0 INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONCEPT OF NOMINALIZATION
sentences (11a) and (11b) below. Preparation in (11a) refers to the actual event of
someone’s preparing a manuscript, and it is said that this event lasts for several weeks.
Despite its being an event, it is treated grammatically as if it were an entity, and as such it
is commented on. Mixture in (11b) refers to a concrete entity, as can be inferred from the
fact that it can be ‘shaped.’ However, an event of mixing must still have taken place.
(11) a. The preparation of the manuscript takes several weeks.
b. The resulting mixture is shaped into balls.
The “Iconicity of Lexical Categories Principle” (Hopper and Thompson 1985:
178) predicts that “a form referring to an event which is being taken as an entity is
functioning neither to report an event nor to refer to a manipulable entity, but has
elements of both.” It could be very well expected that its morphology reflects this
ambivalence, and that is why nominalizations show verbal features such as aspect or
mood and argument-taking properties, as well as nominal ones such as possessive
markers or determiners (see Chapter 3). As De Smet (2010: 1186) claims,
[b]y their nature, deverbal nominalizations and adjectivizations are
atypical members of their word class, as they designate events rather
than objects or properties. It is therefore understandable that they get
luted into clausal syntax, but because this requires a complex
reconfiguration of the syntax of a phrase into that of a clause (...), the
change is inevitably gradual. Even when the phrase has become a
proper clause its distribution will still be reminiscent of its phrasal
origins. The history of such nonfinite clauses is a long story of gradual
dissociation from their phrasal origin.
In short, despite being semantically predisposed to belong to a particular category,
roots can be turned into items of a different category through derivational processes. It is
sometimes the case that lexical elements, such as nominalizations, shifting from a
category to another exhibit semantic and morphological features of both categories.
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