Transpositions and argument structure

Abstract

Considerable attention has been devoted in the recent literature to the morphosyntax of deverbal action nominalizations (Comrie and Thompson 1985; Grimshaw 1990; Rozwadowska 1997; Zubizarreta 1987; see Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993 for a typological survey), especially those that give rise to so-called ‘mixed categories’ (Lefebvre and Muysken 1988), in which a nominalization shows some of the categorial properties of a noun and some of the properties of a verb. Rather less attention has been directed towards other types of morphological category which share some of the general features of nominalizations such as participles and relational adjectives. A participle is a verb form which shows the external syntax of an adjective, while a relational adjective can be thought of as a noun form showing the external syntax of an adjective. In a great many languages the only significant effect of the process is to shift the word from one syntactic category to another. Beard (1995), who has discussed these types of process in some detail, refers to this as ‘transposition’.

I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for supporting some aspects of the research reported here, Project no. R000236115. I am grateful to Keith Brown for detailed discussion of a number of aspects of these ideas. Thanks also to Greg Stump and Steven Lapointe for helpful discussion, and to Marina Zaretskaya for discussion of some of the Russian examples, and to an anonymous referee for very detailed and thoughtful criticism. Versions of these ideas have been presented at the Workshop on Inflection, 8th Morphology Conference, Vienna, 6th February, 1996, and the Associação Portuguesa de Lingüística, University of Lisbon, 1 October 1997. The paper has benefited from the comments of participants in the Research Workshop in Argument Structure at the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, participants at the Workshop on Inflection, 8th Morphology Conference, Vienna, 6th February, 1996, the audience at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring 1997 meeting (8 April), University of Edinburgh, and the participants in the 18 April 1997 meeting of ‘Challenges for Inflection Description’, funded by the ESRC, particularly Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar, and the Lexical Functional Grammar 97 meeting, University of California San Diego, especially Joan Bresnan, Phil LeSourd, Joan Mating and Nigel Vincent. I would particularly like to thank the organizers of the First Mediterranean Conference on Morphology for their invitation to present these ideas to that meeting. Default disclaimers apply.