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  8. 2017

Departmental Guest Speaker Seminar Series | Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt)

17 May 2017

Time: 4:30 - 6:00pm
Venue: ArtsTwo 3.16

*Please note that this talk was rescheduled from 8th February 2017

We are pleased to welcome Professor Alexiadou (Humboldt) to QMUL as part of our Guest Speaker Seminar Series. Title and abstract below. 

Nominalization structures across languages

Borsley & Kornfilt (2000) showed that nominalizations are subject to constraints. Importantly, while (1a) is well formed, (1b) is not, where nominal functional categories are found below verbal functional categories:

(1) a. [NF [NF [NF [VF [VP ]]]]]
b. *[VF [VF [NF [NF [VP ]]]]]

In fact, the verbal functional hierarchy can be stopped at any point across languages and within a language giving rise to partial nominalization. What we do not seem to have is the reverse process, i.e. a verbalization morpheme attaching to a nominal head leading to partial verbalization (Baker 2000).
I will show that there are two types of nominalization strategies across languages, D-based and n-based. D and n embed different sub-parts of the verbal functional hierarchy to yield distinct types of nominalizations. I will then outline a possible explanation thereof.

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