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3. NOMINAL COMPLEMENTATION AND ARGUMENT STRUCTURE<br />

(53) A bull terrier makes an excellent watchdog.<br />

(54) She played the oboe with (a) charming sensitivity/ a sensitivity<br />

that delighted the critics.<br />

(55) She played the oboe with *a sensitivity/ sensitivity.<br />

Therefore, it makes sense that if an abstract noun may be used with the indefinite article<br />

under some particular circumstances, those nominalizations preceded by the indefinite<br />

article a/an, in the circumstances mentioned above, may be considered action nouns<br />

despite being used with the determiners in question.<br />

3.3.1.2. Possessives<br />

The use of possessives in nominalizations has been analyzed by authors such as<br />

Zubizarreta (1987), Grimshaw (1990), or Chomsky (1970), among many others, with<br />

respect to argument structure, and has also been discussed in general grammars such as<br />

Quirk et al. (1985) and Huddleston and Pullum et al. (2002).<br />

As previously mentioned, possessives are licensed by any 'suppressed' argument in the<br />

argument structure. This suppressed argument is the external argument, which is usually<br />

the subject of the verb. Thus, possessives correlate with the subject of the verb, although<br />

they are not proper arguments (Grimshaw 1990: 134). Take, for instance, the verb<br />

imprison and its nominalization imprisonment; their argument structure is again different:<br />

imprison (x (y)) vs. imprisonment (x-ø (y)). In the nominal structure the agent has been<br />

suppressed, and this licenses the possessive argument adjunct. A possible NP having this<br />

structure would be (56) below:<br />

(56) The government’s imprisonment of refugees (Grimshaw 1990:<br />

134).<br />

From a typological point of view, Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1993: 201-202) claims that<br />

“English belongs to the group of V[erb]O[bject] languages, with predominant<br />

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