In this paper we focus on the ability of ARGUMENT SUPPORTING NOMINALIZATIONS (ASNs) to realize morphological plural. We think that this aspect of their behavior is instrumental in our understanding of their properties and their syntax within one language and across languages. Our factual investigation deals with Romanian, English, German and Spanish, as well as Polish and Bulgarian ASNs. We show that the interplay between the aspectual properties -either inner or outer aspect -and the nominal/verbal characteristics, as justifying the internal structure of ASNs, allows us to characterize the ability of ASNs to accept plural marking across languages. We further argue for a flexible syntactic theory that enables us to capture the mixed properties of ASNs. We provide evidence for two parameters of variation. The first parameter is whether ASNs involve a nominalizer or not. If a nominalizer is not included, ASNs lack nominal internal properties. If a nominalizer is included, the second parameter comes into play and allows for language variation with respect to the height of attachment of the nominalizer. Specifically, a nominalizer can attach to (and thus nominalize) distinct layers of syntactic structure (VP vs. AspectP).[1] We thank the editors and two anonymous JL referees for stimulating comments and suggestions. We also thank Barbara Citko for suggesting the investigation of Slavic languages, and to
We investigate the distribution of verbal and nominal layers in Romance and Germanic nominalizations. Specifically, we examine pairs of 'verbal' vs. 'nominal' nominalizations in two Romance (Spanish & Romanian) and two Germanic (English & German) languages. Our study proposes a large spectrum of nominal and verbal properties. While these are differently instantiated among languages, the variation we find cannot be attributed to a Germanic vs. Romance parameter; instead, we find micro-variation constrained by the compatibility between the general building blocks of verbal and nominal categories. Besides the vP-layers responsible for argument structure and Aktionsart and the DP-layer responsible for the nominal external syntax, we make a case for further functional verbal and nominal layers in nominalizations: Asp(ect)P, Class(ifier)P, and Num(ber)P. These projections are in complementary distribution in some languages and co-occur in others. 1 We thank the audience of the congress Variation and change in Romance and Germanic noun phrase at the University of Amsterdam, two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this volume for comments and suggestions.
Control as Movement (see Hornstein 1999 and subsequent work). We further refer the reader to Alboiu (2007), Alexiadou et al. (to appear), where it is argued that Greek and Romanian have extensive backward control across Obligatory Control (OC) complements.
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