I was born in 1980.
What part of speech is "born"? verb? past participle?
It can be a past participle as in " I was seen ."
It can be verb as in " It was pulled by a car ."
Answer
Both seen and pulled in your examples are past participles employed in passive constructions.
Note that it is meaningless to ask if a form is a 'participle or a verb'. A participle is a verb inflection which may act as a verb or as another part of speech or as both simultaneously. The past participle, for instance, may act either as a component of a passive or perfect construction or as an adjective or as both a passive component and an adjective:
We have seen that man.
That man has been seen by us.
That is the man seen by us.
Born is tricky. In origin it is the past participle of the verb bear meaning carry. As far back as we can see, women and female animals have been said to bear their young while pregnant and to have borne their young when the pregnancy ended in a live offspring. BE born was originally the passive version of the same verb.
Eventually, however, the passive sense bleached out of the passive form. When we speak today of a child being born, there is no longer a sense that this was an action performed upon the child by the mother; it is, rather, an event. We no longer say that John Smith was born on April 1, 1950 by Mary Jones Smith; we say at most that John Smith was born on April 1, 1950 to Mary Jones Smith. This 'depassivized' sense is hinted at in spelling: today we spell the past participle of bear as ‹borne›, but the corresponding term in the birth idiom is ‹born›, without the ‹e›.
Somewhere over on ELU John Lawler has suggested that BE born is a unique English deponent verb—a verb which is passive in form but active in sense. That's a very attractive suggestion if you're familiar with the notion of deponent verbs; but I think it's more helpful to think of BE born as a unique idiom which cannot usefully be decomposed beyond what is needed to allow for inflecting BE.
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