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This chapter provides a systematic discussion of Buridan’s nominalist semantics of propositions and sentential nominalizations. The chapter argues that despite its incompleteness, Buridan’s theory is still “nominalism’s best shot” at a semantics of propositions without buying into a philosophically and theologically dubious ontology of dicta, enuntiabilia, complexe significabilia, real propositions, or states of affairs.

Evaluative adjectives (e.g. rude, clever) display a systematic alternation, which brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes. The adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: A lexical saturation operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic reification operator (also seen in nominalization).

This chapter analyzes the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of noun and adjective phrases. Data are given for experiential state nominalizations, process nouns, agent nominalizations, patient nominalizations, kinship terms, partitives, and possessives. A prosodic analysis is also outlined.

This chapter analyses zhe in archaic Chinese as a determiner which selects a nominal or clausal complement and projects a DP. As a determiner, zhe can further serve as the external binder of a gap in its complement, thereby creating a relative clause. Consequently, this analysis offers s a unified account of the seemingly heterogeneous behaviour of zhe as nominalizer, relativizer, or topic marker.

This chapter applies the GPF model to deverbal and deadjectival nominalizations as a case in point. Event nominalizations, or action nominalizations, are transpositions that retain many of the syntactic and semantic properties of the base verb, and in many languages they are the principal way of constructing subordinate clauses. Event nominalizations often induce syntagmatic category mixing, as in Harriet’s writing the paper so quickly . . ., in which the phrase starts as a noun but finishes as a verb. The chapter discusses the nominalized infinitives of German and Italian in detail. Such transpositions can be analysed by means of a rule of referral in the GPF, defining the infinitive form as a nominalization. Event nominalizations often convey subtle semantic nuances such as ‘the fact that . . .’ or ‘the proposition that . . .’. In addition, event nominals often introduce subtle aspectual meanings or restrictions on interpretation (as in German and Russian). In many cases, this extra meaning is like the grammatical meanings associated with plural or past-tense morphology and doesn’t warrant setting up an entirely new lexeme. In other words, we have a subtype of transposition, which includes a semantic enrichment to the lexical representation without (necessarily) the creation of a new lexeme. This is treated as a constructional property of the nominalization process. Similar reasoning applies to property nominalizations of adjectives (for instance, shortness from short, or popularity from popular), which in addition convey an extent meaning.

Since the work of Gärtner (1997), the view that each node in a tree structure is the representation of a set has been pursued by some authors (Starke 2001, 2004; Citko 2005, inter alia). The purpose of this chapter is to provide evidence for this view of structures. The relevant data involve Spanish agent nominalizations, where the affix responsible for the change of category is sensitive and cancels an argument position that is otherwise required by the affix. In a multidominance account, the affixes that cancel an argument are introduced in the position which that argument requires inside the verbal structure in such a way that argument cancellation amounts to structural incompatibility. At a later step, the affix remerges on top of the verbal structure, thus projecting as a whole phrase with the verb as its complement, in such a way that the category of the set becomes nominal.

This chapter addresses the crucial issue of how hierarchical structure relates to linear order, and provides evidence that the two are universally mediated by a version of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). The discussion focuses on new data in support of the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC), an apparent gap in disharmonic word orders. The data in question relate to the embedding of various types of clauses in OV languages. Almost universally, the FOFC-violating order (*[_VP [_CPC TP] V]) fails to surface, and what we see instead is extraposition, i.e. superficially: [_VP V [_CP C TP]]. Based on these data, the chapter argues that: (i) in such cases, obligatory extraposition comes about as an indirect result of FOFC; (ii) any adequate explanation of FOFC and its effects will need to refer to the LCA; and (iii) the pattern provides evidence for the independently proposed idea that certain CPs can be embedded under nominal structure.

