Active present participles (English "singing", French "chantant", Polish "śpiewający") exhibit a well-known cross-linguistic contrast between agreeing (adjectival) and invariant (adverbial) forms. This talk argues that these two forms do not reflect distinct categorial statuses, but instead follow from the internal functional structure of the participial phrase. I propose that all participles contain an aspectual head, but only agreeing participles contain an additional φ-head, which introduces agreement properties and participates in case assignment: it agrees with the NP inside its domain and can also interact with higher clause-level probes. Because selection targets the features contributed by this head, verbs and prepositions do not c-select participles as adjectives or nouns, but as constituents bearing particular formal features. Non-agreeing participles simply lack the φ-head and therefore remain invariant. Drawing on cross-linguistic evidence from Baltic, Romance and Slavic languages, the analysis unifies the distributional patterns of present participles, accounts for their morphological variability, and eliminates the need for adjectival recategorization. Participles are thus treated as verbal phrases whose behavior reflects the availability of an extra φ-probe rather than category shifts.
Dr. Alberto Frasson is a theoretical linguist and syntactician affiliated with the Department of English and Comparative Linguistics, Institute of English Studies, Faculty of Neophilology, University of Wrocław. His research focuses on nominal and clausal syntax, comparative and historical morphosyntax, the effects of language contact in bilinguals and heritage transmission on grammatical systems.
He obtained his M.A. in Slavic Linguistics from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2016) and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Utrecht University (2022). His doctoral dissertation, The Syntax of Subject Pronouns in Heritage Languages: Innovation and Complexification, examined how syntactic, semantic, and discourse factors interact in the use and evolution of subject pronouns in heritage Romance and Slavic varieties.