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Word formation is syntactic: adjectival passives in English

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Abstract

Since Wasow (1977), the differences between adjectival and verbal passives in English have been taken to motivate a division between lexical and syntactic word-formation processes. This paper shows with data from corpora that many accepted facts about adjectival passives are incorrect: adjectival passives can be formed from ECM/raising verbs, and they can also involve a subset of indirect or applied objects. On the other hand, adjectival passives do differ from verbal passives in special meanings and missing inputs. This means that the phenomena that are supposed to characterize syntactic versus lexical processes do not all pattern together: ECM/raising points to a syntactic derivation of adjectival passives, but special interpretations and missing inputs point to a lexical derivation. This paper instead proposes a purely syntactic account of adjectival passives that explains all of the facts, both the similarities and the differences between adjectival and verbal passives. This syntactic analysis also permits a simple account of the alleged class of non-intersective adjectives, and the predictions it makes provides support for the theory of applied arguments advanced by Bruening (2010).

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Notes

  1. Note that the specific lexical process that has been formalized in the literature for adjectival passive formation is Externalization, a process that takes an internal thematic role and maps it to an external position (Levin and Rappaport 1986; Meltzer-Asscher 2010b). It is this process that I address in this paper as the hypothesized lexical process of adjectival passive formation. In note 24 (Sect. 7), I address the possibility of formalizing the process differently within a lexical theory, and show that this alternative is a non-starter. I therefore do not address it in the body of the text, and only address the lexical process of Externalization.

  2. I have added allow and permit to this list. Many writers have classified allow and permit as object control verbs, but they are shown by Schmerling (1978) to be ECM/raising, not control.

  3. But see Meltzer-Asscher (2010a), who argues that prenominal modifiers may be reduced relative clauses.

  4. A reviewer questions the grammaticality of this example, but I find it fine. This is interesting because It is thought understood is not grammatical. Somehow the additional raising renders it acceptable, at least for the person who wrote it (presumably) and for me. Even people who find it unacceptable judge it acceptable when the final small clause is turned into a full non-finite clause: seems assumed to be thought to be understood.

  5. Hartman (2012) notes in passing that present-tense passives of ECM/raising verbs receive what he calls a “stative, adjectival interpretation:”

    1. (i)

      Someone is said/rumored/claimed/supposed/believed to be resigning soon.

    Hartman suggests that these are “raising adjectives” like likely and certain.

  6. The verb seem imposes its own restrictions on its complement; see Matushansky (2002) (though it is difficult to see how scalarity could be relevant to most of the examples here, as she claims it should be).

  7. The prefix un- also changes how verbs behave for Kratzer’s (2000) test for resultant, reversible states, the adverb still. #Still emptied does not work, but still unemptied (by the custodians) does (and note that it can have a by-phrase, unlike Greek, according to Anagnostopoulou 2003). Similarly for #still petted versus still unpetted.

  8. The one thing that does seem to be ruled out just with un- is resultative secondary predicates (*The river is unfrozen solid). See Embick (2004a), especially note 6.

  9. Note that untold, unwritten, unpromised, and unshown can only be predicated of the underlying theme, or an NP that corresponds to the clausal argument (an unwritten rule, *an unwritten person). This is probably because the NP that co-occurs with the CP (or another NP) patterns with applied arguments (below).

  10. Note that object control and ECM/raising differentiate adjectival passives from nominalizations, which allow neither. See the conclusion for further discussion of differences like this between different types of derivational morphology.

  11. There are some restrictions on which unaccusative verbs can form adjectival passives; see McIntyre (2012). Note also that it is unlikely that these adjectival passives are actually active perfect participles; as shown in the Appendix (Sect. A.2), it is not generally possible to form adjectival passives out of active perfect participles.

  12. Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2001) and Wechsler (2005) claim that the direct object restriction is not real, and resultative secondary predicates can be predicated of underlying subjects. This is not correct, however; all of their examples involve directional modifiers, not resultatives. See http://lingcomm.blogspot.de/2010/05/wechsler-2005-claims-that-direct-object.html.

