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3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

c. The announcements that the problem was solved (and that no<br />

issues remained) were greeted with skepticism.<br />

Grimshaw (1990) concludes that sentential complements cannot be considered as<br />

arguments belonging to the argument structure of a complex event nominal because nouns<br />

“never theta-mark directly but only by prepositions” (1990: 6). These prepositions can be<br />

added to NPs, as in (94) below, but not to sentential complements, which are considered as<br />

optional complements licensed by the lexical semantic structure.<br />

(94) The announcement by her mother < Her mother announced…<br />

3.4. Concluding remarks<br />

This chapter has summarized the main views on nominal complementation and argument<br />

structure in nominalizations and has provided a detailed account of the main dependents<br />

that can combine with these formations.<br />

As we have seen, these dependents play a role similar to that of arguments in<br />

sentences, but it cannot be claimed that nominalizations have an exactly parallel structure<br />

to their non-nominalized counterparts. The reason for this is that the number of arguments<br />

appearing in nominalizations is remarkably lower than in their sentential counterparts, the<br />

process of nominalization usually implying a valency reduction.<br />

Most of the information provided in this chapter has been taken from theoreticallyoriented<br />

works, and only in very few cases has diachronic data been provided. It seems,<br />

therefore, that a corpus study is required in order to analyze the main dependents of<br />

nominalizations in the EModE period with a view to identifying the preferred patterns of<br />

usage in Early Modern scientific English.<br />

86

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