[Lingtyp] derivational sources of participles and sources of passive

[Sergey Lyosov]

Dear colleagues,
  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.”  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.
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. 
Who has worked on how grammatical markers and patterns “refine” and “abstractivize”  their meanings? And, in particular, on derivational sources of participles?

Thank you very much,

Sergey
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