  13. Objects of prepositions also cannot take depictive secondary predicates, yet (67a) admits a depictive reading, where the bed is smooth throughout the event of sleeping in it. This reading is available because objects of prepositions that become subjects of pseudopassives can take depictive secondary predicates (Pylkkänen 2008:39):

    1. (i)
      1. a.

          * I slept in the bed unmade.

      2. b.

             The bed was slept in unmade.

    This is similar to indirect objects of ditransitives, which cannot be modified by depictive secondary predicates in the active, but can when they become subjects in the passive (again, see Pylkkänen 2008). With resultatives, the situation is different: only elements that are direct objects underlyingly can be modified. That is, with resultatives, the base position of the NP matters; with depictives, it is the surface position of the NP that matters.

  14. Some adjectival passives of alternating unaccusatives, like opened, seem to strongly imply an external argument, for unclear reasons. But note that unopened does not, which I take to mean that, in principle, opened can be unaccusative.

  15. There is a class of possibly unaccusative verbs that do not admit passive formation, either adjectival or verbal. These are psych verbs like appeal and escape and their counterparts in other languages (Pesetsky 1995; Horvath and Siloni 2008). As Horvath and Siloni (2008) show, these do not form adjectival or verbal passives in any language. I leave an explanation of this fact to future research. (One possibility is that these verbs simply lack Voice altogether, and so cannot merge with either Adj or Pass, which only select Voice.)

  16. Even in German, some un-prefixed participles can take CP complements, for instance uninformiert (‘uninformed’), unüberzeugt (‘unconvinced’), ungewarnt (‘unwarned’), just like the corresponding participles in English in (44) (Uli Sauerland, p.c.).

  17. The most salient reading of an admitted thief involves self-admission, which Bresnan (1995) takes to be derived from an active participle. I address this reading in the Appendix (Sect. A.2), but leave the example here because I think that it might also have a reading comparable to they admitted him to be a thief, although this reading is far from salient.

  18. I have shown the predicate NP adjoining outside of the subject NP. It actually does not matter which NP moves and adjoins first, or whether the second-moved NP “tucks in” below the first (Richards 1997), or adjoins on top. All that matters is that the resulting structure is able to combine with the property argument before the individual argument. See more on multiple movement with ditransitives below.

  19. As pointed out to me by Paul Portner (personal communication), the semantics will have to be enriched with at least a degree variable, since adjectival passives admit degree modification, as in a barely acknowledged genius. I assume that the degree variable is part of the underlying verb, since the verbal use also permits such modification: people barely acknowledge him to be a genius.

  20. Here it is important that the two NPs move in a particular order, and recreate their original hierarchical order after movement. The fact that they cannot change their order is crucial to explaining scope facts in ditransitives. See Bruening (2001, 2010).

  21. For simplicity’s sake, I leave out the BECOME component of von Stechow’s rule. A more complete treatment would include it in the semantics of the double object construction (as well as something like a PROG operator; see Beck and Johnson 2004).

  22. Andrew McIntyre (email correspondence) finds “she seemed given too much power” on the internet, and judges it fairly acceptable, as do I. Since only this one example turns up, and other attempts sound completely ungrammatical, I view it as exceptional.

  23. Note that certain ditransitive verbs allow an adjectival passive with either NP, but not both (Levin and Rappaport 1986): untaught skills, untaught children; unpaid money, a badly paid agent; sloppily served food, unserved customers. These contrast with others noted above, like *untold parents and *unshown children. Given the analyses of this paper, phrases like teach children must not involve ApplP, unlike teach children skills. I assume that children in teach children is simply the object of the verb, and is not introduced by the Appl head. Support for this comes from resultative secondary predicates: resultatives cannot be predicated of indirect objects in double object constructions, but they can be predicated of the goal that appears in a simple transitive:

    1. (i)
      1. a.

             Perhaps stopping a slaver or two and feeding the serpents fat again would restore their tractability. (Ship of Destiny, Robin Hobb)

      2. b.

          * Perhaps feeding the serpents corpses fat again would…

    The goal of feed must be different structurally when it appears with a theme versus without.

