SummaryIn this paper, I have tried to give a description of the Swedish past participle which accounts for both the adjectival and the verbal character of this category. The past participle of a verb is envisaged as forming a lexical entry of its own, related to the lexical entry of the verb with the help of a lexical redundancy rule. To account for the various syntactic similarities between past participles and adjectives, the lexical entry of the past participle is marked + ADJ. The differences between an adjective and a past participle are claimed to be exclusively semantic. The crucial difference seems to be that the past participle focuses on the act referred to by the verb, whereas the adjective just denotes a state of affairs. To obtain the ‘verbal’ meaning of the past participle, I have proposed a description where the meaning of the verb functions as a restrictive modifier of the central meaning of the participle. Furthermore, I have claimed that this central meaning can always be inferred from the meaning of the verb. In section 3 of the paper, I give several arguments for a semantic description of the past partici