Latin Dominant Participles: Dynamics of Derivation and Interpretation*

Abstract

The Latin dominant participle construction poses a challenge for syntactic and semantic analysis due to its exhibiting an apparent syntax–semantics mismatch. Its syntactic behaviour and distribution is determined by a nominal phrase fronted to its left periphery, yet interpretive properties indicate that it is a propositional structure subject to nominalization. With the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1993, 1995) as the framework of analysis, it is argued that taking into account the dynamics of syntactic operations as envisaged in Chomsky (2013b, 2015) and related work is sufficient to provide an account of syntactic and semantic properties of the dominant participle construction without positing construction–specific rules or covert syntactic nominalizers.