Chapter published in:
Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications
Edited by Alba E. Ruz, Cristina Fernández-Alcaina and Cristina Lara-Clares
[Studies in Language Companion Series 225] 2022
► pp. 319–340

Chapter 12
English participles in the derivational paradigm

| Goldsmiths, University of London

This chapter surveys the different uses of the English participles and discusses their status with respect to the distinction between derivation and inflection. In the debate about whether participles are verbal or adjectival, or indeed a mix between the two, most scholars have taken the position that ability to undergo further derivation (with affixes like -ness or negative un- for instance) indicates adjectival status. The paper assumes a descriptive focus and, without aiming to take a conclusive position relative to this general debate, explores such derivation further. The patterns covered in the paper are relatively few, but productive. This leads to derivational networks with sparse membership, but generally stable formal and semantic alignment.

Keywords: participle, derivational paradigms, deadjectival derivation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Participles in English: An overview
    • 2.1Participial constructions as modifiers
  • 3.Participles and the inflection-derivation distinction
  • 4.Participial adjectives from complex verbs
  • 5.Participles and affixation with -ly
  • 6.Suffixation with -ness
  • 7.Negative prefixation
  • 8.Participles in the derivational paradigm
  • 9.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.225.12pop
References
Aarts, Bas
Forthcoming. Participles and so-called synthetic compounds as attributive modifiers in English. In Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency, Andrew Rosta, Eva Eppler & Nikolas Gisborne eds Cambridge CUP
Ackerman, Farrell & Stump, Gregory
2004 Paradigms and periphrastic expressions. In Projecting Morphology, Louisa Sadler & Andrew Spencer (eds), 111–157. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Ackerman, Farrell & Webelhuth, Gert
1998 A Theory of Predicates. Standford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis, Gehrke, Berit & Schäfer, Florian
2014 The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited. Lingua 149: 118–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark
1994 Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew, Brown, Dunstan & Corbett, Greville
2005 The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baerman, Matthew, Corbett, Greville G. & Brown, Dunstan
(eds) 2010 Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo
2013 The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beard, Robert
1995 Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. Albany NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Blevins, James P.
2001 Paradigmatic derivation. Transactions of the Philological Society 99(2): 211–222. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonami, Olivier
2015 Periphrasis as collocation. Morphology 25(1): 63–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bonami, Olivier & Strnadová, Jana
2019 Paradigm structure and predictability in derivational morphology. Morphology 29(2): 167–197. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyé, Gilles & Schalchli, Gauvain
2016 The status of paradigms. In The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology, Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds), 206–234. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan
1982 The passive in lexical theory. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Joan Bresnan (ed.). Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Dunstan, Chumakina, Marina, Corbett, Greville, Popova, Gergana & Spencer, Andrew
2012 Defining ‘periphrasis’: Key notions. Morphology 22(2): 233–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin
2014 Word-formation is syntactic: Adjectival passives in English. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32: 363–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Greville G.
2006 Agreement. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2010 Canonical derivational morphology. Word Structure 3(2): 141–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark
2004 British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). https://​www​.english​-corpora​.org​/bnc/ (10 September 2021).
2018 The iWeb Corpus. https://​www​.english​-corpora​.org​/iWeb/ (10 September 2021).
De Smet, Hendrik & Vancayzeele, Evelyn
2015 Like a rolling stone: The changing use of English premodifying present participles. English Language and Linguistics 19(1): 131–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Embick, David
2004 On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35(3): 355–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fábregas, Antonio
2014 Adjectival and adverbial derivation. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer (eds), 276–295. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022 Structural and lexical aspects of the morphology of English participles. In Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and Applications [Studies in Language Companion Series 225], Alba E. Ruz, Cristina Fernández-Alcaina & Cristina Lara-Clares (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (This volume). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz J.
2012 The morphology of -ly and the categorial status of ‘adverbs’ in English. English Language and Linguistics 16(3): 341–359. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
1996 Word-class-changing inflection and morphological theory. In Yearbook of Morphology 1995, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 43–66. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hathout, Nabil & Namer, Fiammetta
2019 Paradigms in word formation: What are we up to? Morphology 29: 153–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer B. & Baayen, R. Harald
2005 Shifting paradigms: Gradient structure in morphology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9: 342–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Körtvélyessy, Lívia, Bagasheva, Alexandra & Štekauer, Pavol
(eds) 2020 Derivational Networks across Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieber, Rochelle
2016 On the interplay of facts and theory: Revisiting synthetic compounds in English. In Morphological Metatheory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 229], Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds), 513–536. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lowe, John J.
2019 The syntax and semantics of nonfinite forms. Annual Review of Linguistics 5: 309–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marchand, Hans
1969 The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation: A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach, 2nd edn. München: C.H. Beck.Google Scholar
Melloni, Chiara & Dal Maso, Serena
2022 For a topology of derivational paradigms. In Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and Applications [Studies in Language Companion Series 225], Alba E. Ruz, Cristina Fernández-Alcaina & Cristina Lara-Clares (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (This volume). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meltzer-Asscher, Aya
2010 Present participles: Categorial classification and derivation. Lingua 120: 2211–2239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED)
2021 OUP. https://​www​.oed​.com (10 September 2021).
Payne, John, Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2010 The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs. Word Structure 3(1): 31–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sadler, Louisa & Spencer, Andrew
2001 Syntax as an exponent of morphological features. In Yearbook of Morphology 2000, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 71–96. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sims, Andrea
2015 Inflectional Defectiveness. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Andrew
2003 Periphrastic paradigms in Bulgarian. In Syntactic Structures and Morphological Information, Uwe Junghanns & Luka Szucsich (eds), 249–282. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Lexical Relatedness: A Paradigm-Based Model. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 How are words related? In Morphological Metatheory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 229], Daniel Siddiqi & Heidi Harley (eds), 1–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 Split-morphology and lexicalist morphosyntax: The case of transpositions. In On Looking into Words (and Beyond), Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds), 385–421. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 Theoretical approaches to morphology. In The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar, Bas Aarts, Jill Bowie & Gergana Popova (eds), 222–239. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Andrew & Popova, Gergana
2015 Periphrasis and inflection. In The Oxford Handbook of Inflection, Matthew Baerman (ed), 197–230. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Štekauer, Pavol
2014 Derivational paradigms. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer (eds), 354–369. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory
2016 Inflectional Paradigms: Content and Form at the Syntax-Morphology Interface. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Anna M.
2011 Overabundance (multiple forms realizing the same cell): A non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology. In Morphological Autonomy: Perspectives from Romance Inflectional Morphology, Martin Maiden, John Charles Smith, Maria Goldback & Marc-Olivier Hinzelin (eds), 358–381. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Reduction and maintenance of overabundance. A case study on Italian verb paradigms. Word Structure 5(2): 183–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vartiainen, Turo
2012 Telicity and the premodifying ing-participle in English. In English Corpus Linguistics: Looking Back, Moving Forward. Papers from the 30th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 30), Sebastian Hoffmann, Paul Rayson & Geoffrey Leech (eds), 217–233. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Fábregas, Antonio
2022.  In Paradigms in Word Formation [Studies in Language Companion Series, 225], ► pp. 285 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.