The morphophonological identity of past participles used to form passive and perfect periphrases in Germanic and Romance evokes the possibility of being mirrored by substantial syntacticosemantic identity. In other words, the formal uniformity of the inflectional marker raises the question of past participial (non-)identity: are the forms in question – say written in Malin has written a letter and A letter was written by Malin – just accidentally homophonous yet grammatically distinct (as proposed inter alia by Drijkoningen 1989; Bierwisch 1990; and Aronoff 1994) or should the shallow identity rather be taken seriously in terms of reflecting substantial past participial identity (as suggested inter alia by Hoekstra 1984; Roberts 1984; Toman 1986; vanden Wyngaerd 1988; Ackema 1999; Ackema & Marelj 2012; Breul & Wegner 2017; and Wegner 2019). While traditional grammar implicitly seems to have favoured the former view, what immediately supports the lack of a substantial distinction between passive and perfect(ive)1 participles is their historical development: the two items have the same diachronic source, namely a deverbal adjective that is interpreted in a resultative fashion (cf. Ackema 1999: 145f., 150f.; Łe̜cki 2010: 149f.). However, simply taking this at face value and drawing the conclusion that past participles are still grammatically identical is of course too hasty and neglects the potential influence of grammaticalisation on the forms at hand. The diachronic identity thus certainly need not be retained synchronically and hence does not suffice to settle the issue at hand in a conclusive fashion. Nevertheless, it is striking that some core properties of the diachronic predecessor still shine through in modern instances of past participles: an argument structural as well as an aspectual effect.

Based on both diachronic as well as synchronic evidence, the present paper makes a principled case for the identity of past participles. This eventually serves to bring forth novel insights regarding the grammatical properties of past participial formatives, which may be shown to amalgamate the suppression of an external argument (if present) and the contribution of aspectual properties (rendering simple changes of state, and only those, perfective). Due to these two characteristics, the precise grammatical contribution of a past participle in a given syntactic configuration is strongly contingent on both the properties of the underlying predicate (in terms of the presence or absence of an external argument, i.e. [±EA], and a simple change of state, i.e. [±sCoS]) as well as the contribution of the immediate functional context, viz. the auxiliary. These ingredients ultimately induce a compositional approach to the formation of passive and perfect periphrases.

In order to put forth a proper theory on the basis of the most relevant empirical domains, the present paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly discusses the empirical reality of the shallow identity of past participles in passive and perfect configurations by taking into consideration some supposedly challenging instances of past participial polymorphy. Section 3 then turns to evidence in favour of an identity approach by considering the specific properties of diachronic predecessors as well as the insights to be gained from synchronic bare occurrences and divergent realisations of past participial items. This points to some basic characteristics that may be attributed to past participles. Based on these considerations, section 4 lays out a novel approach to the identity of (eventive) passive and perfect(ive) participles, which ultimately bears some implications for the (manifold) determinants of auxiliary selection and the intricate properties of past participles. Finally, the fifth section draws some conclusions and points to natural extensions of the present theory to domains potentially relevant for future research.

The main claim of the present paper rests upon the formal identity of past participles in passive and perfect periphrases whose empirical reality can easily be retrieved from the Germanic and Romance examples in (1) and (2).

While the examples at hand differentiate passive and perfect constructions in terms of the auxiliary that is employed (passive BE/BECOME/COME vs. perfect HAVE), there is no morphological distinction on the basis of the participial auxiliate.

The assumption of a consistent morphological exponent is, however, immediately put into question by the parameterised availability of past participial (object-)agreement.2 Whereas the West Germanic languages always employ an invariant past participle in the formation of passive and perfect periphrases, North Germanic and Romance languages typically resort to specific agreement markers (see, e.g. Kayne 1989; Belletti 2006; D’Alessandro & Roberts 2008; Åfarli 2009), as observable in the examples in (3) and (4).

In contrast to the invariant participles in HAVE-perfect configurations like (3c) and (4b), those in passive contexts agree with their displaced internal arguments, as (3a), (3b) and (4a) show.

