It appears that it is necessary to address this issue in more detail in order to resolve it. To do that I will first go into the origins of the relevant parts of the Latin language and then address those aspects directly. I will being by noting the origins of the Latin perfect and passive. From there I will go on to address specifically the issue of participles in verbal constructions.
To begin, I want to give a few works on relevant topics, some of which I will cite. This list is by no means exhaustive. It is simply designed to give those interested some places to go for further information.
On the origins of Latin:
Baldi, Philip. The Foundations of Latin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002.
Kurzová, Helena. From Indo-European to Latin: The Evolution of a Morphosyntactic Type. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1993.
Sihler, Andrew L. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
General info on Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European:
Clackson, James. Indo-European Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Meier-Brügger, Michael. Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002.
Kurylowicz, Jerzy. The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1964.
On Pre- or Proto-Indo-European as possessing and Active/Stative typology:
Gamkrelidze, Thomas V. and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.
Lehmann, Winfred P. Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London: Routledge, 1993.
Bauer, Brigette. Archaic Syntax in Indo-European: The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000.
On Grammatical Concepts:
Croft, William. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Fried, Mirjam. Grammatical Constructions : Back to the Roots.Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005.
Langacker, Ronald. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2, Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Goldberg, Adele E. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Part 1: Origins
The origins of the Latin Perfect:
A few things need to be noted about the language from which Latin developed. First, at one point, pre- or proto-indo-european was an active/stative language (See Bauer, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, and Lehmann cited above). This means that transitivity was not a feature of the language. Additionally, the passive voice was never a part of PIE, but developed independently in the daughter languages: “In PIE itself there was no true passive, that is, a type of morphosyntax with the direct (or indirect) object as the subject of the verb, with an agent in an oblique case. In the several IE languages that have them, the forms used to express the passive are different and grew up independently” (Sihler, p. 448). In fact, during the active/stative stage of the proto-language, there were no direct or indirect objects at all.
Now, concerning the perfect itself.
“The PIE stative was formally different from the eventive…types in most person endings, in the formation of the finite stem, and the participle. This is the paradigm traditionally known as the PERFECT TENSE. In fact, it was neither perfective (completive) nor a tense: it was instead STATIVE, and tenseless” (Stihler, 564).
From this Active/Stative verbal system (see section 3.2 in Kurzová and chapter 5 in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov) eventually a transitive system resulted, as well as a series of tenses which varied from daughter language to daughter language. The Latin perfect is a conflation of both active and stative endings. The reason for this is clear: the aorist/simple preterite endings of PIE were part of the active system, while the Perfect of PIE was stative. Latin did not retain a distinction in past tense marking. The endings are therefore similar both to aorist and perfect endings of other IE languages: “The Latin perfect stem continues the form and functions of the late PIE perfect and aorist. Because of its hybrid origins, the perfect stems in Latin come in a variety of shapes and types” (Baldi p. 377).
What is the point of all of the above? Let me some up the important relevant points:
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At one point, the parent language of Latin did not have transitivity as a feature, nor a was there a passive voice.
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While other languages developed verbal tense systems out of the active/stative endings which differentiated the preterite (past tense) tenses, Latin did not. This is vital to understand, because previously in this thread there have been more than a few comments about the “perfective” aspect of the Latin perfect tense. In reality, the Latin perfect is a bit of a misnomer. It is, in actuality, simply a past tense. Only context will give one a clue as to whether a perfect verb should be translated as an English perfect or simple past. Generally, unless it is quite clear, the simple past is preferable, because the Latin language did not distinguish between completive past and simple past.
Part 2: Participles as adjectives
First, a participle is partly verbal and partly adjectival. However, it is vital to understand that in Latin, as opposed to English, the tense of a participle is much more important. This is because English uses participles primarily to form periphrastic verbs.
Consider the example already discussed previously: Gallia est divisa. This sentence is usually translated as “Gaul is divided,” understanding the participle to be basically adjectival, even though the same construction is used to form the Latin perfect passive. However, something is lost in this translation, which can be seen in the following:
Gallia est divisa
Gallia est dividens.
You can see above that I have written the sentence using both the present and the perfect participles. English cannot do this, because when the present participle is put in the predicate position it forms the English periphrastic continuous present tense. In “Gaul is dividing” “is dividing” is an English verbal form (verb “to be” + present participle = continous present). It is not at all an adjective. Additionally, it is important to note that the participle itself is temporally bleached, in that the “time” of the construction is carried by the copula (which is semantically null or bleached), and the semantic value is carried by the participle.
“Gaul is dividing”
“Gaul was dividing”
The tense change is entirely due to the copula, not the participle. The point here is that when Gallia est divisa is translated as “Gaul is divided” the temporal component of the Latin participle is lost in translated. A more accurate but rougher translation which distinguishes between Gallia est divisa and Gallia est dividens is “Gaul is in-a-past-state-of-having-been-divided” vs. “Gaul is being divided.”
