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This contribution concerns the interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics. It treats German past participles and concentrates on their function as heads in attributive and adverbial modifier phrases. It is argued that participles have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. Since these three operations involve changes in the morphosyntactic categorization they are considered as zero affixation. Two affixless templates – without any categorical changes – convert participle constructions to modifiers relating to participants or to situations. These phrases do not have a syntactic position for the grammatical subject, an operator or an adverbial relator. The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure. Two further templates serve the composition of participle constructions as modifiers with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modifiers which function as predicates and those which have the status of a propositional operator. In syntax, these different semantic functions correspond to different adjunct positions of the respective participle phrases.
The Early New High German period is characterized by the reduction of the former four-stage ablaut system (e. g. werfen inf. - warf pret.sg. - wurfen pret. pl. - geworfen past part.) into a three-stage system (werfen- warf-geworfen), involving the loss of the number distinction in the preterite. In earlier approaches this development has been analyzed as being triggered by the functional discrepancy between three tenses and four ablaut stages, or, as put forward by natural morphologists, by the adaptation of the strong verb system to the more natural weak verb pattern. This paper rejects these hypotheses and argues that the development is best attributed to the growing stem allomorphy in the verbal system (due to phonological changes) and the remarkable decrease in the token frequency of verbs in the preterite, which lead to the loss of the least relevant category distinction, i. e. number.