Elena Soare

Number/aspect interactions in the syntax of nominalizations: A Distributed approach 1

In this paper we focus on the ability of A rgument S upporting N ominalizations (ASNs) to realize morphological plural. We think that this aspect of their behavior is instrumental in our understanding of their properties and their syntax within one language and across languages. Our factual investigation deals with Romanian, English, German and Spanish, as well as Polish and Bulgarian ASNs. We show that the interplay between the aspectual properties – either inner or outer aspect – and the nominal/verbal characteristics, as justifying the internal structure of ASNs, allows us to characterize the ability of ASNs to accept plural marking across languages. We further argue for a flexible syntactic theory that enables us to capture the mixed properties of ASNs. We provide evidence for two parameters of variation. The first parameter is whether ASNs involve a nominalizer or not. If a nominalizer is not included, ASNs lack nominal internal properties. If a nominalizer is included, the second parameter comes into play and allows for language variation with respect to the height of attachment of the nominalizer. Specifically, a nominalizer can attach to (and thus nominalize) distinct layers of syntactic structure (VP vs. AspectP).

Rivalry between French -age and -ée: the role of grammatical aspect in nominalization

This paper will provide an account for the existence of pairs of deverbal nominals with -age and -ee giving rise to event readings. We first study the argument structure of the bases and of the derived nominals, and establish the general tendencies. We further examine the Aktionsart of the nominalizations and of the verbal bases. We conclude that these levels of investigation are not sufficient to determine the proper contribution of the two nominalization patterns and further demonstrate that the relevant contribution they make is at the level of grammatical aspect. We therefore propose that -age introduces the imperfective viewpoint, whereas -ee introduces the perfective viewpoint.