A comparative analysis of the English and Bulgarian participles with a view to their categorial status

This article presents an analysis of the categorial status of English and Bulgarian participles with special attention to the prenominally used participles. First, we isolate a group of English participles, which we call postmodified participles, which we show to be real verbal participles (not adjectival phrases), something that has been, to my knowledge, unnoticed so far. The analysis of these participles is extended to Bulgarian, where they can occur also in prenominal position. The fact that the prenominal position in Bulgarian can host clearly verbal participles is used as an argument against the wide-spread view that prenominal participles in English are all adjectival expressions. In particular, we argue that the impossibility of the postmodified participles to occur in prenominal position in English is simply due to the right recursion restriction and not to their being verbal. We provide also some semantic evidence showing that prenominally used English participles are not necessarily „stative“, as suggested in the literature. Finally, we analyse some English phrases in which the prenominally used participle can be argued to be a verbal and not an adjectival or an ambiguous expression.