Event-Related Modifiers in German Adjectival Passives

Abstract

The claim that the German Zustandspassiv is not a voice-category but should be analyzed as a copular construction raises the question of how to explain the occurence of event-related modifiers within these constructions. It is argued that event-related modifiers should not be analyzed as a uniform group, and that their admissibility (or unadmissibility) can be explained on the basis of their different syntactic positions as well as by the way pragmatics interprets these modifiers.