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.
Highlights
One of the prevalent approaches to event nominalization is the mixed projection approach, whereby a deverbal noun consists of a verbal extended projection that hosts the arguments and a nominal projection that determines the grammatical category of the word; see, among others, Grimshaw (1990), Bresnan (1997), Marantz (1997), Borsley & Kornfilt (2000), and Alexiadou (2001)
The present paper examines event -ik nominalization in the variety of Kaqchikel (Mayan; ergative, VOS/SVO) spoken in Patzun, Guatemala in an attempt to answer the following two questions: (1) What argument positions are available within the verbal part? and (2) What is the status of the arguments?
In this paper we focused on deverbal event nominalization in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language, and we developed a novel analysis for mixed nouns that consist of both verbal and nominal projections
Summary
One of the prevalent approaches to event nominalization is the mixed projection approach, whereby a deverbal noun consists of a verbal extended projection that hosts the arguments and a nominal projection that determines the grammatical category of the word; see, among others, Grimshaw (1990), Bresnan (1997), Marantz (1997), Borsley & Kornfilt (2000), and Alexiadou (2001). The present paper examines event -ik nominalization in the variety of Kaqchikel (Mayan; ergative, VOS/SVO) spoken in Patzun, Guatemala in an attempt to answer the following two questions: (1) What argument positions are available within the verbal part? As we will further show, additional support for the proposed analysis comes from the previously undescribed behavior of antipassive under nominalization: in clausal antipassive only the external argument survives but antipassive in nominals instead promotes the internal argument. While this phenomenon is accounted for under a PRO-approach, it poses a serious problem for a lexical-DP analysis.
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