The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited

•(German and English) adjectival participles can involve Voice.•Adjectival passives involve event kinds, verbal passives event tokens.•Restrictions on event-related modification of adjectival participles follow from the kind analysis.•Greek adjectival participles can involve an additional aspectual layer.

In this paper, we argue that adjectival passives across languages do not seem to differ in terms of the presence/absence of verbal layers (v, Voice), and we provide morphological evidence for this claim from German, English, and Greek. Particular restrictions observed with adjectival passives compared to verbal passives, such as a more limited availability of event-related modification, are best accounted for under a semantic explanation. In particular, we propose that it follows from an account according to which the underlying event of adjectival passive remains in the kind domain, due to the category change from verb to adjective.