0 INTRODUCTION

3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
3.2. Argument structure of nominals
We can start the discussion with Culicover’s (1997: 17) definition of argument structure as
“[t]he set of arguments selected by the verb, including the subject argument;” this of
course implies that the term is closely related to the category verb. Nevertheless, Culicover
concedes that nouns and adjectives also have argument structure. In the literature
(Zubizarreta 1987, Grimshaw 1990), it has generally been assumed that derived nominals
which denote an action or process share the argument structure of their base verbs. As
Zubizarreta (1987: 39) claims, “[t]his is a reasonable assumption to the extent that
predicate-argument structure represents the grammatically relevant aspects of lexical
meaning and that verbs and their derived nominals are very close (if not identical) in
meaning.” Of course, if nominals have an argument structure, they must satisfy it, as verbs
do. In other words, if a (complex event) nominal shows argument structure, its
complements must be obligatory as they are for verbs. By ‘obligatory’ is understood
“capable in principle of being obligatory but perhaps subject to lexical variation”
(Grimshaw 1990: 49).
In the case of complex event nominals (e.g. construction), they always have an
external argument known as Event argument (Ev), which is the most prominent one. All
the other arguments of this kind of nominal are internal (Grimshaw 1990: 66). Thus, the
verb observe has an argument structure of the kind V (x (y)), having x as its external
argument. The nominal suffix –ing has an argument structure in which Ev is external (i.e.
N (Ev)); when –ing is added to observe the result is the nominal observing, in which the
argument structures of the verb and of the affix are combined into a complex structure of
the kind N, (Ev (x (y))) (Grimshaw 1990: 66).
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