  24. As noted in footnote 1, the specific lexical process that has been hypothesized to derive adjectival passives in the lexicon is Externalization, a process that takes an internal thematic role and maps it to an external position (Levin and Rappaport 1986; Meltzer-Asscher 2010b). It is this process that is incompatible with ECM/raising: only a semantic argument of the verb should be able to be targeted by Externalization. An anonymous reviewer, however, suggests a way of maintaining the lexicon-syntax split, and the claim that adjectival passives are formed in the lexicon. This would be to hypothesize that the lexical process that derives adjectival passives is not Externalization, but Saturation (e.g., Landau 2009 and references there). This process would saturate the external role of a transitive verb, existentially closing it off. The idea is that is all it would do; externalization of an internal argument would take place in the syntax. This would essentially make adjectival passives equivalent to verbal passives, however, since in many hypotheses this is the process that creates verbal passives. This would then leave unexplained all of the syntactic differences between verbal and adjectival passives, in particular the fact that adjectival passives can be formed from unaccusative verbs, which lack external arguments to be saturated, and the restriction against forming adjectival passives from double object verbs other than those of the deny class. Moreover, the account would again be redundant: given that we can account for the differences between verbal and adjectival passives without an additional component of the grammar (a generative lexicon), we should do without it.

  25. This inverse relation could play out in two ways: first, special interpretations (semantic drift and idioms) could just be rarer with larger syntactic structures; second, more flexibility might show up in larger syntactic structures, with semantically and morphosyntactically related forms being allowed to fill slots in a structure with special meanings. That is, the particular lexical items involved would be less fixed. I believe both phenomena are observable.

  26. I also suspect that the focus on lexical versus syntactic processes has obscured what might be a more striking generalization, which is that derived verbs almost never have irregular interpretations, while derived nouns and adjectives do. Again, I have not done a quantitative analysis to back this up, but my impression is that derived verbs in English (e.g., -ize, -ate, -ify, -en, conversion) are almost always perfectly regular in their interpretation. The same claim has also been made by Plag (1999), at least for -ize verbs. If this generalization turns out to be correct, it would call out for an explanation. Whatever that explanation is, it would also help to explain why special interpretations for verbal passives are so rare.

  27. http://www.hum.uit.no/a/svenonius/courses/ArgStruct/April29summary.html, accessed February 2012.

  28. There have been studies of idioms in other languages, for instance Ruwet (1991) on French, Dubinsky and Simango (1996) on Chichewa, Horvath and Siloni (2009) on Hebrew. These studies have found significant differences between adjectival passives and verbal passives in these languages. Even if they are correct, however, they make the same point: the phenomena that are supposed to characterize lexical versus syntactic processes do not all pattern together, and a syntactic theory can account for them without recourse to a lexicon-syntax divide.

  29. But note that many be-prefixed words do exist as active verbs as well as adjectival and verbal passives, for instance befoul, bedevil, bewitch, and numerous others.

  30. Adjectival passives like hagridden raise another issue: they seem to have an incorporated agent. Other examples are moth-eaten and flea-bitten. There are no corresponding active verbs with the incorporated noun. I suggest that these apparent cases of incorporation are similar to self-prefixation (see the Appendix), which also does not appear in the active or verbal passive (other than with self-destruct, which seems to be a backformation from the noun self-destruction). The N adjoins to Voice and specifies a restriction on its argument, which is still existentially quantified.

  31. For Emonds, it is important that the verbs involved are grammatical ones, or ones that can serve as functional elements, and are not fully lexical verbs; see Emonds (2000).

  32. There are a few interesting cases where self- seems to relate the implicit external argument to another implicit argument, like a goal or source: a self-acquired property, a self-addressed envelope, a self-assigned task. I assume that the structure here is not the ditransitive one with the Appl head, but the prepositional dative, where the verb takes an optional goal PP that is left implicit in the adjectival passive. (The verb address cannot appear in the double object frame.) There is also the interesting case of self-reported, as in a self-reported history of drug abuse or self-reported measures, where self- seems to relate the implicit external argument and an implicit about phrase.