Although the occurrence of agreement morphology at first sight points to a substantial distinction between passive and perfect(ive) participles, where only the former ever seem to exhibit overt φ-feature agreement with the internal argument, this potentially challenging assumption may easily be debunked. In fact, both perfect periphrases formed with the auxiliary BE as well as those headed by the auxiliary HAVE occasionally exhibit agreement morphology on the past participle, as observable in (5) and (6).3

The BE-perfect in Italian in (5) as well as the Italian and French exponents of a HAVE-perfect in (6) clearly show that there is no general ban on the occurrence of overt agreement morphology on perfect(ive) participles. Rather, these data point to an independent source: only if the internal argument is displaced out of the participial domain, agreement morphology overtly manifests on the past participle (cf. Belletti 2006: 495; Bjorkman 2011: 155f.; see also Kayne 1989).4 The sketchy representation in (7) serves to illustrate this: the internal argument locally values uφ on the Asp-head and its copy is merged outside of the participial domain, namely in a position from which it asymmetrically c-commands the uφ it has valued in the first place (as indicated by the dotted arrow).

Regardless of the specific conditions on the overt manifestation of participle agreement, the hypothesis of an overarching morphophonological identity of (eventive) passive and perfect(ive) participles is not challenged by these data.

A further morphological distinction may be found in Embick’s (2003; 2004) division between stative participles, on the one hand, and eventive as well as resultative participles, on the other. In fact, there is a number of verbs that exhibit a different participial realisation depending on whether they denote core adjectival properties (in prenominal occurrences and copula constructions) or allow semantic recourse to a verbal event (as in proper passive periphrases, the resultative constructions commonly referred to as “stative passives”, or in adnominal distribution). The attestable allomorphy – though not as neat as these cases suggest (cf. Bruening 2014: 384) – is observable in the examples in (8) (cf. Embick 2003: 152; 2004: 358).

The question that naturally arises with respect to stative participles – especially once we take into consideration that these correlate in a straightforward fashion with bare adjectival morphology, as in (8d) – is whether they should be grouped with participles in the first place. The fact that stative participles are restricted to denoting a state and arguably do not comprise any eventive properties suggests that they should rather be analysed as (lexicalised) instances of adjectives just etymologically related to past participles.5 In any case, these occurrences clearly do not challenge the assumption of participial identity as they do not in any way concern the distinction between passive and perfect(ive) participles. In fact, the dividing line is usually drawn between distinct kinds of passive participles, where perfect(ive) participles are neutrally treated as forms that are formally identical with resultative and eventive passive cases (cf. Embick 2004: 359fn4). Eventually, the relevant dimension encoded by the morphological distinction is one concerning the amount of event structure: stative participles lack recourse to an event, which is present in (eventive and resultative) passive as well as perfect(ive) participles.

While the previous cases of polymorphy do not challenge the identity of past participles in Germanic and Romance, this is certainly not a language universal. In fact, languages that encode a proper distinction between passive and perfect participles on the basis of inflectional morphology may easily be found, e.g. in the Slavic family. South Slavic languages like Bulgarian and Slovenian, for instance, employ substantially distinct forms, as observable in the Bulgarian examples in (9).

What is particularly striking with respect to these cases is that the auxiliary employed in such cases is one and the same, namely a rough equivalent of BE. Furthermore, the grammaticalisation of a proper HAVE-perfect in Macedonian and Kashubian – two Slavic languages that once made use of substantially distinct passive and perfect participles just like Bulgarian – seems to induce the loss of a morphological distinction (see Migdalski 2006: 132). Eventually, then, there certainly are languages that make use of substantially distinct participles, but these are arguably parametrically distinct from the identity languages discussed in the present paper.6

As we have just seen, there is no evidence against the morphophonological identity of participial forms in passive and perfect periphrases. The overarching shallow identity, however, still need not necessarily point to a substantial grammatical identity but may just be accidental. While proponents of this view need to account for why this accidental homophony is so pervasive, the next section provides some diachronic as well as synchronic evidence against it by identifying a set of basic properties. This is anything but a trivial task though given the eponymous participial characteristic of always taking part in larger constructions. This holds true in the case of perfect and passive periphrases, but crucially also – though to different degrees – in those cases in which they occur without an auxiliary: adnominal distributions (the written letter or the letter written by Malin), adverbial clauses (Arrived at the station, the train came to a complete halt or The bomb defused, he returned to his comrades), as well as the stative passive (The house is built) and the stative perfect (The girl has her eyes covered). In fact, the core properties of the participles may well be veiled behind the specific properties of their constructional embedding not just in periphrases but crucially also in “bare” contexts (where there may for instance be an adjectival head).

