Participle-Adjective Formation in Modern Greek

This paper focuses on Modern Greek words ending in -menos:

1. To  nifiko               itan ra-meno         apo ton rafti  me   hrisi  klosti.
   the wedding-dress.NEUT.N was  sew.PRTC.NEUT.N by  the tailor with golden thread
   "The wedding dress was sewn by the tailor with golden thread".
   

Along with Markantonatou et al. (1996), we support the view that Modern Greek words in -menos are participles rather than adjectives, which may appear in the typical position of adjectives in Modern Greek.

This fact we account for by a proposal for participle-adjective formation in Modern Greek which is developed along the lines of Bresnan's (1996) analysis for participle-adjective conversion in English.

The main contribution of this paper, though, is the formalization in LFG of Bresnan's (1996) proposal for participle-adjective formation. The formalization we propose covers the Modern Greek and English data at hand, and we are confident that it can easily be extended in order to account for the phenomenon of participle-adjective formation cross-linguistically.