A history of prenominal passive participles in English: from resultatives to eventives

Abstract This article aims to explain how passive participles used as prenominal modifiers developed their eventive nature throughout the history of English. It is argued that prenominal participles first expressed stative result states in Old English (OE) and came to express perfect result states later on. The locus of required resultativity in participles was the inner aspect head in OE, while in Early Middle English (EME), it shifted to the outer aspect head. This shift was triggered by the loss of OE aspectual prefixes, which generally functioned to perfectivize or transitivize the verb by affecting its (internal) argument and assigning a change-of-state meaning to the verb. This shift rendered participial formation to be less constrained, as a result of which, it became possible for prenominal participles to express perfect resultative meanings, which in turn gave rise to their eventive meanings.