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Acknowledgements

The bulk of this paper was written while the author was a Humboldt Fellow at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The author would like to thank the Humboldt Foundation and ZAS for their generous support, and, for helpful discussions and comments, Uli Sauerland, Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, Florian Schäfer, Andrew McIntyre, the anonymous NLLT reviewers, and audiences at Stuttgart and Georgetown.

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  1. Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, 125 East Main Street, Newark, DE, 19716, USA

    Benjamin Bruening

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Appendix

Appendix

This Appendix discusses two issues in more detail: the category of adjectival and verbal passives, and adjectival passives that are apparently derived from active perfect participles.

1.1 A.1 The categorial status of passive participles

Throughout this paper I have taken adjectival and verbal passives to differ in category. However, there is another possibility, which is that all passive participles in English (and other languages) are actually adjectives. This possibility has been suggested by Freidin (1975), Emonds (2006), and Lundquist (2012), among others. The idea is that verbal passives really only appear following two auxiliary verbs, be and get, and these two verbs also permit adjectival complements, including adjectival passives:

  1. (121)
    1. a.

           Harry is sick/unbeaten.

    2. b.

           Harry got sick/unstuck.

According to this hypothesis, then, all passive participles are actually adjectives. Contexts that disallow apparent verbal passives must do so for reasons other than category selection. For instance, adjectival passives are stative, while verbal passives are eventive; it might be that verbs like seem require stative AP complements and disallow eventive AP complements. (Of course, some explanation would be necessary for why double object APs must be eventive, why unaccusative APs must be stative, and so on.)

Emonds (2007) adds to the distributional argument, arguing that several other verbs also select passive phrases, including the promoted object. These are have, want, need, see, and hear:

  1. (122)
    1. a.

           The players had [the ballboys sent boxes of chocolates for Christmas].

    2. b.

           He wants [the table given a thorough cleaning].

    3. c.

           She needs [her assistant brought a new smartphone].

    4. d.

           You may see [the prisoners given their mid-day meal].

    5. e.

           The players heard [insults shouted at them by irate fans].

Emonds argues that the bracketed phrase in each example is a passive phrase, with an underlying object promoted. (I try to use double object verbs, to show that these are verbal passives, and not, for instance, AP small clauses.) According to Emonds, the distributional generalization is that passive phrases can appear in any context that selects either AP or [NP AP]. The verb get allows either one:

  1. (123)
    1. a.

           Harry got sick. (AP)

    2. b.

           We got [Harry sick]. (NP AP)

  2. (124)
    1. a.

           Harry got slipped a mickey. (Passive)

    2. b.

           We got [Harry slipped a mickey]. (NP Passive)

All of the verbs in (122) also allow [NP AP], for instance She wants the table clean (for the party).

This generalization is not correct, however. There is one (semi-grammaticalFootnote 31) verb, make, which allows adjectival complements ([NP AP]), but does not permit a verbal passive:

  1. (125)
    1. a.

           Such heavy use made [the table dirty].

    2. b.

       * I made [Baghdad approached].

    3. c.

       * I made [her assistant brought a new computer].

If it were true that passive phrases are permitted wherever AP or [NP AP] is, they should be permitted with make.

The correct generalization is that verbal passives can appear in the same position where an active, eventive VP headed by V-ing can appear. Be and get permit V-ing, as do all of Emonds’s verbs:

  1. (126)
    1. a.

           Harry is handing people leaflets.

    2. b.

           Harry got moving.

    3. c.

           Harry got [them moving].

    4. d.

           The players had [ballboys pitching them curveballs].

    5. e.

           The coach wanted [the players throwing each other curveballs].

    6. f.

           She needs [her assistant sending people bouquets of flowers].

    7. g.

           From here, you can see [spies slipping their contacts secret documents].

    8. h.

           The players heard [irate fans shouting insults at them].

In contrast, make permits neither V-ing nor passives (though it does allow a bare V), but it does allow adjectives, as previously shown:

  1. (127)
    1. a.

           Such heavy use made [the table disgusting]. (Adjective)

    2. b.

           I made it disgust you. (Bare V)

    3. c.

