Nominalization in German

This paper deals with nominalizations in German. The first part summarizes the facts about German nominalizations. There are many different types of nominalizations in German. We discuss three kinds of nominalizations in particular: infinitival nominals like das Laufen (walking), so-called “stem”-derived nominals like Fahrt (trip, ride), and, prominently, -ung nominals like Verschwendung (wastefulness). After an introduction to the types of nominals (section 2.1), we discuss which verbs can or cannot form the different types of nominalizations (2.2), followed by the semantics of German nominalizations (2.3) and their syntactic behavior (2.4). The picture described in the first part of the paper is compatible with a theory where the semantics of the root that the verb and its nominalization have in common determines which forms can be constructed, and what their syntactic behavior (for example, argument structure) will be. This situation is an argument for Distributed Morphology, which claims that roots do not carry categorical features, and all syntactic behavior that differentiates between categories (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives) is determined by functional projections that derive full morphological complexes of the roots. However, there are at least two issues relating to German nominalizations that pose a problem for this framework. They are discussed in the second part of this paper. The first topic is raising. Raising nominals, in contrast to raising verbs, do not exist. Section 3.1 elaborates how this fact can be explained even under the hypothesis that noun roots do not differ from verb roots. Section 3.2 discusses the fact that German intransitive verbs can form -ung nominalizations if they have a noun or adjective root, but not if they have a verbal root.