Gerundive Nominalizations

Abstract

Abstract The properties of gerunds, formed with the morpheme ‐ ing in English, have been the object of significant interest in generative linguistics, largely because they seem to be hybrid categories, in that their projections can exhibit sentential or verbal internal structure but are found in positions normally occupied by nominal projections. There have been proposals for the existence of two types of structures broadly referred to as gerundive nominalizations, nominal gerunds and verbal gerunds. Nominal gerunds appear to have unambiguously nominal syntactic properties. Verbal gerunds, despite distributional evidence for their nominal constituency, which is shared by nominal gerunds, show internal properties of regular clauses or verbal domains, in an apparent contradiction with their nominal category properties. For many years, gerundive nominalizations were investigated nearly exclusively on English, but their seemingly idiosyncratic properties regarding case, control, phrasal projection, and movement have been identified as having counterparts in the properties of similar nominalizations in languages as diverse as Basque, Finnish, Navaho, Portuguese, Quechua, and Turkish. Lexical and null subjects may occur in verbal gerunds, and overt subjects with genitive and accusative case can alternate in the position under unclear conditions, in contrast to what is found in nominal gerunds, where only overt subjects can appear, in the genitive case. Another enduring puzzle of English syntax is that there seem to be several affixes with the phonological shape ‐ ing , which raises questions about how many distinct morphological elements they actually represent and how they are introduced into the syntactic structure. Much of the research on gerunds and gerundive nominalizations has been couched in theoretical frameworks spanning the development of generative syntax from its early days up to the minimalist program, in which different approaches to topics such as syntactic derivation, phrasal projection, movement, case, control, and empty categories have taken substantial explanatory weight.