       * I made it disgusting you. (V-ing)

    4. d.

       * I made him running around. (V-ing)

    5. e.

       * I made [Baghdad approached]. (Passive)

    6. f.

       * I made [her assistant brought a new computer]. (Passive)

The real generalization is therefore the following:

  1. (128)

    Verbal passives are permitted as the complements of verbs that also permit V-ing.

This generalization also covers do, which allows neither V-ing nor adjectives, and also does not allow passives.

I contend that the explanation for (128) is that verbal passives are truly verbal, just like (at least some) phrases headed by V-ing. Verbal passives, just like verb phrases headed by V-ing, are selected by verbs which select VPs. (Some verbs impose an additional restriction, selecting only bare VPs; these do not select V-ing or passive VPs.)

In addition to the distributional argument, Emonds (2006) and Lundquist (2012) point to agreement in languages that have agreeing adjectives as an argument that passive participles are adjectives. For instance, in many Romance languages, passive participles agree with their subject in gender and number but not person, just like adjectives and unlike finite active verbs. However, in at least some of these languages, active perfect participles may also agree on the same pattern (e.g., Kayne 1989), so I take this fact only to indicate that verbs and adjectives may share an agreement pattern.

There are other differences between adjectival and verbal passives besides the distributional one that also point to a category difference. For instance, adjectives and verbs differ in their behavior with how: adjectives must pied-pipe how, and how only questions degree; but verbs may not pied-pipe with how, and how questions manner. If how does not pied-pipe with an adjective, the only possible reading is a request for an explanation:

  1. (129)
    1. a.

           How was he defeated? (questions manner)

    2. b.

           How defeated was he? (questions degree)

    3. c.

           How was he passed the secret plans? (questions manner)

    4. d.

       * How passed the secret plans was he? (pied-piping impossible with V)

    5. e.

           How was he unfazed? (only: requests explanation)

    6. f.

           How unfazed was he? (questions degree)

The most straightforward account of this difference depends on category, and again points to a category difference between verbal and adjectival passives.

Adjectival and verbal passives also differ in coordination: adjectival passives can be coordinated with underived adjectives, but verbs cannot be (Lundquist 2008). Verbal passives cannot be coordinated with adjectives, either:

  1. (130)
    1. a.

           He made Bond angry and unconvinced that we were right.

    2. b.

       * He made Bond angry and hand Xenia the secret plans.

    3. c.

       * He made Bond angry and given a sedative.

Apparent examples of coordination of adjectives and verbal passives, like (131a) below, are probably coordination of larger categories, for instance some kind of non-finite clausal category. An auxiliary can be included in the verbal part of the coordination, for instance (131b):

  1. (131)
    1. a.

           With Bond semi-conscious and given a dose of truth serum, …

    2. b.

           With Bond semi-conscious and being given a dose of truth serum, …

The second conjunct in (131b) could not possibly be an AP. Where such larger categories are not possible, as in (130c), coordination of verbal passives with underived adjectives is ungrammatical. Again, I take the simplest explanation for this difference to be a category difference.

According to Emonds (2006), there is also a difference between adjectival and verbal passives in Dutch, in their behavior in final verb clusters. Once again, the simplest explanation says that verbal passives are verbs, but adjectival passives are adjectives.

If all of this is correct, there is a real distributional difference between adjectival passives, which have the distribution of APs, and verbal passives, which have the distribution of VPs. It is not correct to view all passive participles as adjectives.

1.2 A.2 Apparent active participles

Levin and Rappaport (1986) hypothesized that adjectival passives derived from unaccusative verbs were derived from active perfect participles instead. These were discussed in the main text. Bresnan (1995) claims that active perfect participles can generally be turned into adjectives, subject to various constraints, citing the following examples:

  1. (132)

    (Bresnan 1995:13 (30))

    1. a.

           a confessed killer (= a killer who has confessed)

    2. b.

           a recanted Chomskyan (= a Chomskyan who has recanted)

    3. c.

