Date: July 3-4, 2025

Location: University of Graz, Austria

Invited Speakers

Predrag Kovačević (University of Novi Sad)

Rossella Varvara (University of Pavia)

Barbara Schirakowski (Free University of Berlin)

General Description

The JENom workshop series aims to bring together researchers who work on the morphology, syntax, and semantics of nominalizations. It was initiated in France, which explains the French acronym JENom from Journées d'Études sur les Nominalisations. Previous editions have been held in Nancy, Lille, Paris, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Verona, Fribourg, Lublin and Nantes. The 11th edition will be organized for the first time in Austria, at the University of Graz, between July 3-4, 2025.

The study of nominalizations has represented one of the main topics in modern linguistic research starting at least as early as in Lees (1960), Vendler (1968) and Lakoff (1970). Especially after Chomsky (1970), nominalizations have formed the grounds for the split between lexicalist and syntactic approaches to morphology with many implications for the ongoing debate about the organization of a theory of language and the place morphology and the lexicon occupy in it. Besides generative linguistics in the Chomskyan tradition, the special categorial status of nominalizations has also figured prominently in lexicalist (e.g., Tribout 2010, Bloch-Trojnar 2013, HPSG in Malouf 2000, LFG in Lowe 2020) and functionalist (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Heyvaert 2003) theories of language. In the generative literature, Grimshaw’s (1990) seminal work highlighting the argument structural properties of nominalizations laid the theoretical foundations for much of the debate over the past few decades as in Marantz (1997), Alexiadou (2001), Harley & Noyer (2000), van Hout & Roeper (1998), and also later work as in monographs such as Borer (2013) and Lieber (2016) or contributions to edited volumes (Iordăchioaia, Roy & Takamine 2013, Paul 2014, Cuyckens, Heyvaert & Hartmann 2019, Alexiadou & Borer 2020, Iordăchioaia & Soare 2020).

Topics on nominalizations concerning argument structure realization, polysemy, reference, nominalization and natural language ontology, categorization and the status of nominalizers, suffix polyfunctionality, suffix competition, mixed categorial properties, functional structure at the interfaces between phonology, morphology, syntax and (lexical) semantics and many others have remained as actual as ever and have more recently incited for further inter-framework discussion especially from a more data-oriented perspective: see experimental approaches in Schirakowski (2020, 2021a, 2021b) and Gulgowski et al. (2021), as well as data-oriented, corpus-based and computational studies such as Varvara (2017), Lapesa et al. (2018), Varvara et al. (2021), Salvadori & Huyghe (2022), Varvara et al. (2022), Kawaletz (2023) and Lara Clares (2023). These works also bring us back to the original discussion on natural language ontology in nominalizations (see McNally & Grimm 2015, 2016, 2022 and Huang 2024).

Special Theme on Mixed Categories

To allow for a broader discussion on categorial shift in morphology and its interfaces, this year’s edition of JENom proposes a special theme on mixed categories, which will be integrated with the general theme of nominalizations.

While ‘mixed categories’ is a term that automatically sends one to nominalizations in the tradition of Chomsky (1970) and the seminal work by Borsley & Kornfilt (2001), in this edition of JENom we aim to also integrate contributions on non-nominal mixed categories, which may bring new light into how a theory of grammar needs to be designed to accommodate mixed categories in general and to account for mixed nominalizations as a special case. The typical mixed categories are represented by non-finite (e.g. participial, gerundive and infinitival) constructions (Abney 1987, Pires 2006, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2008, Alexiadou et al. 2014, Panagiotidis 2014, Borik & Gehrke 2019, a.o.) but we are looking forward to any further empirical phenomena that could be viewed as mixed categories (see Nikolaeva & Spencer 2019). 

Studies on nominalizations as well as mixed categories (i.e. on their own or in comparison to nominalizations) are welcome to this eleventh edition of the JENom workshop. We invite contributions with a descriptive, theoretical, computational, or experimental focus on various languages and from different theoretical frameworks.

References

Abney, S. P. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.

Alexiadou, A. 2001. Functional Structure in Nominals. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Alexiadou, A. & E. Anagnostopoulou. 2008. Structuring participles. In C. B. Chang & H. J. Haynie (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 33–41. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Alexiadou, A. & H. Borer (eds). 2020. Nominalization: 50 Years on from Chomsky's Remarks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alexiadou, A., B. Gehrke & F. Schäfer. 2014. The argument structure of adjectival participles revisited. Lingua 149B. 118–138.

