Eventualities under deadjectival nominalizations

Abstract

In this paper the behavior of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish is studied regarding the presence of an eventuality reading. It is shown that whereas abstract nominalizations (la belleza del libro ‘the beauty of the book’) clearly encode an eventuality according to standard tests, neuter nominalizations (lo bello del libro ‘the beautiful part of the book’) lack any eventuality reading altogether. It is argued that the difference lies in the different kind of nominalization process involved. As for abstract nominalizations, after the nominalizer is merged, the nominal functional head Classifier will encode the stative eventuality derived from the adjective root. In the case of neuter nominalizations, we lack any nominal functional structure, but rather the AP is directly selected by the neuter determiner, which, following a suggestion by McNally & de Swart (2012), is the syntactic realization of Chierchia’s (1982) Ç (‘cap’) operator, which shifts a property into its entity correlate. Moreover, a slight modification of this semantic operation allows a simple and principled analysis of the difference between the two main neuter deadjectival nominalizations.

Keywords

• nominalization
• eventuality
• adjective
• property
• degree