analytic verb form are never interpreted in sentence semantics. This is
some of the arguments that support

(3): There is no functional category Participle(-,S) in any language
("functional category" in an IL sense):  There is no need to interprete
such a category in sentence semantics, and the functional categories
related to the verb forms in question are non-specific ('unmarked')
categories in German, partly non-specific and partly specific categories
in other languages.

If there is some interest in discussing these phenomena here in Berlin,
there will be a good opportunity in Dec. 07 or Jan. 08: I have to give a
talk at the TU (some Wednesday evening), but the topic is not yet fixed.

Best wishes,
Monika Budde

References
Lieb, Hans-Heinrich (1983): Integrational Linguistics. Vol. I. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.