Deverbal nominals possess no internal VP structure
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Arayik Hayriyan [1]
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[1] Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
París, Francia
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- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 248, 2020
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Deverbal nominals with verbal morphology and PROCESS as their semantic character have been claimed to possess syntactic VP structure (Bruening, 2018a, Borer, 2013, Alexiadou, 2009, Roeper, 2005, Fu et al., 2001, etc.). The paper shows that this claim is incorrect. Specifically, properties such as adverbial postmodification and coreference with ‘do so’, so far admitted only of deverbal nominals and argued to be evidence of VP in them, are shown to be possible also with simple nominals. I argue that some of the proposed evidence of VP in deverbal nominals, namely adverbial postmodification, is in itself flawed since postnominal adverbs are not syntactically internal to nominal phrases (NPs/DPs). The two acceptability surveys conducted affirm the corpus data, offering at the same time new insights into an understudied area, that is, coreference between nominals and ‘do so’. I propose that simple and inanimate role nominals are likely to be coreferential with this anaphor if the former denote a semantic event and the latter are perceived as performing an intransitive action. I further argue for a distinction between internal and external syntactic structures, showing that Payne et al.'s (2010) rejection of the complementarity claim of adjectives and adverbs lacks syntactic support.