           (un)declared juniors (= juniors who have (not) declared [majors])

    4. d.

           an unbuilt architect (= an architect who has not built [buildings])

    5. e.

           a well-prepared teacher (= a teacher who has prepared well)

    6. f.

           a practiced liar (= a liar who has practiced)

According to Bresnan, these have the meanings indicated in the parentheses, and so must be derived from active perfect participles, as in the paraphrase.

Embick (2004a:note 6) dismisses these as special meanings only available when the stativizing head attaches directly to the root, but his evidence for this, the claim that these meanings disappear with un-prefixation, is not correct (examples below). Moreover, at least one class of these is quite productive, as I will show. For these reasons, I do not think such examples are so easily dismissed, and they must be accounted for.

However, there is much reason to doubt that English generally allows adjectives to be formed from active perfect participles. Alongside the examples above, close synonyms and closely analogous phrases are ill-formed (see also the ill-formedness of unergative adjectival passives in (68) above):

  1. (133)
    1. a.

       * a (well-)readied teacher (cf. a well-readied meal)

    2. b.

       * an exercised athlete (cf. an over-exercised dog)

    3. c.

       * an unbuilt inventor, *an unwired electrician, *an unprogrammed computer scientist

I therefore conclude (with most of the literature) that it is not possible to form adjectives out of active perfect participles. (I assume that this is because they are formed by adding a higher aspectual projection, above Voice, and the Adj head cannot combine with this aspectual head; it only combines with Voice.) This leaves Bresnan’s examples above to be accounted for. As a start, I will divide these into different categories, adding additional examples where possible. Bresnan’s first three examples fall into the first class, which consists of verbs of declaration. These quite productively form such adjectives, and some can be prefixed with un-:

  1. (134)

    Participles based on verbs of declaration

    1. a.

           a(n) (un)confessed killer

    2. b.

           a(n) (un)recanted Chomskyan

    3. c.

           (un)declared juniors

    4. d.

           a(n) (un)declared candidate

    5. e.

           a(n) (un)committed evangelical

    6. f.

           an avowed communist

    7. g.

           a sworn enemy

    8. h.

           an admitted murderer

    9. i.

           a professed atheist

Bresnan’s suggested paraphrase for these (‘a killer who has confessed’) is not quite right, however. A confessed killer actually means ‘someone who has confessed to being a killer’. That is, in some way (namely, as something predicational or propositional), killer is the internal argument of the participle, not the external argument. This is made abundantly clear by the following sentence, found on the internet:

  1. (135)

         Heck, I’m actually a recanted-Catholic who became a born-again Christian, only to recant that one too a few years later.

That is, what is recanted is being a Catholic/born-again Christian. The same holds for confessed; what is confessed is being a killer.

Additionally, if Bresnan’s suggested paraphrase were correct, we would expect the adjective to be able to appear in predicate position, but this is not correct for most of them:

  1. (136)
    1. a.

       * She is confessed/recanted/avowed/declared/sworn/admitted.

    2. b.

           She is (un)committed/undeclared (in academic sense).

It is also telling that most of these can be prefixed with self-, with essentially the same meaning:

  1. (137)
    1. a.

           a self-confessed killer

    2. b.

           a self-committed do-gooder

    3. c.

           a self-sworn enemy

    4. d.

           a self-declared enemy of immorality

    5. e.

      ?? a self-recanted Chomskyan

    6. f.

           a self-avowed Christian warrior

    7. g.

           a self-admitted liar

    8. h.

           a self-professed atheist

In fact, some participles take on this use just when prefixed with self-:

  1. (138)
    1. a.

           a self-designated leader

    2. b.

           a self-proclaimed savior

    3. c.

           a self-styled genius

Prefixation with self- is telling because most other past participles with self- are clear passive participles, with the internal argument externalized:

  1. (139)

         self-caused, self-controlled, self-deceived, self-educated, self-engrossed, self-generated, self-governed, self-guided, self-insured, self-motivated, self-obsessed, self-ordained, self-propelled, self-raised, self-satisfied, self-taught

The prefix self- seems in these cases to attach to an adjectival participle, formed as described above, and specify that the implicit external argument is identical to the internal argument.Footnote 32 If this is correct, then that is probably what it is doing in self-confessed and the other examples in (137), and the externalized NP is the internal argument, not the external one as Bresnan took it to be.

