JENom 9

9th Workshop on Nominalizations

9èmes Journées d'Etude sur les NOMinalisations

Date: June 17–18, 2021

Location: The workshop will be held online.

It will be a fully interactive event allowing participants to connect with other attendees on one platform.

Invited Speakers

Pius ten Hacken (Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck)

Chiara Melloni (Università di Verona)

Jim Wood (Yale University)

General Description

The JENom workshop series was initiated in France, which explains the French acronym JENom from Journées d'Études sur les Nominalisations. The first eight editions took place in Nancy, Lille, Paris, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Verona, and Fribourg. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic the 9^th edition of the workshop will be held online and will be jointly organized by the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and the University of Silesia, Poland.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers representing different theoretical paradigms and discuss most recent developments in the area of nominalizations with special emphasis on their interactions with inflection and compounding.

From a cross-linguistic perspective deverbal nominalizations can be thought of as a hybrid category, exhibiting properties of underived nouns and typical verbs (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Comrie and Thompson 1985). Mixed behaviour of action nominals situates them on a cline between purely non-finite categories such as infinitives and gerunds, on the one hand, and referential nominals, on the other. The link with non-finite categories is further strengthened by the same morphological marking (e.g. -ing in English, -en in German). Grimshaw’s (1990) seminal monograph instigated research into the realization of Argument Structure and Event Structure in deverbal nominalizations and continues to hold interest, especially in syntax-oriented models of morphology (Rozwadowska 1997, Borer 2003, 2005, 2013, Alexiadou 2001, 2010ab, Harley 2009, Roeper 2005). Despite extensive research and robust literature, basic distinctions remain far from settled and the nature of the verb to noun category switch is not yet fully understood (Rozwadowska 2017, Alexiadou and Borer 2020). One of the key characteristics differentiating Complex Event Nominals (CENs) from Simple Event Nominals (SENs) is the presence of ‘obligatory arguments’ (Grimshaw 1990), which has been repeatedly questioned by lexicalists (e.g. Newmeyer 2009, Bierwisch 2009, Bloch-Trojnar 2013, Reuland 2011, Lieber 2016), and has recently been undermined by Alexiadou (2009), who argues for the dissociation of the layers of structure responsible for AS-licensing and purely verbalizing layers (see also Grimm and McNally 2013). Since differences can be observed between the ways in which particular researchers draw the boundary between CENs, SENs and Result Nouns, or between ASNs and referential nominals, the controversial questions that can be broached by participants in the workshop may relate to the presence or absence of the verbal layer in SENs (Alexiadou 2009) and the potential need to distinguish more “nouny” and more “verbal” CENs/ASNs (Sleeman and Brito 2010). Furthermore, the close-knit structural relationship between the presence of the AspP projection and the internal argument licensing (Borer 2005), which has until recently been almost axiomatic, has come to be questioned (Alexiadou 2017, Bloch-Trojnar 2020). Other contentious issues include Argument structure/Aspect realization in relation to overt morphological marking (Cetnarowska 1993), CENs’ (in)ability to pluralize (Alexiadou, Iordăchioaia and Soare 2010) and their semantic interpretation (Malicka-Kleparska 1988, Melloni 2011, Grimm and McNally 2015, 2016, Wood 2020ab).

The preservation of aspectual and argument-taking properties in nominalizations in synthetic compounds still remains an understudied area. Borer (2012, 2013) has shown that synthetic nominal compounds cannot appear with aspectual adverbials in English, which would suggest that they do not share the aspectual projections characteristic of the basic verbs. However, this property may or may not coincide with the argument supporting nature of such compounds (Alexiadou 2017, Iordăchioaia et al. 2017; cf. also Iordăchioaia 2019 for some counterevidence to Borer’s claims). In view of the definitional problems of compounding as such (Bauer 2017, ten Hacken 1994), it is not surprising that there is no universal definition of synthetic compounding, although there are some features which distinguish it from other compound types (Selkirk 1982, Wiese 2008, Lieber and Štekauer 2009, Olsen 2015). There is no agreement as to whether the structure should be headed by the nominalizing suffix or the deverbal noun (Lieber 1983, Lieber 2004). It would be interesting to establish cross-linguistic tendencies in synthetic compound noun formation and interpretation also in comparison to synthetic compound structures headed by participles/deverbal adjectives and root compounds (ten Hacken 2016, Cetnarowska 2019).

