Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Alberto Frasson (Wrocław): Just a phi apart: The syntax of adjectival and adverbial participles in Polish and beyond

 

Polish active present participles exhibit a well-known contrast between agreeing (adjectival) and invariant (adverbial) forms. This talk argues that these two forms do not reflect distinct categorial statuses, but instead follow from the internal functional structure of the participial phrase. I propose that all participles contain an aspectual head, but only agreeing participles contain an additional φ-head, which introduces agreement features and participates in case assignment: it agrees with the NP inside its domain and can also interact with higher clause-level probes. Because selection targets the features contributed by this head, verbs and prepositions do not c-select participles as adjectives or nouns, but as constituents bearing particular formal features. Non-agreeing participles simply lack the φ-head and therefore remain invariant. Drawing on additional evidence from Danish, Latvian and Latin, the analysis unifies the distributional patterns of Polish participles, accounts for their morphological variability, and eliminates the need for adjectival recategorization. Participles are thus treated as verbal phrases whose behavior reflects the availability of an extra φ-probe rather than category shifts.