Bloch-Trojnar, M. 2013. The Mechanics of Transposition. A Study of Action Nominalisations in English, Irish and Polish. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

Borer, H. 2013. Taking Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Borik, O. & B. Gehrke (eds). 2019. Participles: Form, use and meaning, special issue, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 109.

Chomsky, N. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Jacobs, R. & P. Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in English Transformational Grammar, 184–221. Waltham, MA: Ginn & Company.

Cuyckens, H., L. Heyvaert & S. Hartmann (eds). 2019. Categorial Shift: From Description to Theory and Back Again, special issue, Language Sciences vol. 73.

Grimm S. & L. McNally. 2015. The -ing dynasty: rebuilding the semantics of nominalizations. Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 25), ed S D'Antonio, M Moroney, CR Little, 82–102. Washington DC: LSA

Grimm S. & L. McNally. 2016. The+VPing as anaphoric event-type reference. Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 33, 167–75 Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proc. Proj.

Grimm, S. & L. McNally. 2022. Nominalization and natural language ontology. Annual Review of Linguistics 8, 257-277.

Grimshaw, J. 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gulgowski, P, J. Błaszczak & V. Puhacheuskaya. 2021. The influence of aspect on the countability of Polish deverbal nominalizations: Evidence from an acceptability rating study. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 40.1: 1-30.

Harley, H. & R. Noyer. 2000. Formal versus encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalisations. In Peeters, B., ed., The lexicon-encyclopedia interface, 349-374. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Heyvaert, L. 2003. A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

van Hout, A. & T. Roeper. 1998. Events and aspectual structure in derivational morphology. In Harley, H., ed., Papers from the UPenn/MIT Roundtable on Argument Structure and Aspect. MITWPL 32, 175-200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Huang, Z. 2024. Verbal gerunds in English: a case study in natural language ontology and referentiality. PhD thesis, University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

Iordăchioaia, G., I. Roy & K. Takamine (eds). 2013. Categorization and Category Change. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Iordăchioaia, G. & E. Soare (eds). 2020. Nominalization, special issue, Zeitschrift für Wortbildung/Journal of Word-formation 4.2.

Kawaletz, K. 2023. The semantics of English -ment nominalizations. Language Science Press, Berlin.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. 1993. Nominalizations. London: Routledge.

Lakoff, G. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.

Lapesa, G., L. Kawaletz, I. Plag, M. Andreou, M. Kisselew & S. Padó. 2018. Disambiguation of newly derived nominalizations in context: A distributional semantics approach. Word Structure, 11:277–312.

Lara Clares, C. 2023. Morphological competition in present-day English nominalisation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Granada.

Lees, R. B. 1960. The Grammar of English Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.

Lowe, J. J. 2020. Mixed projections and syntactic categories. Journal of Linguistics 56.12: 315-357.

Malouf, R. 2000. Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Marantz, A. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4, 201-225.

Nikolaeva, I. & A. Spencer. 2019. Mixed Categories. The Morphosyntax of Noun Modification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Panagiotidis, P. E. 2014. Categorial features: A generative theory of word class cat­egories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paul, I. (ed). 2014. Cross-linguistic Investigations of Nominalization Patterns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Pires, A. 2006. The minimalist syntax of defective domains: Gerunds and infinitives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Salvadori, J. & R. Huyghe. 2022. Affix polyfunctionality in French deverbal nominalizations. Morphology, 33:1–39.

Schirakowski, B. 2021a. Nominalisierte Infinitive im Spanischen. [Linguistische Arbeiten 579]. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.

Schirakowski, B. 2021b. What constrains the formation of Spanish nominalized infinitives?  A case study on transitive base verbs and event interpretations. In Marc‐Olivier Hinzelin, Natascha Pomino & Eva‐Maria Remberger (eds.), Formal approaches to Romance morphosyntax: Linking variation to theory, 225–250. Berlin: De Gruyter. 

Schirakowski, B. 2020. (No) competition between deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives in Spanish. Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 9(22). 257–283.

Varvara, R.. 2017. Verbs as nouns: empirical investigations on event-denoting nominalizations. Ph.D. thesis, University of Trento.

Varvara, R., G. Lapesa & S. Padó. 2021. Grounding semantic transparency in context a distributional semantic study on German event nominalizations. Morphology, 31:409–446.

Varvara, R., J. Salvadori & R. Huyghe. 2022. Annotating complex words to investigate the semantics of derivational processes. In Harry Bunt, editor, Proceedings of the 18th Joint ACL- ISO workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-18), pages 133–141. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Paris.

Vendler, Z. 1968. Adjectives and Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/jenom-nominalizations/home

Email

jenom.11.graz@gmail.com