@jayles - off to bed now so will get back to you later, but of your first group, at first glance I'd say:

plummeted - definitely no
decreased - yes
dropped - definitely no
fallen - probably no (although there's a bit on the web)
reduced - yes.

Reasons? fallen is accepted adjective for trees etc, but probably not in this context. Plummet and drop (in this context) intransitive only, and have never seen their pps used as adjectives (in this context, although you can have a dropped assignment, I think) - at least that'd be my guess. Declined wouldn't work either. Declining, plummeting and falling would work though.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plummeted+output%2Cdecreased+output%2Cdropped+output%2Cfallen+output%2Creduced+output&year_start=1950&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

The picture is much the same if you substitute production, sales or profits for output.

@jayles - I got interested in "(the) injured men" vs "(the) hurt men". Semantically they can be much the same, but the latter seems to me unnatural, and I don't think that paper explains this. I first tried a site search of the BBC. The expression "men hurt" by far outnumbers "men injured" (758:158), although this was almost entirely when the words were used as verbs; "the men injured" only got 4 and "the men hurt" got 0.

Attributive use rather bore out my hunch:

the injured men 91 injured men 210
the hurt men 0 hurt men 2

At Google Books, the story was pretty similar, with at least twenty pages of verifiable results for the 'injured men', but less than two pages for 'the hurt men', many of the latter being from rather old books, something which this graph seems to bear out:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+injured+men%2Cthe+hurt+men&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

But things got really interesting when I started checking dictionaries. None of the standard British dictionaries I checked (OALD, Macmillan, Longman, Cambridge) showed the adjective 'hurt' being used attributively - and for some strange reason Oxford Online doesn't seem to show 'hurt' as an adjective at all.

But two internet dictionaries do show 'hurt' being used before a noun:

"The hurt child was taken to the hospital." - Dictionary.com (from Random House)
"ambulances...for the hurt men and women" - The Free Dictionary (from Wordnet)

So I wondered if it was an American thing, and googled "for the hurt men and women". This brings up 80 hits. But the interesting thing is that these are nearly all from dictionary or vocabulary site definitions of 'hurt'. There were only six actual examples of the phrase being used 'in the real world', one of which was gobbledygook:

"the actual firefighters ought to not simply run upward routes associated with steps and also have around the hurt men and women around the steps"

One was about emotional hurt:

"But the hurt men and women experience post-breakup may be different because men and women often view relationships from varied ..."

Which leaves us with four: one was from a legal website, where hurt probably refers to physical injury, but might possibly be about legal injury:

"these Stryker hip lawsuits will get the hurt men and women the payment they deserve"

So we have only three that are indisputably about physical injury, one of which is from another legal website:

"involves the insurance provider saying yes to cover the automobile repair price as well as the hospital bills from the hurt men and women."

One seems to be from an internet horror novel:

"The boot scuffs of all the hurt men and women that were piled into the backseat on gasoline runs into local towns."

And another from the script of a computer game:

"Mauka spent all her time massaging the hurt men and women"

Not sure about the literary merit of those last two! Meanwhile we have at least seventy dictionaries and vocabulary sites around the world saying that "ambulances...for the hurt men and women" is a good example of 'hurt' being used as an adjective, yet it all seems to go back to one entry at Wordnet, which was then picked up by The Free Dictionary - http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hurt

Now, as we know from that paper, if it had been 'badly-hurt', things might have been different. "The badly-hurt man" gets 40 hits on Google, most of them real examples, such as "The badly hurt man was flown by helicopter to Albany Medical Center Hospital", and that sounds perfectly normal to me.

@jayles - it seems that all this stuff about qualia and GL is from theories that Pustejovsky himself has put forward. This might help a bit, but only a bit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_lexicon

It strikes me we might have been more successful if we had looked for examples with 'the', as these constructions are no doubt more often used in a second utterance - 'Three men were injured in the accident. The * injured men* were later all released from hospital'

@jayles - they come up, but only just - these are real figures, not Google's first page joke ones:

'a told joke' - 59 - maybe 20 at Google Books, nearly all with 'told' in inverted commas
'a sent letter' - 149 - about 38 at GB, again, some with 'sent' in inverted commas
'a bitten man' - 67 - perhaps 44 at GB
But 'a hard-bitten man' - 122, perhaps 50 at GB

None of these appear in the British National Corpus.

'a hit dog' - 226, but 177 of those are for the saying 'a hit dog will holler'

I grant that cooked egg is OK; it was a silly example. But it tends to be used in contexts like well-cooked, and in books its use is almost entirely in American-published books - I think they sometimes use the expression instead of boiled eggs.
'Cooked eggs' doesn't appear in the BNC either

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+cooked+egg%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ca+cooked+egg%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

And for your homework, I'd like you to write a short precis of Batiukova and Pustejovsky's paper, in plain, non-technical English, remembering to structure your text with an introduction, main findings and a conclusion. :) (looks interesting - I've printed it out and will have a look at it over the weekend)

@jayles - Unit 82 - I would say sometimes rather than usually:

A bit man, a hit dog, a loved woman, a told joke, a made mistake, a sent letter, some done homework? We can probably rule out one syllable verbs for a start.