Immediate though non-conclusive support for the substantial identity of (eventive) passive and perfect(ive) participles comes from their historical development out of a common source (cf. Dal 1952/2014: 128ff.; Mitchell 1985: 12, 280ff.; Schrodt 2004: 9ff.). In fact, both stem from a deverbal adjective that attributes a resultative property to a nominal referent. This may be seen in the Old High German and Old English examples in (10) and (11).

In all of those cases, the result of a change of state is attributed to a referent. In fact, the ingressive use in (10a) features the copula BECOME, which conveys a transition on the basis of attributing a resultative state to the subject (cf. Musan 1998: 124; Eckardt 2011: 391). The copula BE in (10b) lacks the meaning of a transition, but also attributes the resultative state to the referent in question (cf. Abraham 1992: 3f.). The main verb HAVE in (11) in turn conveys the interpretation of possessing an object and it is this possessee that is attributed the resultative state denoted by the deverbal adjective (cf. Łe̜cki 2010: 149f.; Ringe & Taylor 2014: 435f.).

As part of the grammaticalisation process of proper participial periphrases, the deverbal adjectives in question are reanalysed as verbal past participles (and lose their agreement morphology in some or all of their periphrastic uses as a consequence).7 While participle formation was first restricted to transitive (causative) predicates, the proper grammaticalisation of past participles soon led to an analogical extension to intransitive (first unaccusative, then unergative) predicates (cf. Öhl 2009: 296; Łe̜cki 2010: 149f.). However, the adjectival predecessors of proper verbal past participles are still functional in the modern instantiations of the two languages. Accordingly, the characteristic properties of the participial occurrences in (10) and (11) are directly mirrored in the stative passive in (12) and the stative perfect in (13).8

In both of those stative cases, the participial contribution to the clausal interpretation is its denotation of a resultative property, which is attributed to the subject of the copula BE in the stative passive and the object of the possessive main verb HAVE in the stative perfect. The core properties that the diachronic as well as synchronic “stative” uses thus lay bare are the following: (i) a transitive predicate is deprived of its external argument (in favour of a simple change of state that lacks grammatical recourse to the cause), (ii) the resultative state (of the simple change of state) is attributed to the referent that the participial adjective modifies.9

Synchronically, although the reanalysis of the stative precursors certainly triggered some changes, the contribution of eventive past participles in the two periphrastic contexts is still two-fold: (i) an argument structural effect in passive cases, and (ii) a temporal or aspectual contribution in perfect cases. Turning first to the former, what distinguishes the adjectival predecessors from the reanalysed eventive past participles is that the latter are supplemented by a CAUSE10 and hence allow for semantic recourse to a fully-fledged event structure.11 This concurs with the grammatical presence of an external argument. Nevertheless, there synchronically is only one context in which an external argument may syntactically be realised as an overt part of the argument structure of the underlying predicate: the periphrastic perfect formed with the auxiliary HAVE. In all other eventive occurrences of past participles, the external argument (if there is one in the argument structure of the underlying predicate) is bound to remain implicit, unless introduced independently by an adjunct BY-phrase. This is in line with the comparison of the HAVE-perfect in (14) and the eventive passive, BE-perfect as well as bare uses in (15).

Based on these observations, it is anything but far-fetched to acknowledge the special role of the perfect auxiliary HAVE in perfect periphrases. While eventive past participles generally allow for semantic recourse to an external argument (if there is one in the properties of the underlying predicate), the presence of HAVE plays a vital role in terms of licensing this argument syntactically. This is not surprising given the traditional claim that auxiliaries retain some of the functional properties of their main verb predecessors: possessive HAVE is transitive and thus brings with it the ability to license an external argument, unlike the copula BE which bears an unaccusative argument structure to begin with (cf. Rouveret & Vergnaud 1980: 193). Postponing the theoretical implications of this observation to the next section, we may tentatively maintain that the past participial morpheme bears the argument structural contribution in (16) and the perfect auxiliary HAVE plays a special role in the denotation of an active reading in terms of its contribution in (17).

