Icelandic Nominalizations and Allosemy

This book brings a basic yet detailed description of Icelandic nominalizations to bear on the general theoretical and architectural issues that nominalizations have raised since the earliest work in generative syntax. While nominalization has long been central to theories of argument structure, and Icelandic has been an important language for the study of argument structure and syntax, Icelandic has not been brought into the general body of theoretical work on nominalization. In this work, Jim Wood shows that Icelandic-specific issues in the analysis of derived nominals have broad implications that go beyond the study of that one language. In particular, Icelandic provides special evidence that Complex Event Nominals (CENs), which seem to inherit their argument structure from the underlying verbs, can be formed without nominalizing a full verb phrase. This conclusion is at odds with prominent theories of nominalization that claim that CENs have the properties that they have precisely because they involve the nominalization of full verb phrases. The book develops a theory of allosemy within the framework of Distributed Morphology, showing how one single syntactic structure can get distinct semantic interpretations corresponding to the range of readings that are available to derived nominals. The resulting proposal demonstrates how the study of Icelandic nominalizations can both further our understanding of argument structure and shed new light on the syntax-semantics interface.

Jim Wood, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Yale University

Jim Wood is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Yale University and Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. His primary research interests lie in syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics. He is the author of Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure (Springer, 2015), and his research has been published in journals such as Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, Glossa, and Linguistic Variation. Since 2012, he has been a leading member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, investigating micro-syntactic variation in North American English, and was a co-principal investigator on the National Science Foundation grant funding its work.