French event nominals and number-inflection

Preverbs, aspect and nominalization in Hungarian1

“…We show that these values are maintained in case of nominalization. Consequently, derived event nominals in Hungarian keep the aspectual properties of the corresponding verbs, for inner as well as outer aspect, thus corroborating the idea, put forward by several authors (Engelhardt 2000;Alexiadou, Iordachioaia & Soare 2010;Iordachioaia & Soare 2008Knittel 2011) that outer aspect is a valid category for event nominals.…”

“…by the means of preverbs. This language thus differs from Russian, where verbal preixes, although present in the nominal structure, are deprived of their perfective value (Tatevosov 2013), but also from French (Knittel 2011) and Romanian (Iordachioaia & Soare 2008, languages where the expression of outer aspect is conveyed by the means of the mass/count distinction. Thus, another indirect consequence of our analysis is that it explains why Hungarian deverbal -ás/-és nominals never pluralize (Szabolcsi 1994;Kenesei 2005); since the availability of number inlection in event nominals conveys perfectivity in a number of languages, it is expected not to be observed if this value is expressed by other means, such as preverbs.…”

“…In other words, do perfective sentences produce perfective nominalizations in Hungarian? This question in turn leads to that of the presence of outer aspect in DPs whose heads result from a nominalization process, a hypothesis suggested by various authors for other languages (Engelhardt 2000;Alexiadou, Iordachioaia & Soare 2010;Iordachioaia & Soare 2008Knittel 2011).…”

N and D nominalizations

“…It has recently been argued that Number and (outer) Aspect are somehow in complementary distribution in the system, on the basis of deverbal nominals that project imperfective outer Aspect but no Number (see Soare 2007, Iordăchioaia and Soare 2008, Alexiadou et al 2010, Knittel 2011, Soare 2017. In this view, "Complex-Event" or Argument-structure Nominals (see Grimshaw 1990 andBorer (1999), respectively 1 ) are not a homogeneous class, and exhibit different behaviours with respect to aspectual properties.…”

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This paper addresses deverbal nominals denoting events (Complex Event Nominals or AS-Ns, Grimshaw 1990 and Borer 1999 respectively), that have been argued to convey aspectual information. I put a particular emphasis on French -age and -ée nominals, which have been argued to encode grammatical (im)perfective Aspect (Ferret et al 2010, Knittel 2011. The aim is to contribute to a general syntactic theory of nominalizations involving aspectual projections, and to investigate their interaction with other, in particular categorizing, layers of structure.

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