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3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

between nouns showing argument-taking capacities like verbs, which she calls complex<br />

event nominals or action nouns, such as examination in (42a) below, nouns having no<br />

argument structure, which are simple events nominals, as event, race, trip or exam in<br />

(42b), and result nominals, such as exam in (42c) (see also Alexiadou 2001).<br />

(42) a. The instructor’s examination of the papers took a long time.<br />

b. The event/race/trip/exam took a long time/took place at 6:00<br />

P.M.<br />

c. The exam was on the table.<br />

Grimshaw develops a theory of argument structure that tries to bring order to this apparent<br />

chaos in nominal complementation. Thus, according to her:<br />

Complex event nominals and corresponding simple event and result<br />

nominals have related lexical conceptual structures or lexical meanings,<br />

but only complex event nominals have an event structure and syntactic<br />

argument structure like verbs. The argument structure of complex event<br />

nominals licenses (and indeed requires) arguments. Complex event<br />

nominals are distinguished from the others in the range of determiners<br />

and adjuncts they occur with as well as in event control and predication.<br />

(Grimshaw 1990: 59)<br />

However, when facing real data, the boundaries are not so clear-cut, and even Grimshaw<br />

herself (1990: 49) concedes that there are nouns such as examination that may have an<br />

eventive or resultative reading depending on the context. For instance, if we say The<br />

examination was on the table, the noun examination has a resultative reading, whereas the<br />

sentence The examination of the patients took a long time has an eventive reading (cf.<br />

Grimshaw 1990: 49). That is one of the reasons why authors such as Sleeman and Brito<br />

(2010) consider Grimshaw’s division too strict, arguing that the difference between<br />

process and result nouns is just of an aspectual nature.<br />

Argument structure as well as the different dependents that nominalizations can<br />

take are analyzed in depth in what follows.<br />

59

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