Movement in the passive nominal and nominal morphology

Abstract

This article argues for the presumption that syntactic movement is involved inside the passive nominal (Anderson 1977, 1979, Chomsky 1970, 1981, 1986, Kayne 1984). I argue that pace Grimshaw (1990) and Williams (1982), there are some facts that follow only by assuming that the prenominal genitive DP originates from a noun's object position. Furthermore, basing my argument on Grimshaw's (2004) claim that Romance/Latinate suffixes license N's complements, whereas their Germanic counterparts cannot, I demonstrate that this dichotomy is observed in the formation of passive nominals as well. This in turn offers the basis for the movement of N's complements to the DP-initial position. The present study will thus reinforce the parallelism that has been purported in the generative literature to exist between the sentence and the noun phrase.