A Syntactic Analysis of Dominant Participle Constructions

Dominant participle constructions have long been known to linguists as a phenomenon of form-meaning mismatch widely existent in Indo-European languages.Their studies, however, have been isolated among works of different schools and on different languages.This paper provides, for the first time, a complete review of these studies as well as their contributions and problems, on the basis of which a new account is given that sees the dominant participle construction not as a small clause, but as a noun phrase with a context-dependent exocentric reading, and a model of pragmatic processing is proposed for the reading, with its crosslinguistic variations discussed.Proof for the account and the model is drawn from tests such as pronoun substitution, word order change and passivization, as well as the seeming ambiguity of the construction.