LUCL colloquium: Artemis Alexiadou

Speaker: Artemis Alexiadou (ZAS Berlin)

Title: Nominalization: the view from syntactic approaches to word formation

Date/Time: 20th of February, 15:15-17:00

Location: Herta Mohr, Witte Singel 27A, room 0.20 Leiden

Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss two issues within syntactic approaches to nominalization, focusing on Grimshaw’s (1990) complex event nominals (CENs), that are currently controversially discussed. The first one concerns the question of whether the derivation of CENs is phrasal as opposed to involving complex head formation. The second one concerns the question of whether CENs may have the same transitive structure found in the verbal domain as opposed to being intransitive. Approaching these issues will shed light on the nature of nominalization process itself, the operations that may create complex objects in the syntax more generally and the cross-linguistic variation found in this domain.