On Deriving Nominals from Causatives

Abstract

NOMINALIZATIONS IN ENGLISH have received much attention from transformational grammarians.' In recent years, the correct description of a particular type of English nominalization, known as the DERIVED NOMINAL, has been an issue in the controversy between interpretive semantics and generative semantics. The claim has been made in support of interpretive semantics that verbs derived transformationally from other verbs do not have corresponding derived nominals. I will show that for the class of causative verbs this claim is wrong. Interpretive semantics is a variant of the transformational theory of grammar developed by Noam Chomsky and bthers.2 It emphasizes the role of phrase structure rules and rules of semantic interpretation that apply to pairs of deep and surface phrase markers, and it reduces the role of transformations in grammatical descriptions.3 Generative semantics derives from the same transformational theory, but has rejected phrase structure rules, rules of semantic interpretation like those mentioned above, and the concept of deep structure as that point separating the syntactic and semantic components of the grammar, where all lexical items are inserted. No distinction between syntactic and semantic components is made in generative semantics, and lexical insertion is not restricted to one point in the grammar.4 Chomsky, who has been one of the foremost proponents of interpretive semantics, has claimed that derived nominals like its growth and their arrival constitute a part of English grammar that cannot be described transformationally.5 He supports this claim by contrasting such derived nominals