Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

Argument Linking in English Derived Nomináls

Mary L. Nunes

University of California, Davis

0. Introduction

Because the English noun phrase may be headed by nominalized verbs like

destruction, admiration, and performance, an important question which

arises in an analysis of the syntax of the English NP is: "What is the

relationship between the syntax of verbal clauses and their nominalized

counterparts?" More particularly: "How does the syntactic manifestation of

verb-argument relations in the clause correspond to the syntactic manifesta­

tion of nominalized verbs and their understood arguments within the NP?"

A crucial assumption commonly made in efforts to deal with such questions

is that grammatical relations [GRs] or grammatical functions [GFs] define

significant syntactic relations in both the clause and the noun phrase.^1 The

analysis presented in this paper attempts to show that a clearer answer to

the opening questions emerges when semantic roles, rather than either GRs

or GFs,^2 are used to define the syntactic relations under investigation.

1. The vNP: Some preliminary demarcations and definitions

Before turning to an analysis of the verbally-derived nominal in English, it

is essential to delineate the parameters which have been set for the current

study. In specifying these parameters, the most obvious question to be

answered is: "What is a verbally derived nominal [vNP]?" Once the vNP

has been distinguished from other types of nominal constructions in 1.1,

two of numerous terms which have been used in the literature to identify

significant types of vNPs will be defined in 1.2.