Cross-linguistic investigations of nominalization patterns ed. by Ileana Paul (review)

Nominalization is not an unusual linguistic phenomenon in the languages of the world. As Crystal (2008: 328) states, "nominalization refers to the process of forming a noun from some other word-class or, especially in classical transformational grammar, the derivation of a noun phrase from an underlying clause." Because nominalizations seem to "be mixed in nature: part noun, part something else" (Paul, 2014, p. vii), they have attracted the attention of many linguists. This volume contains investigations of nominalization patterns across a wide range of languages, including Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Dënesųłıné, English, Malagasy, Lithuanian, and Halkomelem (Central Coast Salish). The main issues with which all the papers in this volume are concerned are the possible nominalization constructions and their distributional properties, exploring and interpreting the categorical status of nominalizations, and different degrees of nominality. Indeed, the book is intended to shed light on some complicated issues for linguists working in the areas of morphology, syntax, and semantics.

The volume has three parts in addition to an introduction by Ileana Paul. Part one, consisting of three articles, deals with the verbal structure inside nominalizations. Part two, also with three articles, focuses on the referent of nominalizations. Part three, containing two contributions, discusses the nature of the nominalizer, namely, ways of nominalization, including different derivations of nouns and varying degrees of nominality.

"Nominalizations in Ojibwe", by Eric Mathieu, aims to explain nominalization processes in Ojibwe by examining result nominals and agent nominals. Mathieu tackles the puzzle mentioned in Harley (2009) for English nominalizations, which can be summed up as "meaning shifts from event to result readings do not affect the internal morphological structure of the nominalization" (p. 3), and demonstrates that there are no internal or external arguments in result nominals in spite of their transitive morphology. Furthermore, Mathieu shows that only some cases of agent nominalizations in Ojibwe are true nominalizations; other cases are not nominalizations per se, but rather full clauses.

Elizabeth Ritter, in "Nominalizing inner aspect: Evidence from Blackfoot", examines the properties of Blackfoot abstract nominalization, which is one type of Blackfoot nominalization, enhancing our understanding of the parameters of nominalization and addressing the issues of selecting verbal category. The author provides data that seem to show that abstract nominalizations are nominalized I-AspPs (Inner Aspect Phrases), rather than IPs (Inflection Phrases), O-AspPs (Outer Aspect Phrases), or vPs (Verbal Phrases). Also, Ritter provides evidence that I-AspPs are clausal functional categories, which have participant-based substantive content (with person features rather than tense features).

Andrea Wilhelm's contribution, "Nominalization instead of Modification", deals with nominalizations (many of which are nominalizations of full, finite clauses) in Dënesųłıné, a member of the Northern Dene branch of Athabaskan. Wilhelm investigates the role nominalizations play in the modification of nouns in Dënesųłıné, demonstrating that nominalizations have a similar function to that of most noun modifiers (adjectives and relative clauses) in this language. The author relies on Chierchia's (1998) nominal mapping parameter and argues that nouns in Dënesųłıné are type <e> entities and do not shift to the predicative type <e, t> in the process of derivation.

In "Assigning reference in clausal nominalizations", Heather Bliss carries out a detailed description and analysis of two different kinds of clausal nominalizations in Blackfoot: bare nominalizations and hp-nominalizations (-hp being a suffix which signals clause type). The author points out that a nominalizing head as well as a nominalizing feature on a functional head can establish reference in nominalizations. Interestingly, bare nominalizations and hp-nominalizations differ in how they realize the nominalizing feature [N]. Thus, Bliss proposes that "[N] is realized on a Num (a nominal functional head) in bare nominalizations, while it is realized within the verbal constituent" (p. 115) in the hp-nominalizations.

Keir Moulton, in "Simple event nominalizations: Roots and their interpretation", argues against what he terms the Blob Theory, a view that holds that "word meanings are nothing but...