0 INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONCEPT OF NOMINALIZATION
non-restrictive modification provides a secondary comment on the head that it modifies.
It adds a predication to the main predication.
When an object or a property is intended to be used predicatively, its morphology
does not change, it only requires the support of the auxiliary be, which carries the relevant
verbal inflections. When used for modification, verbs require an additional morpheme.
This morpheme can be a bound affix (the sleeping child) or a phonologically relatively
free form, as in relative clause constructions (the child who was sleeping), where a finite
predicate form is syntactically subordinated to the nominal head. In the case of nouns,
most of them require the presence of an additional morpheme. Morphological affixation
to the roots may occur as in vehicular in Table 1 above. The usual morphosyntactic
means for expressing adnominal modification is some sort of genitive construction
(English has two forms; see sections 3.3.1.2 and 3.3.2.1). Nouns can also function as
posthead modifiers, but they require the use of prepositions such as for, with, in, by, etc.
(e.g. in the vehicle).
Verbs can have a referential function by undergoing nominalization processes.
Croft (1991: 49) claims that nominalized forms lose verbal character and gain nominal
character. This is also supported by Langacker (2002 [1991]: 98) when he points out the
semantic difference between the verb explode and its nominalization explosion. As he
concedes, both can be used to describe the same event, but they contrast semantically
since they employ different images to structure the same conceptual content. While
explode imposes a processual construal on the profiled event, explosion portrays it as an
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