Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), -na and -, which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss-ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with -er). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax side, I argue that -na and - overtly realize the nominal functional head that canonically assigns case to possessors when this head takes a vP complement. On the semantics side, I propose that Northern Paiute has operators that abstract over a variable inside nominalizations. This accounts for the meanings that deverbal nominalizations in Northern Paiute have, and it highlights their relationship to nominalization patterns in other languages.

Negation in Tuparí (Tupían; Brazil) is an exclusively nominal category: verbs must enter into a nominalized form to accept the negator -'om and must undergo a subsequent process of reverbalization so as to combine with tense and evidential morphology. These category-changing processes leave -'om in a low position in the clause, and scopal evidence confirms that negation is also interpreted low. In keeping with the low structural position of -'om, the same negative strategy known from finite matrix clauses appears in nonfinite embedded contexts as well.

Tuparí shows that negative phrases exhibit more crosslinguistic variation than standardly assumed: they may appear in either the nominal or verbal extended projection. This finding is not compatible with cartographic efforts to strictly circumscribe the distribution of NegP within the clause. Like nominal tense in Tupi-Guaraní and other languages, in Tuparí a grammatical category normally associated with the verbal domain instead surfaces within the nominal one. For the purpose of typological comparison, the Tuparí facts highlight the need for classifications of negation that take into account both constructional asymmetries between affirmative and negative clauses and individual negator morphemes' selectional and categorical properties.

Negative structures are generally assumed to be maximally accessible for verbal predicates, as evidenced by the requirement in many languages that nonverbal predicates be supported by a verb when negated. Indeed, the term ‘standard negation’ is used to refer to the negation of a declarative verbal clause, and yet this is at best highly restricted in Kusunda. We discuss the mood and nominalizing strategies that are employed to escape from the restrictions imposed by such a system.

Employing the ‘observation and collection’ method, this paper tracks some of the changes to the recent British English lexicon that have occurred through the use of syntactic category change. These involve primarily nominalization and verbification. Many of the examples discussed in the main body of the text and extended in the annex are of a contemporary nature.

Semantic transparency is usually defined as the extent to which the lexical meaning of a morphologically complex word can be inferred from its structure and constituents. Recent studies have emphasized the need to distinguish two aspects of transparency: relatedness (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of lexical constituents is retained in that of a complex word) and compositionality (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of a complex word is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way they are combined). In this paper, we investigate the influence of a variety of linguistic factors on both relatedness and compositionality. Our objective is twofold, as we seek to (i) determine more precisely the impact of lexical and morphological properties on transparency and (ii) better understand the distinction between relatedness and compositionality based on their respective determinants. The study focuses on deverbal nouns in French and estimates relatedness and compositionality based on human judgments and computational methods. The results indicate that the frequency and ambiguity of bases and derivatives, as well as the productivity and polyfunctionality of nominalizing suffixes, have different effects on relatedness and compositionality. They confirm the relevance of the distinction between the two aspects of transparency.

While sound glosses from the Six Dynasties and early Tang provide direct evidence for morphological alternations in Archaic Chinese, studies on the syntax of this language generally disregard these data. This neglect is due in part to perceived unreliability of these sound glosses. In this paper, I first argue that the arguments against their reliability do not stand scrutiny, and that they are not a simple philological curiosity, but have the potential to enrich studies on Archaic Chinese syntax, and plead for more collaboration between syntacticians and historical phonologists.

Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, ‘serious’ ontologists both accept the inference from ‘Fido is a dog’ to ‘Fido has the property of being a dog’ but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular terms is not generally to refer and on which they are generally ontologically noncommittal. This is the best way to reject linguistic, ‘easy’ arguments for the existence of properties. The account recommends neutralism about quantification (drawing on Barcan Marcus and Meinongianism), coherently bringing together two important yet uncombined meta-ontological movements. Moreover, it employs Ramseyan insights about the transformations to provide a nonreductionist, non-error-theoretic redundancy approach to explicit talk about properties.

In this article we explore the range of aspectual and quantificational readings that are available to two kinds of deverbal nominalizations in English, conversion nouns and -ing nominals. Using data gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC), we examine the range of readings available for the conversion and -ing forms of 106 English verbs in context. We distinguish eventive versus referential readings, looking at instances of both count and mass quantification for the two kinds of nominalizations. Within the eventive readings we also distinguish bounded versus unbounded aspectual readings, and within bounded readings two types that we call ‘completive’ and ‘package’. We argue that the quantificational properties and aspectual intepretation of both conversion and -ing nominalizations are not rigidly or even loosely determined by the form of the nominalization, but that the lexical aspect of the base verb (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive) plays some role in circumscribing aspectual readings. We argue that the strongest role in determining quantificational and aspectual readings is played by factors arising from the context in which conversion forms and -ing nominalizations are deployed. The aspectual interpretation of conversion and -ing nominalizations can be influenced by the presence of temporal and quantificational modifiers, by surrounding tenses, as well as by encyclopedic knowledge. We conclude with a consideration of the theoretical implications of our findings.

Blackfoot verbs are marked with nominal agreement morphology in relative clauses, in place of verbal inflection. These relative clauses have previously been analyzed as nominalizations. The present study shows that a nominalization analysis makes incorrect predictions about the morphological composition of relative clauses, as well as the availability of non-agentive and possessive constructions, and adjectival modification. This study demonstrates that relative clauses can relativize subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects. Based on observations about obviation, recursion, long-distance extraction, inflection, and word order, I propose that relative clauses are participles: clausal entities with a nominal superstructure. This accounts for their mixed clausal and nominal properties, and provides an analysis of Blackfoot relative clauses similar to those proposed for related Algonquian languages.

In this paper, I show that Embick's (2010) cyclic head approach to regular morphology alone cannot account for the freely available variations in the realization of nominalizers in English nominalizations involving overt verbalizers. Instead, I offer an account of the regularity effects using the technology of Local Dislocation (Embick and Noyer 2001, Embick and Marantz 2008, Embick 2007a, 2007b). Using this analysis, I derive both the variable nominalization patterns and the restrictions on particles and results in derived nominals from Sichel (2010). By treating regularity as the by-product of extant morphosyntatic operations, we can better explain the distribution of regular and irregular nominalizers and account for particle/result restrictions in English derived nominals.

The standard view concerning Case assignment or valuation is that Case is valued to determiner phrases (DPs) in syntax. Recently, Kayne has proposed an alternative model, in which Case is valued to lexical elements rather than to phrases. This article cites several facts from Finnish in support of this model. A detailed Kaynean model of Case is developed. According to this model, abstract Case is valued to lexical elements by the highest ranking c-commanding Case assigner when each phase (CP, vP) is sealed, where ranking is based on a particular Case Hierarchy and a simple notion of locality. Configurations in which Case is seemingly assigned under a spec–head relation are provided with an alternative interpretation.