It is the tradition of the workshop that papers relating to any aspect of nominalizations are welcome. We invite contributions concerning deadjectival nominalizations, nominalizations of stative verbs and other types of deverbal nominals with reference to such issues as the presence of event implications, gradient categorial behaviour, polysemy, affix homonymy/ polyfunctionality and productivity. Issues of paradigmatic organization of derived nominals and compound nouns (Bauer 2019) can also be addressed.

We invite papers dealing with the abovementioned issues from different angles including the syntax-based neo-constructional approach, the constructionist vantage point as well as the lexicalist perspective. We also invite data-oriented contributions from computational, experimental and diachronic studies on various languages.

References

Alexiadou, Artemis, and Hagit Borer (eds.). 2020. Nominalization: 50 years on from Chomsky’s remarks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alexiadou, Artemis, Gianina Iordăchioaia, and Elena Soare. 2010. Number/Aspect interactions in the syntax of nominalizations: A Distributed Morphology approach. Journal of Linguistics 46: 537–574.

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Functional structure in nominals: Nominalization and ergativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2009. On the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes: The case of (Greek) nominals. In Anastasia Giannakidou, and Monika Rathert (eds.), Quantification, definiteness and nominalization, 253–280. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2010a. Nominalizations: A probe into the architecture of grammar. Part I: The nominalization puzzle. Language and Linguistics Compass 4: 496–511.

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2010b. Nominalizations: A probe into the architecture of grammar. Part II: The aspectual properties of nominalizations, and the lexicon vs. syntax debate. Language and Linguistics Compass 4: 512–523.

Alexiadou, Artemis. 2017. On the complex relationship between deverbal compounds and argument supporting nominals. In Maria Bloch-Trojnar, and Anna Malicka-Kleparska (eds.), Aspect and valency in nominals, 53–82. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bauer, Laurie. 2017. Compounds and compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, Laurie 2019. Notions of paradigm and their value in word-formation. Word Structure 12: 153–175.

Bierwisch, Manfred. 2009. Nominalization – lexical and syntactic aspects. In Anastasia Giannakidou, and Monika Rathert (eds.), Quantification, definiteness and nominalization, 281–320. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bloch-Trojnar, Maria. 2013. The mechanics of transposition: A study of action nominalisations in English, Irish and Polish. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego.

Bloch-Trojnar, Maria. 2020. Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations. Journal of Word Formation 4 (2): 143–163.

Borer, Hagit. 2003. Exo-skeletal vs. endo-skeletal explanations: Syntactic projections and the lexicon. In John Moore, and Maria Polinsky (eds.), The nature of explanation in linguistic theory, 31–67. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Borer, Hagit. 2005 The normal course of events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Grimm, Scott, and Louise McNally. 2016. The+VPing as anaphoric event type reference. In Kyeong-min Kim et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 33^rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 167–175. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedinds Project.

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ten Hacken, Pius. 1994. Defining morphology. A principled approach to determining the boundaries of compounding, derivation and inflection. Hildesheim: Olms.

ten Hacken, Pius (ed.). 2016. The semantics of compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Iordăchioaia, Gianina. 2019. English deverbal compounds with and without arguments. In Eszter Ronai, Laura Stigliano, and Yenan Sun (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. CLS, 179–194.

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Melloni, Chiara. 2011. Event and result nominals. A morpho-semantic approach. Bern: Peter Lang.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2009. Current challenges to the Lexicalist Hypothesis. An overview and a critique. In William D. Lewis, Simin Karimi, Heidi Harley, and Scott O. Farrar (eds.), Time and again. Theoretical perspectives on formal linguistics, 91–117. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Olsen, Susan. 2015. Composition. In Peter O. Müller, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen, and Franz Rainer (eds.), Word-Formation: An international handbook of the languages of Europe, volume I, 364–386. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Roeper, Thomas. 2005. Chomsky’s remarks and the transformationalist hypothesis. In Pavol Štekauer, and Rochelle Lieber (eds.), Handbook of word-formation, 125–146. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Rozwadowska, Bożena. 2017. Derived nominals. In Martin Everaert, and Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell companion to syntax, Second Edition, 1263–1305. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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Sleeman, Petra, and Ana Maria Brito. 2010. Aspect and argument structure of deverbal nominalizations: A split vP analysis. In Artemis Alexiadou, and Monika Rathert (eds.), The syntax of nominalizations across languages and frameworks, 199–217. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Wood, Jim. 2020a. Icelandic nominalizations and allosemy. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005004

Wood, Jim. 2020b. Prepositional prefixing and allosemy in nominalizations. In Artemis Alexiadou, and Hagit Borer (eds.), 391–418. Nominalization: 50 years on from Chomsky’s remarks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/nominalizations-jenom9/home

Email

jenom9.lublin@gmail.com