0 INTRODUCTION

7. CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
process, which took place earlier in more oral/informal genres and in nominalizations
having only post-head dependents, and only later in those showing both pre- and post-head
dependents. Since post-head dependents started to be verbal, whereas pre-head ones
remained nominal, mixed forms appeared and coexisted for a while with both nominal and
verbal ones. These mixed gerunds were relatively common since they could be used in
slots where verbal formations were not yet accepted (Fanego 1996). This chapter also
described the process of change which –ing forms were undergoing at that time, and
justified the necessity of taking all these formations into consideration in Chapter 6 for a
thorough account of nominalizations in the EModE period.
Chapter 3 dealt with nominal complementation and argument structure. It
considered the existing theories on argument structure and analyzed the main dependents
of nominalizations. In this vein Section 3.1 discussed the similarities between the items
that co-occur with nominalizations and those that co-occur with their base verbs. Here the
idea of valency reduction (Mackenzie 1985: 32) was also introduced. Finally, the topic of
argument structure in nominals was presented, listing the main views in support of it
(Vendler 1968; Zubizarreta 1987 and Grimshaw 1990) and those against it (Anderson
1983; Higginbotham 1983 and Dowty 1989). However, the definition of argument
structure was fully developed later, in Section 3.2. Grimshaw advocated the view that not
all nouns have argument structure, only complex event nominals. This contrasts with
Picallo (1991), who argued that result nouns may also select arguments. Similarly, within
the framework of Distributed Morphology (see Marantz 1999), Alexiadou (2001: 66)
proposed that both result and event nouns are capable of licensing arguments, although she
did concede that it was only in the case of event nouns that these arguments were
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