N and D nominalizations

Abstract

This paper addresses deverbal nominals denoting events (Complex Event Nominals or AS-Ns, Grimshaw 1990 and Borer 1999, respectively), that have been argued to convey aspectual information. I focus on French –age and –ée nominals, which have been argued to encode grammatical (im)perfective Aspect (Ferret et al. 2010, Knittel 2011). The aim is to contribute to a general syntactic theory of nominalizations involving aspectual projections, and to investigate their interaction with other, in particular categorizing, layers of structure. The analysis distinguishes between n-nominalizations which involve derivational affixes introducing categorial information, and default D-nominalizations in which the Determiner embeds aspectual (im)perfective morphology. I demonstrate that outer Aspect (an inflectional layer selecting verbalized structure) is only expected in the latter type of nominalizations, and that in the other cases, a relevant analysis should derive effects on the aspectual calculus by entailments at the level of a Classifier projection, specified in terms of +/-bounded, +/-count.

Keywords

• nominalizations
• mixed projections
• categorization
• aspect
• plurality