N and D nominalizations

Abstract

This paper addresses deverbal nominals denoting events (Complex Event Nominals or AS-Ns, Grimshaw 1990 and Borer 1999 respectively), that have been argued to convey aspectual information. I put a particular emphasis on French -age and -ée nominals, which have been argued to encode grammatical (im)perfective Aspect (Ferret et al. 2010, Knittel 2011). The aim is to contribute to a general syntactic theory of nominalizations involving aspectual projections, and to investigate their interaction with other, in particular categorizing, layers of structure. The analysis distinguishes between n-Nominalizations which involve derivational affixes introducing categorial information, and default D-Nominalizations in which the Determiner embeds aspectual (im)perfective morphology. I demonstrate that outer Aspect (an inflectional layer selecting verbalized structure) is only expected in the latter type of nominalizations, and that in the other cases, a relevant analysis should derive effects on the aspectual calculus by entailments at the level of a Classifier projection, specified in terms of +/−bounded, +/−count.