Nominalization and the problem of indirect access: Evidence from Ossetian
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Ekaterina Lyutikova
Abstract
We examine aspect, eventuality type and transitivity alternations in two types of nominalization in Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken in East Caucasus, focusing on how deverbal nominals differ from fully inflected clauses projected by the same VPs. The main empirical finding of the study is: nominalizations exhibit a wider range of syntactic and semantic possibilities than fully inflected clauses. The finite verb in Ossetian is either perfective or imperfective and shows Slavic-type aspectual composition, but (prefixless) nominalizations are aspectless and are associated with English-type aspectual composition. Besides, deverbal nominals allow for transitivity alternations even if a corresponding finite verb does not. Our account for the observed pattern is based on the hypothesis that in the course of derivation, the range of options available at the VP level is narrowed down by the elements of functional structure, specifically, Asp and T. We argue that the role of Asp is to impose a quantization requirement on its complement predicate, while T interacts with the structure generated at the VP level in determining transitivity of a clause. Nominals can be built before Asp and T are merged, hence the semantic contribution of those heads is not part of their meaning. It that way, nominals provide us with a more direct access to the true characteristics of the verb and its immediate projections at early stages of derivation.
Funding statement: Funding: The study has been supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant # 14-06-00435 “Verbal syntax and semantics in a derivational aspectual system”, Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Sergei Tatevosov) and Russian Science Foundation (grant # 14-18-03270 ‘Word order typology, communicative-syntactic interface and information structure in the world’s languages’, Russian Scientific Foundation, Ekaterina Lyutikova).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the audience at the Workshop on Finiteness and Non-finiteness (Institute of the Estonian Language, Tallinn, November 25, 2009) for valuable feedback and discussion. The paper has benefited much from detailed comments from the anonymous reviewers of this volume. Most of all, we are indebted to Chris Piñon whose insightful suggestions encouraged us to make a number of significant refinements to the original version of this paper. Data for this study have been collected during a number of field trips organized by the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Moscow State University, in 2007–2010. We would like to express our deeply felt gratitude to the native speakers of Ossetian for their invaluable help and patience.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Nominalization and the problem of indirect access: Evidence from Ossetian
- Pragmatic accommodation as a catalyst for the development of (non-)finiteness
- On case and tense: The role of grounding in differential subject marking
- Deriving the scale of finiteness from parasitic syncretism
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Nominalization and the problem of indirect access: Evidence from Ossetian
- Pragmatic accommodation as a catalyst for the development of (non-)finiteness
- On case and tense: The role of grounding in differential subject marking
- Deriving the scale of finiteness from parasitic syncretism
