Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: WordsIn general then, it seems that nouns are a fairly well behaved category and that even
for the more problematic cases morphologically distinct forms for singular and plural
can be found.
Turning to the distribution of nouns, as with verbs a proper treatment of this will be
possible later in this chapter, though we can once again talk about subcategories of
noun. Nouns subcategorise in exactly the same way that verbs do, in terms of
restrictions placed on the possible categories of their complements. Just as with verbs,
the complement of the noun follows it. The similarity between noun complements and
verb complements can best be seen by comparing the behaviour of nouns that have
been derived from verbs with these verbs:
(87) a he waited for the letter his wait for the letter
b he believed in Father Christmas his belief in Father Christmas
c he fought with the dragon his fight with the dragon
d I expect that he left my expectation that he left
e they detonated the bomb their detonation of the bomb
As seems clear, most nouns that are formed from verbs take exactly the same
complements as the original verb does. The one difference can be seen in (87e) where
the verb takes a nominal complement while the noun takes a prepositional one. Note
that the verb and its complement express exactly the same relationship as the noun and
its complement: in both cases it is ‘the bomb’ that gets detonated. Thus, the
preposition of in the case of the noun complement does not seem to add anything of a
semantic nature. Moreover, this is an entirely regular process – any verb that has a
nominal complement will take a prepositional complement (with of) when it is formed
into a noun:
(88) construct a house construction of a house
destroy his confidence destruction of his confidence
observe the reaction observation of the reaction
peruse the index perusal of the index
Indeed, there are no nouns that take following nominal complements, even ones that
are not formed from verbs:
(89) a book of magic a book magic
a plague of flies a plague flies
a case of mismanagement a case mismanagement
a cup of tea a cup tea
For some reason then, it seems that the whole class of nouns fails to have nominal
complements and thus they differ from verbs in this way (we will see later on in this
book there is an explanation for this observation). However, other than this, nouns can
take any other kind of complement and as such we can propose that they subcategorise
in the same way as verbs do, by the inclusion of a subcategorisation frame in their
lexical entries.
This inability to take nominal complements is something nouns share with
adjectives, as we shall see. Verbs pattern with prepositions in this respect. Thus we can
claim that whatever property it is that allows verbs and prepositions to take nominal