“Agent Exclusivity” Effects in Hebrew Nominalizations

Abstract

This paper discusses restrictions on the type of external arguments available in clauses headed by nominalizations in Hebrew. Previous work has identified a bias against causers in English nominalizations corresponding to transitive verbs (DP-causers), despite the congruence of both causers and agents in the base verb. Most accounts of this bias have attributed it to the defective nature of nominalizations compared to verbs, more specifically the lack of the Voice projection. Based on the behaviour of two nominal structures in Hebrew, one of which claimed here to contain Voice, it emerges that the presence of Voice does not seem to alter the prevalence of this bias, as both structures – with and without Voice – reject causers. An additional observation is that prepositional-causers (comparable to English from-phrases), are perfectly grammatical in Hebrew nominalizations based on anticausative verbs. This class of verbs, believed to lack (active) Voice to begin with, suggests that the notions of nominalization and causation are not in principle incompatible, and that the degraded nature of DP-causers has to do with some other factor (possibly syntactic), but not the absence of Voice.