Based on these considerations regarding the basic properties of the past participle in an identity approach, while the reanalysis of the deverbal adjective reintroduces the predicate’s causative phase and with it the semantic presence of an external argument (if present in the properties of the predicate), it is the auxiliation of HAVE that eventually enables a proper active interpretation.

This tentative outlook promises to grasp the passive characteristics of past participles and also paves the way to account for the fact that they vary between a passive and an active interpretation. A principled approach to the identity of past participles also has to account for the contribution of perfect semantics, though. In other words, an identity approach has to be able to account for the fact that all perfect periphrases manage to evoke perfect meaning, but it also has to grasp that passive instantiations remain devoid of any temporal or aspectual effect (cf. Wanner 2009: 28). Only very few approaches try to account for this on the basis of a flexible aspectual characteristic attributed to the participial morpheme (see Savova 1989 and Breul & Wegner 2017 for periphrases and Lübbe & Rapp 2011 for attribute instances) and we will return to these in the next section. What is a priori clear is that the aspectual contribution of the past participial affix in Germanic and Romance has to be set apart from the overt morphological manifestation of (im)perfectivity in aspectual languages like the Slavic exponents Bulgarian or Russian. The latter explicitly encode the (un)boundedness of an eventuality (cf. Iatridou et al. 2001: 208ff.) and may (or may not) combine this with passive as well as active forms whose perfect time span is arguably determined by perfect participial morphology. Crucially, while the expression of (im)perfectivity may apply regardless of the particular properties of the underlying eventuality in such aspectual languages,12 the aspectual effect brought in by past participles in Germanic and Romance seems to be strongly contingent on event structure. In fact, what will be argued in the next section in some more detail is that the past participial morphology may only autonomously impose perfectivity on the basis of a single kind of eventuality: a simple change of state, i.e. one that lacks grammatical recourse to a causer as introduced by an external argument. This is claimed to be denoted by unaccusatives, whereas all other kinds of predicates (transitives and unergatives of any kind) demand additionally support. Based on these considerations, which will be shown to account for auxiliary alternation (the BE-perfect typically being formed with unaccusatives) and the required imperfectivity of passives below, let us just tentatively assume that the past participle bears as its second basic ingredient the denotation of event-structure sensitive perfectivity, as spelled out in (18).

This raises the question of how a perfect interpretation may be derived from participial periphrases that are event structurally more elaborate than just denoting a simple change of state.13 There are two possibilities in this respect. The first one is that the periphrasis does not include any other ingredient that could help out in terms of conveying a perfect interpretation. This characteristically holds true for passive periphrases, which are formed with semantically vacuous auxiliaries like BE and BECOME and remain imperfective. The alternative option comes forth in configurations with HAVE. The perfect reading conveyed by past participial periphrases headed by the perfect auxiliary HAVE might partly (or fully) stem from the perfect auxiliary (cf. Klein 1999: 73; Iatridou et al. 2001: 220f.). This diachronically fits the grammaticalisation of the HAVE-perfect: while the reanalysis of the past participle leads to the suppression of an external argument and thus accounts for its passive function, the auxiliation of HAVE licenses the external argument syntactically and provides the relevant ingredients to evoke a proper perfect interpretation.

Empirical support in favour of a relevant perfect semantic contribution of the auxiliary HAVE may be drawn from participial periphrases that are morphologically deviant in one of two respects: either what is expected to be realised as a past participle occurs as an infinitival (plain) form or an infinitival form unexpectedly takes on participial morphology. The former phenomenon, which will be discussed first, crops up in West Germanic verbal clusters as well as contexts of VP-preposing in English. Verbal clusters of the relevant kind are usually discussed under the heading of Infinitivus pro Participio (IPP) (see, e.g. Vanden Wyngaerd 1996; Hinterhölzl 1998; Schmid 2002), whereas those of VP-preposing are occasionally termed “Perfect Participle Paradox” (PPP) (see Oku 1996; Urushibara 1997; Breul 2014). Some examples of each kind are provided in (19) and (20).

