Edited by Etsuyo Yuasa, Tista Bagchi and Katharine Beals
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 176] 2011
► pp. 213–228
This paper contrasts the analysis of English derived nominals (i. e., words such as refusal, height, goodness, movement, etc.) in minimalism, automodular grammar, and classical transformational grammar. It argues that minimalism does the poorest job of the three in handling their distinctive properties. Automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar are each partly successful. The paper closes with a discussion of how automodular grammar and classical transformational grammar might each be extended to account for the relevant facts. Essentially, the former could incorporate a notion such as ‘canonical argument structure’, while the latter could borrow from automodular grammar a mechanism for interfacing mismatched surface representations from different grammatical modules.