Nominalization in Soqotri, a South Arabian language of Yemen

In his recent article Deutscher (2009: 199) suggests that “nominalization is an unsung hero in the story of subordination”. He goes on to say that “[t]he ability to derive a noun from a verb, that is, to reify a verbal predicate and present it as a nominal argument or modifier, is the core of subordination”. While Deutscher (2009) believes that the relevant nominalization for his study is “derivational nominalization”, which derives nouns from verbs, we find his characterization of nominalization as an unsung hero to be quite fitting not only in the study of subordination but also in other related phenomena, which we wish to characterize as the case of “grammatical nominalization”. Unlike derivational or lexical nominalization of the employ-er/employ-ee type, which supplies the lexicon with new lexical items belonging to the noun class, grammatical nominalization yields nominal expressions but which are not nouns. We shall explicate the difference between lexical nominalization and grammatical nominalization below, from which various properties of grammatical nominalizations follow. The issues addressed in this paper are those nominal expressions that have been discussed under the heading of “noun phrases without nouns” by Matthew Dryer in his recent review of noun phrase structure (Dryer 2007), where he surveys noun phrases without a nominal head such as adjectives functioning as noun phrases by themselves (see (1) below), possessor phrases without a noun head (see (2) below), and socalled headless relative clauses (see (3a) below):