This course will examine some new and old puzzles in passive participles. The goal is to use passive participles to test some current approaches to the theory of syntactic category, and theories of word-building more broadly.

Stative (a.k.a. “adjectival”) passive participles, as in (1a), and eventive (a.k.a. “verbal”) passive participles, as in (1b), play a prominent role in architectural investigations of word formation. Structural analyses in which stative participles are formed Lexically (unlike their eventive counterparts) have been argued against in many recent proposals in which some or all stative passives are also built in Syntax. Such investigations have resulted in significant advances to our understanding of many different aspects of passive structures cross-linguistically.

(1) a. The metal is flattened.
b. The metal was flattened by the smith.

This course concentrates on the syntactic structure of participles in stative and eventive passives, (re)assessing the properties that the two participles share, as well as the ways in which they differ. One set of facts to be explained includes that the two participles have the same form in many languages; and, cross-linguistically, the two often have distributional properties in common. On the other hand, the two participles appear to differ in interpretation (i.e. eventive vs. stative), and to differ with respect to argument introduction (e.g. presence/absence of a by- phrase). Finally, of course, the stative participle in (1a) has often been analyzed as the category Adjective, while the participle in (1b) has been analyzed as the category Verb. We review how theories of syntactic category are crucial to constructing an explanatory account of the patterns that passive participles display. We concentrate particularly on the ways current approaches to theories of categories link category label with effects such as syntactic distribution, morphological form, semantics, and argument introduction.