Crucially, the lack of participial morphology in these cases bears no consequences for the LF-interpretation as proper perfect periphrases. While the IPP-cases are often treated as the consequence of some kind of morphological “rescue mechanism” that serves to deal with an overly complex configuration (cf. Hinterhölzl 2009: 209ff.), the PPP has recently been analysed as an effect of the application of “impoverishment” (cf. Breul 2014: 462f.).14 What is quite striking about both of these phenomena is that they are restricted to periphrases headed by the perfect auxiliary HAVE. Accordingly, passive cases exhibiting infinitival forms like those in (21a) and (22) are just as ungrammatical as perfect periphrases headed by the auxiliary BE, as in (21b).

Accordingly, there is no passive instantiation of the PPP (cf. Breul 2014: 453) and the same holds for passive as well as BE-perfect occurrences of the IPP (cf. Haider 2003: 104; Vogel 2009: 312). This correlation may be taken to bear some insights for the compositional contribution of participles and their auxiliaries even under a PF-analysis. While an operation at PF should of course not bear any LF-consequences – in line with the observation that the interpretations of periphrases exhibiting the IPP and the PPP are identical to their “regular” counterparts (if available) – the externalisation component may nevertheless be taken to underlie general restrictions regarding the recoverability of information: only operations that do not impede the availability of the information morphosyntactically encoded by the expression at hand are licit. With respect to the PF-deletion of morphological cues, according to Breul (2014: 465f.) an impoverished form may only substitute a properly inflected one if this does not endanger the recovery of the meaning that is associated with it.15 This entails that only perfect periphrases formed with the help of the auxiliary HAVE bear properties that serve to signal a perfect interpretation, whereas BE and BECOME apparently do not suffice to convey the interpretation in question and thus require the overt presence of participial morphology.16 In the tradition of Breul (2014: 465), we may tentatively derive from this that the relevant perfect information is compositionally located on the perfect auxiliary HAVE as well as the participle or on the perfect auxiliary alone.

This argument gains some additional support from the exceptional placement of the auxiliaries in (23) (as well as (19) above).

Although the syntax of German canonically demands finite predicates to be placed in the final position of an embedded clause (i.e. the T-position, into which the finite element moves, is head-final), there are two contexts in which this requirement may be suspended: verbal IPP-clusters embedded under perfect haben (‘have’), as in (23a), and those embedded under future werden (‘will’), as in (23b). In the tradition of Bærentzen (2004: 137f.) as well as Eisenberg et al. (2001: 257f.), this possibility might have to be traced back to the unifying characteristic of the perfect and the future auxiliaries in question, namely their relevant temporal contribution. In fact, preposing the auxiliary may serve to provide relevant temporal information to the parser as soon as possible in the absence of other morphological cues.17

What should not go unmentioned in the context of the IPP, however, is that Dutch exhibits some potentially challenging cases. In fact, while it also strictly bars the formation of passive periphrases without participial morphology,18 some verbs are able to occur in infinitival form in perfect periphrases with BE, as in (24) (see also Haider 2010: 291).

These verbs, however, crucially are not proper main verbs in the traditional sense anymore, but rather have come to be (re)analysed as aspectual verbs (cf. Broekhuis & Corver 2015: 1020ff.), as observable in the interpretations one may gain from these cases.19 Their aspectual core may be argued to readily allow for the conventional association with perfective properties, which is why semantic recoverability is not endangered despite the fact that the (semantically vacuous) perfect auxiliary does not introduce relevant perfect semantics.20

Further support for the semantic contribution of HAVE as opposed to BE and BECOME may be drawn from the closely related phenomenon Participium pro Infinitivo (PPI) (see e.g. den Dikken & Hoekstra 1997; Wiklund 2001; Wurmbrand 2012), which may be seen as a morphologically opposed counterpart to the IPP. Just like the IPP, the PPI occurs in verbal clusters, though rather in North Germanic languages (apart from the West Germanic exponent Frisian). As the Norwegian example in (25) makes clear, PPI-clusters include a superfluous piece of participial morphology on a form that is expected to occur as an infinitive (and may often optionally do so).