I would imagine it's more common with verbs involving some sort of physical action - a dredged river, a parked car

Then there's context as well - a cooked breakfast, a boiled egg, but a cooked egg sounds a bit weird to me.

@jayles - OK, I think I see what you're getting at:

The players who have been selected will start training today - full sentence (passive)
The players selected will start training today - reduced relative clause (passive)
The selected players will start training today - 'dragged' pp

I don't really think there's a rule on this one; you have to take each adjective case by case - does it sound natural? And that seems to me to depend on whether the adjective is normally used in this position. So let’s start with the easy ones:

8) grown men - grown is an adjective in its own right. Nobody would think - ‘Come on, grown men don’t cry!’ - Ah, that means ‘Men who have grown don’t cry.’ They are simply grown men.
8) failed marriage - failed is also listed in the dictionary as an adjective in its own right - ‘a failed writer’, ‘a failed coup’ - OALD - and there's no passive involved failed here is intransitive
7) and so is withered (as is, for example, shrivelled)

With adjectives in their own right we need make no connections with relative clauses, reduced or otherwise, and there’s no need to look for any passive root; they are simply adjectives.
.
8) crashed plane - There are plenty examples in Google, and in Google Books (although they don’t look of a very high literary standard), and quite a few at the BBC, so this seems to be OK (although I don’t like it much personally - it sounds to me as though it has been crashed, rather than simply crashing) - mind you the examples at the BBC are mostly from headlines, which have their own grammar.

1) the selected players 323 on Google, plenty at the BBC - passive pp as in the opening example
2) standing passengers is a standard term in the transport trade to describe a class of passengers - it doesn’t really mean ‘passengers who are (in the act of) standing’ - so I think this is a bit of a red herring
3) and 5) this one is interesting. Both discouraged and encouraged are used as adjectives in predicate position -’I was encouraged / discouraged at the way things turned out’, but it would seem we are much more likely to use discouraged attributively before a noun than encouraged - Google comes up with 326 results for "the discouraged workers", but only 46 for "the encouraged workers", Google Books 100 to 7, so although technically possible, encouraged doesn't seem to be very natural in that position. The BBC has 16 results for discouraged workers where discouraged is an adjective (and none as a verb), but none for encouraged.

You could also compare heartened and depressed - ‘The depressed young man’ OK, but ‘The heartened young man’?

4) and 6) - you can decline an offer and you can decline a Latin noun, but you can’t decline a number; a number simply declines. So this can’t be a passive, but neither is declined thought of as an adjective in its own right - so 6) to me is impossible. ‘a declined offer’ gets 175 hits on Google, 22 at Google Books, but nothing at the BBC (and nor do ‘the declined offer’ or ‘a declined invitation’)

So if there are any rules they might be these:
1) Some past participles have become adjectives in their own right, both from transitive and intransitive verbs, and passive doesn’t really come into it:
a broken marriage - intransitive - the marriage breaks down
a broken heart - transitive? - someone else has broken it
but in any case, which it is doesn’t matter; broken here is simply an adjective.

2) Some other pps can be used as adjectives, usually with a similar meaning to a passive relative clause - ‘a declined offer’, but only from transitive verbs
3) Some adjectives (including those derived from pps) are more often used in attributive position (before the noun), whereas others are more often used in predicative position after a linking verb such as be or feel - ‘I’m (feeling) very encouraged with your progress’

@ providencejim - totally agree with you about the sound of the words 'Lay Lady Lay'; 'Lie Lady Lie' just doesn't cut it. And as for the first part of your comment, I of course teach my students the standard differentiation. I just tell them not to get too bothered if they see the rule getting broken, especially in popular music.

Did I say 'passive mood'? Tush, tush! What I meant, of course, was 'passive voice'.

@HJMCS - I'm afraid that's not good enough. With a moniker like that, we expect some highfalutin reasoning. (I think something's dangling there, but I really don't care)

@jayles - I'm not really saying that a past participle used as an adjective has a passive meaning, as I prefer to reserve the word passive for the 'passive mood' or similar verb constructions, such as - 'We got done', 'She had her house repainted' etc. In the sentence 'We are encouraged to see how hard you've worked', I simply see 'encouraged' as an adjective. But in 'We were encouraged by his business-like attitude', yes, we have a passive.

All I'm saying is that there are two main types of reduced relative clause:
Active with a present participle - Look at that man (who is) standing on the corner.
Passive with a past participle - Those (who have been) selected to play for the team will start training today
But that something similar sometimes happens with the verb be + adjective
- Anyone (who is) interested should contact me immediately
- If you see anything (which is) interesting let me know

@Rose - you might well be right, but I think jayles was mainly trying to understand the grammar behind his example sentences, not their relative merit. He and I both teach English to foreigners, and sometimes we get asked awkward questions, so it's nice to be able to work these things out.