On the nature of arguments in event nominals

Abstract

The present paper examines deverbal event nouns in Kaqchikel (Mayan) that consist of both nominal and verbal projections. Contrary to the recent proposal made by Imanishi (2020), who argues that nominalized verbs in Kaqchikel obligatorily lack an external argument projection, we demonstrate that intransitive unergative predicates maintain their external arguments under nominalization. We further propose that event -ik nouns in Kaqchikel are derived via predicative control with the verbal part being predicated of the possessor DP introduced in Spec,nP (in the spirit of Landau 2015). Additional support for this comes from the behavior of antipassive predicates under nominalization, which preserve the internal argument instead of the external one.