Just like the IPP (and the PPP), the PPI is only available in periphrastic perfect configurations headed by HAVE and just like the other two cases of divergent realisations, this phenomenon remains without any semantic effect whatsoever. Hence, the previous argument may easily be transposed to these contexts in that the relevant perfect contribution primarily seems to be derived from HAVE, whereas the superfluous participial morpheme does not autonomously (and erroneously) denote a perfect(ive) interpretation. In fact, the participle only appears to be autonomously responsible for a passive or perfect interpretation in periphrases with BECOME or BE, respectively. These thus do not give rise to the PPI, as this might endanger the proper semantic recoverability of the configuration at hand.

Eventually, then, we may tentatively derive the relevant perfect semantic contribution of HAVE in (26).21

While the precise compositional contribution will be discussed in the next section, let us conclude the present section by mentioning two further arguments in favour of the attribution of relevant perfect properties to the auxiliary HAVE. One of these concerns the auxiliation of HAVE as an auxiliary denoting future tense in Latin. In fact, Roberts & Roussou (2003: 49) describe the grammaticalisation of future tense in the history of Romance as consisting of three stages: (i) reanalysis of the main verb habere “as a future auxiliary comparable to will in Modern English”, (ii) reanalysis of habere as a syntactic affix, (iii) “reanalysis of the syntactic affix as a lexical affix”. The consequences of the first phase, which is most relevant for the present purposes, may be seen in the Late Latin examples in (27).

The example in (27a) from the early third century AD includes a periphrasis made up out of a passive infinitive and the auxiliary HAVE, which conveys a future interpretation on the basis of introducing (deontic) modal meaning (cf. Roberts & Roussou 2003: 51). In a similar vein, (27b) comprises an example from the seventh century which shows that the use of a future auxiliary spread to further contexts, most importantly active intransitives (cf. Roberts & Roussou 2003: 52). Crucially, such periphrases denote future tense (cf. Bourciez 1967; Benveniste 1968; Tekavčić 1980) and the only viable source for this is the auxiliary HAVE.22 Though admittedly not particularly pressing, this analogy shows that the auxiliation of HAVE is generally capable of attributing temporal properties to the auxiliary and thus tentatively points to the availability of relevant perfect properties on synchronic instantiations of HAVE.

The final piece of evidence that we will consider here concerns the observation that past participles which occur in bare contexts, i.e. are not licensed by auxiliaries, occasionally vary between a perfective and an imperfective reading. In fact, what challenges the assumption that the aspectual contribution of participial periphrases may be reduced to the past participle is that the interpretation of some (but not all) bare occurrences allow the concurrency of the participial event with its sentential context. This is for instance observable in the flexible prenominal position in German and the postnominal distribution in English: der (gerade) von Malin geschriebene Brief (lit. the currently by Malin written letter) or the letter (currently) written by Malin. Even without the overt presence of an adverbial like currently, a simultaneity-reading may be evoked if this is contextually supported and if the participial eventuality is able to encompass what is expressed in the main clause.23 The lack of an overarching temporal contribution shows once more that perfect information is not or at least not solely stored in the participial form in HAVE-perfect cases (cf. Iatridou et al. 2001: 220). In contrast to these cases, all of those bare past participles that would occur with BE-perfect periphrases in languages showing auxiliary alternation (simple changes of state), on the other hand, only ever convey a resultative reading (consider das gerade verschwundene Mädchen ‘the girl that has just disappeared’, lit. the just disappeared girl, or the train *currently/recently arrived at platform 9 3/4). This is in line with the aspectual contribution set up in (18): a perfective situation may only successfully be established by the past participial contribution alone if the underlying event structure denotes a simple change of state (i.e. consists only of an atomic BECOME-predicate). This holds true for unaccusatives like ankommen/arrive or verschwinden/disappear and the intransitive variants of anticausative predicates like zerbrechen/break or schmelzen/melt. Atelic cases like singen/sing, lieben/love, husten/cough, brennen/burn, on the other hand, may not be rendered perfective. This carries over to accomplishments like bauen/build or lesen/read and the transitive variants of achievements partaking in causative alternations as the aforementioned zerbrechen/break or schmelzen/melt. The former are taken to comprise an atelic CAUSE that evokes a change (BECOME) on the part of an incremental theme, while the latter also include an external argument associated with a CAUSE in cases like The vase was broken by the intruder. The same analysis may be applied to run-of-the-mill achievements that do not allow for intransitive (or anticausative) counterparts, e.g. finden/find and verlieren/lose, which feature an external argument that is held responsible for causing the change in question. In all of these cases the complexity of the event structure prevents the aspectual contribution from imposing perfectivity.24 Participles of these types of predicates may thus either remain imperfective in passive periphrases or rely on the relevant contribution of HAVE in periphrastic perfect instantiations in order to denote a perfect interpretation.25 An interesting conclusion that we may derive from this is that past participles which autonomously denote perfectivity are in complementary distribution with those that do not in passive periphrases: while unaccusatives cannot occur in proper passives, all other (“imperfective”) participles cannot denote a perfect situation without external help and thus do not occur in BE-perfect periphrases.26

