Participles vs. Adjectives

Problem:

In German, past participles can be used as part of the verbal complex (VVPP) or as adjectives (ADJD). As neither predicative adjectives nor participles inflect, the distinction gets ambiguous for verbs that can form a passive with sein (stative passive). In that case, ambiguity exists with copula constructions where the participle is used as a predicative adjective.

• Sie sind von den Änderungen direkt betroffen/VVPP.
• Sie sind sehr betroffen/ADJD und kleinlaut.

It can also get ambiguous for constructions with ``werden'':

• Der Tisch wird von mehreren Möbelpackern verrückt/VVPP.
• Ich werde verrückt/VVPP.

Tagging practice IMS/TUE:

All uninflected participles are tagged as V.PPF, except for special lexicalized forms (1,4,5)) and except for adverbially modifying participles (8,10).

• er ist verrückt/ADJD. (1)
• der Tisch ist verrückt/VVPPF. (2)
• der Tisch wurde verrückt/VVPPF. (3)
• der alte Mann wurde verrückt/ADJD. (4)
• er ist gelehrt/ADJD. (5)
• er hat ihn reiten gelehrt/VVPPF. (6)
• sie sind betroffen/VVPPF und kleinlaut. (7)
• das war gekonnt/ADJD gemacht/VVPPF. (8)
• die Sache ist geplant/VVPPF. (9)
• das gewollt/ADJD verlorene Spiel. (10)

STTS:

In order to get more consistency into this, we decided to tag adverbially used participles as ADJD whereever this could be decided savely, that is, also in the case of (7). Distinction between belonging to verbal complex and not belonging to VC.

Criteria for VVPP:

• Form of sein could be replaced by werden without too much semantic difference;
• Sentence can be put into the active;
• There is a von-PP denoting logical subject.

Criteria for ADJD:

• Above tests don't work;
• Participle could be replaced by a regular adjective.

Tests:

Type II. We have material where ambiguous forms are manually isolated and marked. This material can be used with tags one way or the other.

1. STTS practice
2. Take different syntactic constructions into the ADJD class:
   1. no subcategorized PPs of participle in question
   2. subcategorized PP except von
   3. von-PP of particle there