"The selection of this subject to write an interesting paper" - a study on non-deverbal complex event nominals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2176-9419.v27i2e-242610Keywords:
Nominalizations, Allosemy, Event Structure, ArgumentsAbstract
The aim of this paper is to propose a compositional and detailed analysis of the internal structure of nominal forms with eventive meaning in Portuguese, following Medeiros (2024). Of particular interest for this study are nominals that, by morphological criteria, are not deverbal, and yet pass the tests that identify the so-called complex event nominals (Grimshaw, 1990; Borer, 2013). Examples include nouns such as ‘seleção’ (‘selection’), which derives the verb ‘selecionar’ (‘to
select’), and ‘captura’ (‘capture’), which derives the verb ‘capturar’ (‘to capture’). We will propose here that such nominal forms lack an internal verbal (or adjectival) layer, and that the nominalizer itself (little n; Marantz, 1999) may be interpreted as introducing the event reading, depending on the elements syntactically combined with it (Marantz, 2013; Medeiros, 2024).
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