An Argument Structure Analysis of Adjectival Passive Participles

Abstract

This paper reviews major previous lexical and syntactic approaches to adjectival passives and shows that they have digged out conflicting sets of data. Presuming that they reflect two dialects of English, it attempts to account for the data representing the more inclusive dialect. It proposes introducing the construct of argument chain, which consists of two arguments in a complex argument structure. Then, it shows that the minor revision can improve the empirical coverage of the theory.