Deverbal nominalizations and participles (DeNAP)
Deverbal nominalizations and participles (DeNAP)
Deverbal nominalisations and participles are among the most intensively studied representatives of so-called mixed categories. At least since Chomsky (1970), they have played a central role in debates on how syntax, morphology, and semantics interact in word formation. They occupy a theoretical middle ground between verbs and nouns/adjectives: they may preserve argument structure, aspectual interpretation, and event semantics, while simultaneously exhibiting nominal or adjectival morphology and distribution (Grimshaw 1990; Alexiadou 2001; Kratzer 2000; Embick 2004; Gehrke 2011, 2013; Iordăchioaia 2020, a.m.o.).
A particularly persistent challenge concerns syncretism: participial morphology often recurs across distinct domains (eventive/verbal vs stative/adjectival; passive vs perfect), and related exponents may overlap with nominalisations across language families (e.g. Germanic, Romance, Slavic). This has generated a broad spectrum of theories, ranging from morphomic or autonomous-morphology approaches (Aronoff 1994; Maiden 2011), to accounts that locate the source of uniformity in shared syntactic cores, merger height, or embedding configurations (Embick 2000; Embick & Halle 2005; Gehrke 2013, 2015), to truncation/“bleaching” and analogy- or pattern-based approaches (Ramchand 2018; Steriade 2016; Kodner 2023, a.o.).
This workshop aims to explore nominalisations and participles from theoretical, descriptive, comparative, and methodological perspectives. Both synchronic and diachronic studies are welcome, and contributions drawing on experimental, corpus-based, or quantitative methods — as well as work on under-described varieties — are especially encouraged.
We invite contributions on any aspect of nominalisations and participles, including but not limited to the following research questions and related issues:
a) What verbal layers are preserved in nominalisations and participles, and how can structural size be diagnosed (e.g. argument realisation, aspect, event-related modifiers, agreement, reflexivisation)?
b) Do nominalisations and participles share a common syntactic core, or can similar exponents correspond to structurally distinct configurations? Do nominalisations embed participial structure, or does shared morphology mask heterogeneous derivations?
c) How should participial syncretism (eventive vs stative; passive vs perfect) be modelled: morphomic structure, shared functional heads, merger height, paradigm-internal analogy?
d) How do aspect, argument structure, and event semantics interact in deverbal nominalisations, and to what extent do these factors constrain productivity and interpretation cross-linguistically?
e) How do reflexivisation, binding, and argument realisation operate in nominalisations and participles across languages, and what do they reveal about cross-categorial differences?
f) How can agreement and other nominal/verbal diagnostics (case, determiners, clitic-related phenomena, auxiliary environments) — alongside new methods — inform our understanding of mixed-category architecture?
Abstracts:
We invite submissions for 20-minute talks (+10 minutes discussion).
Formatting: Times New Roman 12 pt, single-spaced, standard margins.
Abstracts must be anonymous and must be submitted in PDF form via Oxford Abstracts.