Attention to individual words and patterns in word choice can yield important insights into argumentative effects, but what are the words actually doing in a text? Part II takes up this issue by focusing first on sentence forms, beginning with those choices that make a sentence in the first place: the subject and verb. In a first pass, English sentences can be separated into two types, stative versus active, depending on whether they categorize or characterize (typically yoking subjects and predicates with forms of the linking verb to be) or whether they make their subjects agents capable of acting through intransitive verbs or transitive verbs taking an object. Focusing on the subject/verb pairings in a text reveals who gets to be or do what in the universe the arguer constructs. To further that analysis, this chapter offers a semantic taxonomy for the kinds of subjects (agents or entities) that an arguer can use: humans, rhetorical participants, things, abstractions, concepts, and slot fillers (e.g., it is, there are). Verb choices can be analyzed according to the parameters identified by grammarians: tense, aspect, mood, negation, modality, and voice. The often-maligned passive voice is defended here as a rhetorical option. Rhetoricians have linked variables in subject/verb choice to an overall nominal versus verbal style and to individual effects like personification, pairing a thing or abstraction with a verb typically linked with a human, to the historic present, using the present tense to narrate an event from the past and zeugma or to hypozeuxis, the multiplying of subjects and verbs. This chapter includes detailed analyses of passages for subject choice and verb choice alone (in the latter case showing the importance of a progression of tenses) and of further passages from mundane news stories for their subject/verb pairings revealing their construction of a worldview.

This chapter provides detailed empirical evidence for the presence of a verbal or an adjectival Extended Projection within Argument Structure Nominals (AS-nominals), which is in turn responsible for the emergence of event interpretation within such nominals. Arguments are based primarily on Hebrew and on English, with some additional evidence coming from French. Data arguing against the existence, specifically, of verbal structure within derived nominals, based primarily on Chomsky (1970) for English and on Siloni (1996) for Hebrew is reviewed in detail, and while some of it is found lacking, some facts are provided with an alternative explanation. Direct evidence for verbal structure within AS-nominals is based, in Hebrew, on the distribution of object markers, by-phrases, and adverbs, as well as on constituent structure distinctions between AS-nominals and other nominals, derived or otherwise. For English, further evidence is based on ellipsis, on the limited distribution of adverbs, and on the distinct properties of de-verbal nominalizations and de-adjectival nominalizations, the latter valid in French as well. Finally, evidence is presented for adverbial raising to adjectives in English derived nominals, leading the way to an account of the limitations on the distribution of adverbs in English derived nominals.

We start with a brief outline of kinds of clauses in Amazonian languages. We then turn to various techniques of putting clauses together into one sentence. Numerous Arawak, Carib and Tupí languages use nominalizations in the function of relative clauses, and in subordinate clauses. A number of languages north of the Amazon, and some in the south have what is known as ‘switch‐reference’: a clause‐combining technique which indicates whether the subject of the main clause is the same as that of a dependent clause, or different from it. This takes us to the issue of ‘pivot’ in clause combining. In a number of languages, including Aguaruna and the Quechua varieties, speech reports have many overtones to do with intention, internal thought and volition.

In Nata, an endangered Eastern Bantu language (E45) spoken in the Mara region of Tanzania, deverbal nominalizations present certain properties. Morphologically, they consist of four morphemes, ordered left to right: (i) a phonologically predictable pre-prefix; (ii) an N-Class prefix; (iii) a verb stem; (iv) a harmonic final vowel (FV) suffix. Semantically, Nata nominalizations fall into three classes: entity-denoting, state-denoting, and event-denoting. Syntactically, (i) entity Ns have a singular/plural distinction, but event Ns are number-neutral; (ii) entity Ns cannot be modified by an adverb, but event Ns can be; (iii) entity Ns optionally introduce an internal argument, while event Ns do so obligatorily. It is proposed that Nata nominalization construal arises compositionally via features introduced by the final vowel (ACTOR, THEME, EVENT), and features introduced by the N-class prefix (HUMAN, NON-HUMAN). Nata confirms the relevance of proto-roles and event arguments and shows that the event/entity partition is derived compositionally.

