Resumen de Participles and gerunds
Rafael Marín Gálvez, Antonio Fábregas Alfaro
This chapter discusses the nature of participles and gerunds in Spanish. As they are considered hybrid categories with a cross-categorial nature, the chapter focuses in particular on their category distribution: traditionally, participles are verbal forms that share properties with adjectives, while gerunds are verbal forms with adverbial properties. Infinitives, participles and gerunds are non-personal forms of the verb whose categorial status is unclear. For this reason, they have been considered hybrid categories, that is, categories that exhibit a behaviour that partially corresponds to two or more word classes. Certain participles, depending on the grammatical contexts in which they appear, show clear adjectival properties. In any case, from the previous discussion, one can draw the conclusion that estar adjectival passives are not always resultative, so the generalisation that only participles of telic verbs are allowed in these constructions should be revised.
