On The Syntax Of Deverbal Nominalizations In English And Romanian

The book offers a syntactic and semantic perspective on the nominalization system in both English and Romanian. The three main types of deverbal nominalizations analysed here are complex event nominalizations (CENs), simple event nominals (SENs) and result nominals (RNs), according to the well-known distinction made by Grimshaw (1990). The hypothesis furthered in the present book is that in both languages deverbal nominalizations form a squish (see Ross 1972), i.e. an implicational hierarchy which is built on two dimensions, a syntactic dimension, i.e., the presence or absence of a complete VP, including some functional structure (AspP), and a semantic dimension, i.e., whether or not the nominalization expresses an event (see Wood 2020). Thus, all the properties of CENs, SENs and RNs described in the literature (Grimshaw 1990, Alexiadou 2001, Borer 2011, a.o.) are accounted for on the basis of these two dimensions and are illustrated on a vast corpus of authentic English and Romanian examples gathered from dictionaries and online corpora such as Corpusul computațional de referință pentru limba română contemporană (CoRoLa), the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

This book contributes to the recent theoretical developments in the area of mutual interactions of valency and aspect, as expressed in different types of verb-related nominal structures (nominalizations and synthetic compounds). A wide range of data from Slavic, Hellenic, Germanic, Romance and Semitic languages provides an empirical testing ground for competing theoretical explanations couched in the lexicalist and construction-based frameworks.

Discusses a special case of syntax-morphology mismatch that puzzles current traditional morphological theories - the case of relational adjectives across languages.

The volume explores the syntax of nominalizations, focusing on deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations, but also discussing the syntax of genitives and the syntax of distinct readings of nominalizations. The volume investigates the morpholgy-syntax interface as well as the semantics-syntax interface in the domain of nominalizations. The theoretical frameworks include distributed morphology, and minimalist syntax. Data from a variety of languages are taken into consideration, e.g. Hebrew, Bulgarian, Serbian, French, Spanish, German and English.

Recent years have witnessed a (re)surfacing of interest on the interaction of morphology and syntax. For many grammatical phenomena, it is not easy to draw a dividing line between syntactic and morphological structure. This has led to the assumption that syntax is the module responsible not only for deriving syntactically complex phrases but also for deriving morphologically complex items, both in inflection and word formation. There are however also good reasons to think that syntax is not involved in all morphological processes and that there are consistent areas of morphology that are independent from syntactic processes. This book presents a collection of papers where phenomena from Romance languages and varieties are analysed under contrasting views on how morphology and syntax interact. All the contributions follow the aim to investigate what the analysed phenomena tell us about their structural make‐up and the grammatical processes involved.

The volume explores the semantics of nominalizations from different theoretical points of view: formal and lexical semantics, cognitive-functional grammar, lexical-functional grammar, discourse representation theory. Data from a variety of languages are taken into account, including Hungarian, Italian, French, German and English. The papers discuss the semantics of distinct readings of nominalizations and meaning differences observed between competing affixes.

This book brings a basic yet detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been central to theories of argument structure, and Icelandic has been an important language for the study of argument structure and syntax, Icelandic has not been brought into the general body of theoretical work on nominalization. In this work, Jim Wood shows that Icelandic-specific issues in the analysis of derived nominals have broad implications that go beyond the study of that one language. In particular, Icelandic provides special evidence that Complex Event Nominals (CENs), which seem to inherit their argument structure from the underlying verbs, can be formed without nominalizing a full verb phrase. This conclusion is at odds with prominent theories of nominalization that claim that CENs have the properties that they have precisely because they involve the nominalization of full verb phrases. The book develops a theory of allosemy within the framework of Distributed Morphology, showing how one single syntactic structure can get distinct semantic interpretations corresponding to the range of readings that are available to derived nominals. The resulting proposal demonstrates how the study of Icelandic nominalizations can both further our understanding of argument structure and shed new light on the syntax-semantics interface.