The present section has adduced some relevant data in favour of the assumption that past participles in passive and perfect periphrases are not just accidentally homophonous but rather formed with one and the same participial morpheme. The major conclusions to be drawn from both diachronic as well as synchronic data with respect to the basic syntacticosemantic contribution of the participial head is that it (i) syntactically suppresses the external argument, and (ii) renders simple changes of state perfective. This allows for a neat complementary distribution of what the past participles contribute autonomously: past participles that properly suppress an external argument cannot autonomously express perfectivity, whereas those that can may never feature an external argument and thus are exempt from argument suppression. In other words, past participles in periphrastic passives are necessarily not simple changes of state and thus convey imperfective situations without any substantial contribution of their auxiliaries (BE/BECOME). Those in perfect periphrases, on the other hand, may either autonomously denote a perfect situation (in which case the semantically vacuous auxiliary BE is introduced in languages showing auxiliary alternation) or require the additional contribution of relevant perfect properties as brought in by HAVE.27

The previous section has shown that the empirical data neither necessitate nor support the non-identity of the participles in passive and perfect configurations. Rather, both diachronic as well as synchronic considerations suggest that there is just a single past participial marker which is underspecified in the sense that it may give rise to passive as well as perfect interpretations on the basis of its syntactic context, namely depending on the properties of the underlying predicate as well as the potential presence of an auxiliary that contributes relevant ingredients and thus manages to shift the interpretation into a specific direction. Based on the tentative ingredients in (16) and (18), the present section will lay out how the participial contribution interacts with its immediate functional environment. Before we enter this discussion, however, it is worthwhile to briefly consider the spectrum of possible approaches to the issue of past participial (non-)identity, as schematically presented in (28) (see Wegner 2019: Chapter 3 for a discussion of the main problems and merits of the distinct kinds of approaches).