The Aspect Preservation Hypothesis (APH) predicts that, all things being equal, the aspectual information of a deverbal nominalization reflects the Aktionsart of the verbal base. This hypothesis faces prima facie counterexamples in the domain of psychological nouns, as they quite systematically denote states, while not all psychological verbs are stative. This chapter addresses these counterexamples and argues that they do not pose a problem for the APH. We argue that the base of the nominalization is a partially specified verbal stem; then we show that only verbs whose stem is stative have a derived psychological noun. Verbs whose stem is not stative lack a corresponding nominalization, although they can be associated with an underived psychological noun.

This chapter provides a detailed survey of the various ways in which words can be related. It discusses transpositions (action nominalizations, deverbal participles, relational and possessive adjectives, property nominalizations of adjectives, and predicatively used nouns/adjectives) as well as the notion of mixed category. The chapter then addresses the question of meaning-bearing inflections: how do we know when the added meaning is ‘merely’ inflectional, and when it introduces an additional semantic predicate into the SEM attribute for the lexeme, characteristic of derivation? It is proposed that derivation entails a change in the value of the lexemic index. The chapter then reviews argument structure alternations (passives, causatives, applicatives, and others), as well as an intermediate type of relatedness called argument nominalization, which defines/denotes one of the arguments of a verb, typically the subject. There follows discussion of non-compositional (‘meaningless’) derivational processes, such as the prefixation which gives rise to words such as withstand, withhold, etc. The chapter then provides a systematic characterization of evaluative morphology. The next type is within-lexeme relatedness, which frequently throws up instances of morphosyntactic or category mismatch or category mixing. Not infrequently, this within-lexeme category mixing gives rise to mixed behaviour in the syntax, too (syntagmatic category mixing), a phenomenon very well known from studies of event nominalizations, but one which is much more widespread and general than that. The chapter surveys Russian nouns with adjectival morphology, conversion of adjectives to person-denoting nouns, morphological shift (Russian past tense morphology, Kayardild verbal case).

This chapter is an application of the model introduced in Chapter 5 to much of the empirical data summarized in Chapter 3, illustrating the intermediate types of lexical relatedness, specifically transpositions, argument nominalizations (such as DRIVER), the various paradigmatically mixed categories such as nouns which have the morphology of adjectives, diminutives and augmentatives, and finally, derivational morphology which can be defined formally but which is not associated with any systematic semantics (‘meaningless derivation’), as illustrated by prefixed verbs such as under-stand. One of the aspects of PFM which is explored in Stump’s work on paradigm linkage and related issues is the question of how inflected forms are interpreted semantically. In this chapter I take up this aspect in more detail. I modify Booij’s distinction between contextual and inherent inflection, arguing that some types of inflection are best thought of as introducing an additional semantic predicate into the lexical representation, in addition to realizing the value of a morphosyntactic feature. Inherent inflection is defined as relatedness which is part of the inflectional paradigm of a lexeme, and which therefore does not alter the lexemic index, but which nonetheless introduces a non-trivial change to the SEM value. Examples are case-marked forms of nouns in which the case marker has exactly the same meaning/function as a spatial preposition in English.

This chapter discusses how recursion works for several types of verbal predicates. Every verb that allows for a sentential complement based on a verb can form the core of such a complement itself. These comprise verbs of perception such as see, hear, feel and verbs of mental content such as know, remember, believe, suppose, and the like. The type of overall constituent ordering in Turkish is often characterized as subject-object-verb; the verb is preferably put at the end of the sentence and all other constituents precede it. This has important implications for the internal structure of the Turkish sentence, namely that the embedded verb in a sentential complement undergoes the process of nominalization, as is visible in suffixes signalling tense and person. Passive verbs are formed by suffixation and this explains why stacking of passive forms is quite common as well.

This chapter examines language that is inappropriate for academic writing and reveals the individual terms that should be avoided. It explores adjective choice and how writing can be improved by removing unnecessary phrases from sentences, to improve clarity and understanding. It ends with a discussion on the merits of using noun phrases and verbs.