The point is, even when sum + perfect participle is NOT translated as the periphrastic perfect passive, there is still a past tense value which is difficult to get across in English.
- When is it an adjective, and when is it passive?
The above question is an issue both in Latin and English, and is the center of this discussion. At issue, after all, is whether facta in the phrase est facta should be understood as more as an adjective, or as part of a verbal construction (the perfect passive). How does one know? There are a few relevant issues here.
A) There is the distinction between stative or instransitive verbs vs. agentive/active verbs. Consider the following sentences:
- The man was dead.
- The man was killed.
It is far easier to read the past participle “dead” in the first sentence as simply adjectival, rather than part of the English past perfect construction. The reason for this has to do with agency:
- *The man was dead by a criminal
- The man was killed by a criminal
The active nature of “kill” vs. “die” make it much harder to read “killed” in a passive construction as simply adjectival. In other words, it is far easier to read “the man was killed” as a past passive construction than it is to read “killed” as an adjective.
B) Verbal semantics
The agentive (or ergative) vs. stative aspect of a particular verb is not the only thing that helps decide whether, when used as a participle, it should be understood more as an adjective or as part of a verbal construction. For example:
- The book was colored.
- The book was ripped.
Both of the above sentences use past participles which can easily be understood as adjectives rather than part of a passive construction, even though they are agentive/ergative verbs. This is due to the semantic component of the verb itself. “Colored” or “ripped,” like “divided,” refer to adjectival aspects of the subject. Many verbs, however, do not have the same semantically adjectival component as the above, and are far less easy to read as adjectives. This can be seen when the participle is used attributively. In English, while a predicate participle can either be understood as an adjective or as part of a verbal construction (e.g. past continuous), an attributive adjective cannot. Consider the following:
- The colored book was on the shelf.
- The ripped book was on the shelf.
- *The read book was on the shelf
- *The made book was on the shelf
The above sentences demonstrate how certain participles do not lend themselves to adjectival use. I have deliberately used “made” as an example, because both the English “to make” and the Latin facere do not lend themselves to adjectival usage. They are among a class of verbs whose participles lack the necessary adjectival semantic component. Facio is also agentive. In other words, the verbal aspect of the participle is primary over the adjectival, and therefore the construction est facta should be understood as a periphrastic perfect passive (was made/has been made), not a present construction of est + an adjective.
- English vs. Latin past passive constructions
There is a further reason for the importance of discerning when a form of sum + past participle should be understood as a periphrastic perfect passive, and when the participle should be understood more as an adjective (albeit with a past sense, as noted above). Notice the difference in the following sentences:
- The man is killed by his own folly
- The man was killed by his own folly
The above sentences are the English present passive and past passive respectively. Both versions use the past participle. In fact, all passive tenses in English use the past participle (is being killed, will be killed, etc). This is because the present participle is not sanctioned, or blocked (see Langacker on this), from being used in a passive construction because it is already used to in a different verbal construction (continuous).
The practical meaning of this is the lack of a distinct difference in semantics when trying to decide whether a particular form of “to be” + past participle should be understood as a passive construction or whether the participle should be considered a simple adjective. Consider again the sentence “The book was colored.” This sentence can be forced to be understood as a passive construction by adding an agent: “The book was colored by a famous artist.” In other words, it is possible that “The book was colored” is a passive construction, and that “colored” is part of a verbal construction rather than an adjective. However, for all intents and purposes, if the sentence lacks the agent forcing, it doesn’t really matter whether you understand “was colored” as a passive construction or understand “colored” as an adjective. The sentence still means more or less the same thing. The difference is one of emphasis: in the passive construction, the verbal aspect is emphasized, whereas in the adjectival reading, the adjectival aspect is.
The same is NOT true for Latin. There big difference between reading est divisa as a present tense + adjective vs. a periphrastic perfect passive. This is because, unlike English, present form of “to be” + perfect participle is NOT a present verbal construction, but a PAST one. In other words, the difference between the two readings is “Gaul is divided” vs. “Gaul was divided,” or present reading vs. past reading. Again, in English “Gaul is divided” is present whether you interpret it as a passive or not. This is not so in Latin, which makes it much more important to understand whether est facta is passive or not.
The answer is that est facta is almost certainly a periphrastic passive construction. The reason for this is the nature of the verb facere. Notice the differences between the participles in the following sentences:
Catena fracta canem devinciebat
?Catena facta canem devinciebat
Here I have used two participles attributively. In the first sentence, the participle can be easily rendered as a simple adjective: the broken chain used to bind the dog. In the second sentence, however, it requires much more work to get the meaning across in English, because of the fundamental verbal nature of facio as a verb meaning “to make.” One would have to say something like “the chain, having been made, used to bind/was binding the dog.”
The relevant point is, again, that facio in the sense used here (to make) does not have the requisite adjectival nature to be rendered as a simple adjective. Therefore, reading catena facta est as “the chain was made” is far superior than “the chain is made.”