I suggest that examples like a (self-)confessed killer are similar to adjectival passives like alleged, analyzed above. Confess takes a nominal small clause, and both the NP subject and the NP predicate move, as described above for alleged and acknowledged. Most of these verbs can, in fact, take ECM/raising or small clause complements:

  1. (140)
    1. a.

           He confessed himself a killer.

    2. b.

       * He recanted himself (being/to be) a Chomskyan.

    3. c.

           He declared himself a biology major.

    4. d.

           He committed himself *(to being) an evangelical.

    5. e.

           He avowed himself a communist.

    6. f.

           He swore himself (to be) an enemy.

    7. g.

           He admitted himself a murderer.

The only difference between the confessed class and the alleged class is that with the confessed class, it is usually understood that the external argument is the same as the subject of the small clause, and this can be explicitly marked using self-. (But note that this is not necessarily the interpretation; I have the intuition that with phrases like a confessed/admitted murderer, the person could have been identified as such through someone else’s confession or admission.) I suggest that when the reflexive internal argument is missing from verb phrases headed by these verbs (e.g., He confessed that he was the murderer), the verb has been reflexivized in some way, perhaps in the same way that is accomplished with inherently reflexive verbs like wash and shave.

The analysis I am suggesting for confessed, then, is exactly the same as for alleged, given above. There is a nominal small clause, and both the predicate and subject of that small clause move and abstract over the structure they attach to. The noun (e.g., killer) forms the property argument, while the external argument of the resulting NP is interpreted as the subject of the small clause. The only difference is that confess is usually understood reflexively, so that the implicit external argument is taken to be the same as the subject of the small clause.

If this analysis is correct, it explains why these adjectives cannot be used predicatively (*She is confessed): as was the case with the alleged class, above, the adjective must combine with a noun in order to satisfy its property argument.

This accounts for three of Bresnan’s six examples, which turned out to belong to a productive class. They are actually like other adjectival passives, and are built from passives, not active perfect participles.

As for an unbuilt architect, I think that the analysis suggested by Caroline Heycock in Bresnan’s footnote 8 (page 14) is actually correct. According to this suggestion, ‘architect’ stands in for ‘the architect’s designs’, the same way They never play that composer anymore actually means ‘the works by that composer’. This would make an unbuilt architect exactly parallel to an unpublished author, which means ‘an author whose works have not been published’, and not ‘an author who has not published anything’. An unbuilt architect may have built many things, the same way an unpublished author may have published many things in a previous career as a publisher; what is important is that no one has built the buildings that architect has designed. (In fact, architects typically do not build their own designs—builders do.) In other words, this participle is passive again, and not active: architect (and author in unpublished author) corresponds to the internal argument of the verb. If one could generally form adjectival passives from active perfect participles like this, it should be possible to say *an unbuilt inventor or *an unwired electrician, but these are not possible.

This leaves only prepared and practiced. Prepared may also be reflexive, like confessed. That is, it may be derived from prepare oneself. If this is correct, it is on a par with inherently reflexive verbs like wash and shave, which can be used as reflexive adjectival passives (an unwashed/unshaven man), as discussed briefly above. As for examples like a practiced liar, I suggest that the noun is the internal argument again. That is, a practiced liar is someone who has practice as a liar. A practiced eye is an eye that has been practiced (or made to practice). This would make practiced another instance of an adjectival passive with a missing active input, since one cannot practice an eye or a liar in the relevant sense (see Sect. 7.2 on missing inputs). I suggest the same analysis for experienced in an experienced sailor, which seems quite similar to practiced but does not have an active perfect paraphrase (*a sailor who has experienced).

If all of this is on the right track, adjectives apparently formed from active perfect participles are all actually adjectival passives, and are not active. Active perfect participles cannot generally be turned into adjectives, and there are plausible analyses for all of these cases that treat them as passives.

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Bruening, B. Word formation is syntactic: adjectival passives in English. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 363–422 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9227-y

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