Participles in contrast

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a structural analysis of present and past participles in two constructions: open and closed adjuncts. The crucial difference between the two types of adjuncts to be accounted for concerns the availability of an explicit (for the closed type) or an implicit (for the open type) DP subject. Our analysis is based on data from French and German in the OMC corpus. These data allow us on the one hand to identify the idiosyncratic properties of the constructions in the two languages, and on the other to test our hypotheses concerning the structural properties of the various participial constructions in a cross-linugistic perspective.