Argument structure and aspect in adjectives and participles: Where are we?

• There is no agreement about how adjectives and participles are different from verbs.
• There is conflicting evidence about whether adjectives introduce their subjects or must combine with a functional head in order to do so.
• There is growing evidence that adjectives can denote events, and allow for a richer aspectual typology than previously thought.
• There is a growing dissatisfaction with the traditional classification of participles, particularly with respect to whether adjectival participles introduce agents or not.
• These questions have to be answered in order to have a non-parochial theory of grammatical categories.

One of the oldest concerns in linguistic theory is the characterization of grammatical categories, and the problem of how to capture their similarities and differences. Perhaps one of the most problematic cases identified in previous studies has been to find a non-parochial characterization of the relation between adjectives and verbs; participles are at the centre of the problem, because they show mixed morphosyntactic and semantic properties that connect them both with adjectives and verbs. The aim of this contribution is to summarize the main results and pending questions that the literature has identified in the study of the relation between adjectives, participles and verbs. We concentrate on two problems: their argument structure and their aspectual properties.