Selected Aspects of the Semantics and Syntax of De-verbal Nominalizations in English, Polish and Irish

Abstract

Bearing in mind the formal and functional complexity of the category of verbal nouns in Irish (henceforth VNs), it is not surprising that it continues to be the subject of intensive research. Much has been written on the syntax of VNs proper, i.e. verbal nouns employed in participle and infinitive constructions, and linguists are so absorbed in the debate about whether to regard them as nouns or verbs (e.g. McCloskey (1983) and Duffield (1995) are representatives of the two opposing views), that the area of de-verbal nominalizations has been neglected. This paper is meant as a modest attempt to amend this situation and present some aspects of their syntax, semantics and formal derivation. In the course of our discussion we will raise the following issues. First, we will concentrate on their argument taking properties. We will try to find out whether the binary distinction process vs. result nominals (which is considered in all studies of nominalizations) can be found in nominals derived from transitive and intransitive verbs alike. Most studies of nominalizations (Rozwadowska (1997) being a notable exception) disregard or openly exclude intransitives from the scope of their interest. Secondly, we will also consider two alternative views on the process of nominalization i.e. whether to treat result nominals as products of semantic drift (as does e.g. Malicka-Kleparska (1988)) or as products of a separate derivational process producing countable nominalizations (cf. a similar analysis proposed for English in Bloch-Trojnar (2007)). The syntactic and semantic properties of nominalizations in Irish will be compared to their Polish and English opposite numbers. Finally, we will also consider their morphophonological exponents and argue that the model of LMBM developed by Beard (1995), which separates the formal and syntactico-semantic facets of derivation, is best equipped to account for the data in question.