On the syntax of episodic vs. dispositional -er nominals

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned with the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of -er nominalizations in English. Our main contribution to the theoretical discussion on these nominals is that we should distinguish between two groups of -er nominals: those that obey the external argument generalization, irrespectively of whether they are eventive or not, and whether they have complements or not, and those that do not obey the external argument generalization. The first group -er nominals sub-divides into episodic ones, which always project their internal complements, and dispositional ones, which may leave these objects unexpressed; we argue that both episodic and dispositional nominals have the exact same rich syntactic structure, namely they are derived from verb phrases. They differ as far as their aspectual properties are concerned, a property from which we will derive the presence vs. absences of complement structure. The second group contains -er nominals that are not fully productive; we argue that these have a poorer syntactic internal structure. Specifically, these involve affix attachment at the root level and not contain any verbal layers. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we offer a brief overview of the literature on the subject and outline our analysis as well as our theoretical assumptions. In section 3, we propose our decomposition of -er nominals. In Section 4, we discuss the episodic vs. dispositional distinction for -er nominals that obey the external argument generalization. In section 5, we turn to those -er nominals that do not obey this generalization. In section 6, we offer some brief conclusions.