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Cross-linguistic Investigations of Nominalization Patterns
Edited by Ileana Paul
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 210] 2014
► pp. 25–50

Nominalizing Inner Aspect

Evidence from Blackfoot

| University of Calgary

Blackfoot abstract nominalizations are deverbal process/result nominalizations with rather unusual properties: They are never derived from morphologically transitive verbs, and as a consequence do not license a DP or NP object, but if they have a possessor, it must refer to the agent of the source verb. Moreover, they may contain tense and aspect prefixes, but not temporal adverbs. Assuming that they are nominalizations of some clausal functional category, I interpret these facts as evidence of cross-linguistic variation in clausal functional categories. Following Ritter and Wiltschko (2009; to appear), I assume that clausal functional categories in Blackfoot have participant-based, rather than temporal substantive content, and show that abstract nominalizations are nominalized I(nner)-AspP in a language with atemporal functional categories.

Published online: 18 February 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.210.02rit
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