Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics (Jan 2007)
The distribution of referential adjectives in psych nominalizations in English and Romanian
Abstract
Previous accounts of referential adjectives have examined their status in the structure of action nominalizations in correlation with the event vs. result interpretation of nominals. They have been argued to behave like noun phrases (Grimshaw 1990), to introduce new entities into the discourse (Giorgi and Longobardi 1991) or to simply modify deverbal nominals (Oersnes and Markantonatou 2002). This paper attempts a comparative study of referential adjectives in psychological nominalizations in English and Romanian. We argue that the restrictions on the occurrence of referential adjectives in psych nominalizations are imposed by the language specific functional structure of the DP. The paper is organized as follows. In section one we briefly overview the literature on referential adjectives in action nominalizations. In section two we look at the distribution of referential adjectives in psychological nominalizations and in section three we correlate modification by referential adjectives with the process vs. result interpretation of psych nominals.
