ARGUMENT LINKING IN DERIVED NOMINALS 409criterion to defend her configurational treatment of object preposing might
suggest, and as the ensuing discussion will attempt to make clear, semantic
relations are the only terms in which the ability of a vN argument to occur
prenominally can be adequately stated.
Although the primary concern in this section is with prenominally
occurring vN arguments, it should be recalled from the discussion in 2.2.3
that NPs other than vN arguments are permitted to occur in the LDP. Spec
ifically, as is true in the clause (cf. l1e, f), temporal adverbial NPs like last
month or yesterday may occur either as peripheral modifiers or as topical
detached-NPs:
(52) a. the destruction of the court summons (by Gray) [yester
day] peripheral ADV
b. [yesterday's]LDP NP destruction of the court summons (by
Gray).
Having only one prenuclear "slot" in which to place an NP (cf. Figure 2),
however, the nominal cannot — as the sentence can — simultaneously take
a topical temporal NP and a topical argument NP. (Recall from 2.2.3 that
in the unmarked active clause, the topical argument NP is the "subject.")
(53) a. s[Yesterday, Gray destroyed the court summons]
b. *NP[yesterday's Gray's destruction of the court summons]
Finally, preposed temporal NPs can be grammatically omitted in both the
clause (cf. llf) and the nominal. So, too, can preposed vN arguments be
omitted in the nominal.
(54) a. [yesterday's]TEMP ADV destruction of the court summons by
Gray
b. [Gray's]vN_ARG destruction of the court summons
. the destruction of the court summons (by Gray) (yesterday)
In fact, only where a prenuclear topical NP is the "subject" in the clause is
it not deletable. This clearly indicates that the grammaticalization of seman
tic roles and certain discourse-pragmatic relations which has occurred in the
case of the "subject" in the English clause has not occurred in the English
nominal.
In the remainder of the discussion, the focus will be on defining the
interaction of arguments' semantic roles with the topical function of the
nominal's LDP. Specifically, the goal will be 1) to identify the types of
semantic relations which permit vN arguments to occur prenominally and 2)