Active participles are (deverbal) adjectives

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines so-called active participles in three languages with different morphological systems (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English and Hebrew). Based on a range of morphological, syntactic and interpretational diagnostics, I argue that these elements are uniformly deverbal adjectives. This result challenges a substantial body of work claiming that active participles show an adjectival/verbal ambiguity, but it is in line with Bešlin (2023), which analyzes passive participles as deverbal adjectives. Importantly, deverbal adjectives may denote predicates of properties or predicates of eventualities (events or states), depending on the characteristics of the verbal structure they embed. If these conclusions generalize to other languages, then there is no need to assume that (verbal) participles constitute a separate grammatical category, which is a desirable theoretical outcome. The results presented in this paper argue for an architecture of the grammar in which there is no one-to-one mapping between an item’s syntactic category and its meaning.