Tra verbo e aggettivo: il participio presente nel latino repubblicano

In Latin, as in other Indo-European languages, the present participle is a hybrid form which partakes of the character of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. In particular, in the light of the “Non-Discreteness Hypothesis of parts of speech” the Latin present participle can be regarded as a peripheral member of the category “verb” that shares a significant number of features with the category “adjective”. This may explain why, during the 2nd and 1st century BC, some present participles underwent categorial reanalysis and shifted into the class of adjectives. However, a large number of them had a completely different development, and resulted in non-finite transitive predicates that take accusative-marked objects. The hypothesis is put forward here, that the two opposite developments are the consequence of a single major drift, i.e. the rise of transitivity in Latin, which operates in different ways in relation to the different functions and contexts (attributive and predicative) where present participles can occur.