0 INTRODUCTION

1. THE CONCEPT OF NOMINALIZATION
What this piece of evidence seems to indicate is that, for Chomsky, both the
transformational and the lexicalist hypotheses are valid when dealing with
nominalizations. The important point here is that the former applies with gerundives,
while the latter is correct for derived and mixed forms.
1.3.3. Nominalization as “squish”
As a reaction against the traditional transformational view, Ross (1973, 2004: 387)
proposes a “necessary relaxation of the claim that sequences of elements either are or are
not members of some constituent class.” That is what he calls “membership to a degree.”
Following this idea of “squish,” Mackenzie (1996: 327-328) also develops on the
“different points on the nominalization trail.” This nouniness squish leads from fully
verbal to fully nominal, as seen in (16) below:
(16) a. the finite clause
That my horse won the race came as a great surprise.
b. the gerund
My horse winning the race came as a great surprise.
c. the genitive-gerund
My horse’s winning the race came as a great surprise.
d. the productive nominalization
My horse’s winning of the race came as a great surprise.
e. the nonproductive nominalization
My horse’s victory in the race came as a great surprise.
Comrie (1976), who relies on both Chomsky’s (1957, 1970) transformational
approach and on Lees’ (1968 [1960]) work on nominalizations, does not restrict his study
to the English language, but also draws examples from Slavic, Turkic and classical
Arabic, among other languages. He concludes that action nominal constructions across
languages form a “continuum” from noun phrase-like and sentence-like action nominals.
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