Events in Adjectival Passives

Abstract

The paper presents a new analysis of the semantics of adjectival passives mainly concentrating on the status of the implicit event, its agent participant and the dependency relation between eventive base and derived property. On the basis of data from two questionnaire studies it proposes an adjectival ?-affix, modifying Maienborn’s (2009) analysis in two respects: First, it does not involve existential quantification over an event particular but reference to an event kind. Second, the dependency relation between the event kind and the property denoted by the participle of an adjectival passive sentence is not a causal or temporal one. It is a relation of lexical supervenience in the sense of Kim (1990) which leaves room for the pragmatic character of adjectival passives, for their specific ‘surplus in meaning’.