La categoria del participio tra grammatici antichi e teoria linguistica contemporanea: i tratti verbali

The Greek-Latin grammatical tradition of parts of speech already ascribes a dual nature to the category of participles. Moreover, the morpho-syntactic features shared by participles with verbs and nouns have already been identified. Among the verb-like features, the expression of tense (tempora) is central, and closely related to the encoding of diathesis (significationes) and verb-like government (uerborum consequentia). The absence of these features makes the participle equivalent to a deverbal noun (ἀντανάκλαστος προσηγορία, appellatio reciproca), which holds the genitive (amator illius ≈ amans illius), rather than the accusative (amans illum). Ancient grammarians’ thought on the participle is very close to formal approaches devoted to the nounverb opposition, due to the structural and binary features taken into account. On the other hand, these features are also perfectly compatible with the typological perspective, as they can be considered as structural correlates of the functional criteria, which are often more appropriate for crosslinguistic comparison.