Adjectivization of participles in Romance
A gradual process?
The well-known distinction between verbal participles and adjectival ones has been fine-grained in the last decades. Within the adjectival participles, Kratzer (1994) and Embick (2004), for German and English respectively, distinguish between stative and resultative participles. Sleeman (2011) distinguishes two types of verbal participles in Germanic. She argues that the postnominal verbal participle in Dutch and English is fully eventive, while the prenominal one is not fully adjectival, as has been claimed by Embick (2004), but to a lesser extent eventive. In this paper, we claim that Romance languages also display the four stages in the adjectivization process. We argue that, not only in Germanic, but also in Romance, the less fully eventive verbal participle does exist, on the basis of an analysis of the French passive participle in combination with the adverb très “very” and the Romanian present participle in modifier position preceded by cel, a type of definite article selecting an adjective.
