Present Participle as Predicative with vara ‘be’ in Present Day Swedish

Abstract This article investigates the case of lexical restrictions on present participles with predicate vara ‘be’ in Swedish. According to the standard descriptions, Present Day Swedish disallows the use of verbal present participles in the complement slot of the copula vara ‘be’, which is reserved for present participles with adjectival properties. However, we occasionally find examples with verbal participles, suggesting the construction can potentially become available to such participles. The study is qualitative and based on material excerpted from three large corpora of written Swedish, representing different genres and registers. The results indicate that the characteristics of the participles in the tested schema vary depending on the participles’ orientation, the animacy and thematic roles of the subjects as well as the type of the corpus. We conclude that in structures that seem to contradict the established test on the participles’ status their verbal reading is nevertheless suppressed through either incorporation or reduction of the object and through the loss of temporal anchoring. The restrictions lead to an inclination towards an adjectival or even nominal reading of the participles.