Argumentality and the distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan

ABSTRACT The relationship between the distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan and the argument/adjunct property of relevant syntactic elements is approached from a generative perspective. The distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan demonstrates a regular pattern. Some nominalizers are bi-functional in that they can mark both participant and event nominalizations while others are uni-functional in that they can only mark participant nominalizations. It is found that the difference between the two types of nominalizers correlates to whether the nominalizer (NML) is argument-associated or adjunct-associated. An account of the correlation is developed in the theoretical framework of generative grammar. It is argued that the syntactic derivation of an NML-phrase gives rise to a binding relationship between the nominalizer and the suppressed element in the source constituent Aspect Phrase (AspP) or the AspP itself, leading to a condition on its semantic interpretation. The condition is satisfied in a participant NML-phrase headed by a nominalizer of either type and in an event NML-phrase headed by a bi-functional nominalizer. It is not in an event NML-phrase headed by a uni-functional nominalizer for the reason that in the calculation of event semantics arguments align with events while adjuncts align with predicates. Specifically, a bi-functional nominalizer, being argument-associated, semantically matches both a suppressed argument in a participant NML-phrase and the source constituent AspP, whereas a uni-functional one, being adjunct-associated, semantically matches a suppressed adjunct in a participant NML-phrase but not the source constituent AspP. Consequently, no event NML-phrase headed by an adjunct-associated nominalizer is found in this language. The findings of this study have implications for both analyzing the distribution of nominalizers in other Tibeto-Burman languages and the syntactic and semantic mechanisms that constrain them, and for classifying the argument/adjunct asymmetry, which is fundamental in most current linguistic frameworks as well as research on human sentence processing.