Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show that all passive participles in OE and PE are members of the same category with the feature specification [+V], unspecified for a value of the feature [N]. It will be shown firstly that there is no reason to distinguish between lexical adjectival and transformational verbal passives. Then the Case assignment properties of passive participles will be considered. It will be shown that inherent Case can be assigned by categories that are non-distinct from [-N], whereas structural objective Case is assigned by categories that are [-N], and therefore passive participles which can assign only inherent Case should be analyzed as unspecified for a value of the feature [N].
