Nominal Verbs and Transitive Nouns: Vindicating Lexicalism*

The earliest generative work derived all nominalizations syntactically (Chomsky 1955-6, Lees 1960). Chomsky (1970) then argued that only -ing gerunds are derived syntactically, while all other types of event nominals, such as refutation, acceptance, refusal, are derived morphologically in the lexicon from bases that are unspecified between nouns and verbs. The suffix -ing was shown to serve both as the gerund formative and as one of the formatives that derive lexical event nominals. Chomsky’s main argument was based on the fact that gerund phrases have the structure of verb phrases whereas other event nominals have the structure of noun phrases. The differences are completely systematic. Unlike derived event nominals, gerunds are modifiable by adverbs, assign structural case to their complements (1a,b), disallow articles and other determiners (1c) and plurals (1d), allow aspect (1e) and negation (1f), and they have a grammatical subject which is assigned a Th-role as in finite clauses (1g), and which may be an expletive (1h):