Polish present active participles as syntactic centaurs

Abstract

This paper investigates the syntax of present active participles in Polish, morphologically similar forms that nevertheless split into agreeing and invariant types. Agreeing participles show full φ-agreement and appear in adjectival environments, while invariant participles lack agreement and function as adverbial, converb-like modifiers. Despite this contrast, both types retain core verbal properties, including argument structure and aspectual interpretation. I argue that this split does not reflect a categorial distinction between verbs and adjectives. Instead, both participle types are derived from the same verbal structure and the difference follows from the presence or absence of an additional φ-probe and from structural position. Agreement is licensed by syntactic Agree, not by recategorization to adjective. Adopting a feature-driven minimalist approach, I propose that non-categorial features such as φ can provide labels under the Labeling Algorithm, making an adjectival head unnecessary. Present active participles will therefore be defined as ‘centaur’ constructions, showing properties of multiple categories, which, however, does not entail syntactic category change.