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3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

3.1. Introduction<br />

The intuition in a study on nominalizations is that nouns share some of the semantic<br />

properties of their base verbs (Alexiadou 2001: 8). What is clear is that, as can be seen<br />

below, the items that co-occur with nominalizations are closely related to the range of<br />

items that co-occur with their base verbs. Grimshaw (1990: 46-47) proposes that the only<br />

restriction is the impossibility for nominalizations to take bare NPs as their complements.<br />

a. CP complement<br />

(37) a. The physicists claimed that the earth is round.<br />

b. The physicists’ claim that the earth is round<br />

b. Infinitival complementation<br />

(38) a. They attempted to leave.<br />

b. Their attempt to leave<br />

c. Locative PP complement<br />

(39) a. The train arrived at the station.<br />

b. The train’s arrival at the station<br />

No doubt this statement holds for derived nominalizations proper. However, as explained<br />

in Chapter 1, my definition of nominalization is wider than Grimshaw’s, and includes<br />

verbal gerunds as (40), which do allow NP complements.<br />

(40) John’s criticizing the book<br />

This chapter intends to provide a detailed account of the main views on nominal<br />

complementation and argument structure, paying special attention to the kind of<br />

dependents that can appear with nominalizations. The intention is to compare what has<br />

been said in the previous literature on the topic with the results obtained later in the corpus<br />

study. But before going deeper into the analysis, it must be noted that, despite the common<br />

assumption about the possibility of comparing the arguments in nominalizations with those<br />

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