While the assumption of substantial non-identity in (28a), as defended inter alia by Drijkoningen (1989), Bierwisch (1990), and Aronoff (1994), certainly bears the potential of providing an easy way out, it simply cannot explain why the supposedly distinct forms in question are homophonous and is not in any way supported by the empirical data put forth in the previous section. The alternative claim of proper past participial identity, on the other hand, though supported by both diachronic as well as synchronic observations, has to be able to identify a shared set of properties that may be attributed to the past participial marker. The literature has different ways in store of dealing with this issue. Approaches based on the (often implicit) assumption of what is termed faint identity in (28b) (see inter alia Embick 1997; 2003; 2004; Sleeman 2011; 2014) turn out to be problematic in the sense that the relevant participial contributions (diathesis, aspect) tend to be attributed to individual functional heads. In fact, the passive contribution of past participles is typically tied to a particular kind of v- or Voice-head and the aspectual contribution hinges on the presence of an Asp-head. This raises the question of what exactly the participial morpheme spells out, which is typically not explicitly addressed.28 Accordingly, it often remains mysterious whether the passive and perfect properties are just effects of the structural configuration regardless of the properties of the participial marker or in what way the participial marker is eventually responsible for either (or both) of the relevant contributions. Subscribing to the biased identity in (28c) is no less problematic as these approaches characteristically (though often implicitly) settle for either an inherent passive (see inter alia Hoekstra 1984; Roberts 1984; Ackema 1999) or perfect(ive) (see inter alia Zagona 1991; Zeller 1994; Grewendorf 1995; Musan 1998) contribution which usually neglects the importance of its respective counterpart. This contribution, i.e. passive in tense/aspect approaches and perfect(ive) in argument structure approaches, is then just shifted off to the auxiliaries. This is insufficient in both cases: approaches with a passive bias cannot account for the fact that the argument structural contribution is clearly not a necessary condition for past participle formation (cf. the grammaticality of the unaccusative past participle disappeared) and tense/aspect-based approaches have to associate passive auxiliaries with the capacity of blocking the aspectual contribution (which is problematic given the availability of imperfective bare past participles). Considering these drawbacks, what remains is an approach based on the assumption of neutral identity, i.e. (28d). Such approaches may generally come in two kinds, namely those that attempt to attribute the participial morpheme no relevant contribution whatsoever (see inter alia von Stechow 1990; 1998; Kathol 1991; 1994; Pollard 1994) as well as those that conflate ingredients of both perfect as well as passive characteristics in the past participial form (see Breul & Wegner 2017; Wegner 2019; and – rather implicitly – Klein 1999; 2010).29 The former kind may be neglected, since it has to face the issues that arise for biased identity approaches yet in a much more severe manner: both contributions have to be attributed to the functional context, which raises the question of what the grammatical role of the participial marker is in the first place. The alternative way of sketching a neutral identity approach boils down to an account in which the past participial marker evokes an argument structural as well as an aspectual effect, but the precise properties of the overall configuration crucially hinge on the functional environment (auxiliary and event structure). An amalgamation approach along these lines bears the potential to account for the range of synchronic data and also takes seriously the historical development of the past participle out of a deverbal adjective that bears passive as well as resultative properties. Accordingly, the next two subsections will be concerned with the individual contributions and how they combine with their functional environment.

The present paper has argued in favour of the identity of past participles in passive and perfect periphrases on the basis of both diachronic as well as synchronic considerations. While the former made clear that the historical predecessors of past participial forms already combined argument structural (the grammatical absence of an external argument) as well as aspectual properties (resultativity), synchronic data shows that the contribution of the reanalysed eventive past participles is still two-fold: (i) the insertion of an implicit external argument to be existentially bound (unless HAVE steps in), and (ii) aspectual properties that render a given situation perfective iff the underlying predicate denotes a simple change of state. These properties properly account for the passive imperfective as well as anticausative perfective characteristics of past participles in the context of semantically vacuous auxiliaries (BE and BECOME), yet also grasp the availability of active perfect periphrases with HAVE. This perfect auxiliary has taken on the ability to license an external argument and serves to establish a perfect time span in terms of denoting posteriority.

Eventually, an identity approach along these lines provides an answer to the long-standing mystery of why perfect(ive) and passive participles receive a homophonous spell-out. At the same time it serves to uncover the intricate properties of past participial items and the auxiliaries they occur with, where the traditional assumption that BE and BECOME are empty is supported, whereas HAVE may affect the properties of perfect periphrases in crucial ways. In doing so, the present approach provides a fresh perspective on the determinants of auxiliary selection and offers novel insights concerning the interplay of aspect, argument and event structure: based on the aspectual contribution of the participial marker, perfectivity correlates with anticausativity, whereas causative properties evoke imperfectivity and thus demand additional support in order to give rise to a perfect interpretation.

What certainly deserves some attention in future research is the behaviour of bare instances, which seem to share the past participial properties, but are embedded within a range of functional contexts that impose their own restrictions. This promises to shed light on the categorial nature of past participles in their various uses and may consolidate an identity view if the underlying properties also shine through in these contexts. Furthermore, as indicated by the brief discussion of some Slavic cases above, what may turn out to be particularly worthwhile is an extension of these considerations in an attempt to uncover the parameterisation of past participial (non-)identity.