Past participles in reduced relatives : a cross-linguistic prespective

Abstract

This paper discusses the syntax and semantics of Active Past Participles in restrictive reduced relatives (RRs). The distribution of Active Past Participles is compared with respect to verb classes in Bulgarian, English, Italian, Slovenian and Spanish. We see that presumably the same surface participial structure has different distributional properties in these languages: in Bulgarian, Past Participles of all classes of verbs appear in RRs, while in other languages only those of unaccusative verbs do so. The differences in the distribution are accounted for by referring to the syntactic structure of the participle and semanticfea­tures on participial heads.