From Verb to Noun: Deverbal Nominalizations in English, Hungarian, and Serbian

This thesis investigates the distribution and syntactic structures of deverbal nominalizations in English, Hungarian, and Serbian. Deverbal nominalizations are distinct from regular nouns in that they are derived from verbs and thus contain both nominal and verbal properties. The significant work by Grimshaw (1990) established specific diagnostics advocating a strict dichotomy between event and result nominals: event nominals emphasize the action denoted by the verb, and result nominals focus on the outcome of the event denoted by the verb. However, ample cross-linguistic evidence shows that the distinction between these two types of deverbal nominals is less clear-cut than thought before, and a lot of this variation is found in forming the plural of these nominals. There is also no uniform syntactic structure for these kinds of nominals. This means that all the existing syntactic proposals in the literature deviate from one another in multiple ways. Therefore, the primary objective...Show moreThis thesis investigates the distribution and syntactic structures of deverbal nominalizations in English, Hungarian, and Serbian. Deverbal nominalizations are distinct from regular nouns in that they are derived from verbs and thus contain both nominal and verbal properties. The significant work by Grimshaw (1990) established specific diagnostics advocating a strict dichotomy between event and result nominals: event nominals emphasize the action denoted by the verb, and result nominals focus on the outcome of the event denoted by the verb. However, ample cross-linguistic evidence shows that the distinction between these two types of deverbal nominals is less clear-cut than thought before, and a lot of this variation is found in forming the plural of these nominals. There is also no uniform syntactic structure for these kinds of nominals. This means that all the existing syntactic proposals in the literature deviate from one another in multiple ways. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to bridge the gaps in the literature on the usage of deverbal nouns and their syntactic structures. This thesis presents acceptability judgment data on deverbal nouns that occurred in the singular and plural alongside an additional diagnostic by Grimshaw (1990): type of reading, adverbial modification, argument structure, and aspectual modification. The results indicate that Hungarian and Serbian allow plural event nominals in all contexts, while English only allows them without any modifiers. These findings are contra Grimshaw (1990) and underscore the crucial role of contextual factors in (dis)allowing plurality with event nominals. In addition to its empirical contributions, this thesis evaluates the applicability and generalizability of Grimshaw’s (1990) theorem by analyzing languages from different language families, thereby enriching the understanding of deverbal nominalizations across diverse linguistic contexts.Show less

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From Verb to Noun: Deverbal Nominalizations in English, Hungarian, and Serbian