Nominalization – Lexical and Syntactic Aspects

While the choice of morphological markers is lexically determined and highly idiosyncratic – fahren/Fahrt (drive/drive) vs. erklären/Erklärung (explain/explanation)-, syntactic combination follows general rules: the verb assigns nominative and accusative case to the subject and direct object, the derived noun systematically requires genitive case for both complements. These observations exhaust neither the idiosyncratic nor the systematic properties of nominalizations, but they highlight the central issue of the present paper: The relation between lexical entries that enter into verbal and nominal constructions, respectively, can neither be captured in purely syntactic terms, nor can it be reduced to lexical properties, ignoring the systematic syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. This raises the question how the systematic and idiosyncratic conditions of nominal and verbal constructions are represented, and how they interact.