Functional Heads and eventive nominals: the Basque perspective
Ikusi/ Ireki
Data
2023-07-07
Roczniki Humanistyczne 71, special nº 11, 13-41
Laburpena
This article shows that Basque has a few suffixes (-era, -keta, -pen) which give rise to the type of
eventive nominals described in the literature (Grimshaw; Picallo; Alexiadou, Functional Structure).
Nominals headed by these suffixes are passive-like (cf. Alexiadou, Functional Structure), obligatorily
take genitive arguments and are mostly restricted to unaccusative and transitive predicates, but
have a very limited eventive reading: they do not take adverbial modification (aspectual modification
is realised through adjectives) and adpositional phrases show up with the functional linker -ko, typical
of nominal structures (de Rijk, “Basque Hospitality”). A peculiar feature of Basque is that the external
argument has genitive case, just like the internal argument; this double genitive structure suggests
that Basque has a neutralised case system at the nominal level. On the other hand, Basque has
nominalised clauses which admit all kinds of adverbial and PP modification, as well as regular subject
case-marking (be it ergative or absolutive); this type of nominalised clauses may have an eventive
reading. I propose that Basque nominalised clauses have the structure DP-TP-(NegP)-AspP-VoicePvP-
root. For derived event nominals, I claim that Basque only projects up to VoiceP, with the nominaliser
selecting a Voice head with a [-external argument] feature (Alexiadou, “Ergativity”). The selection
of an unsaturated VoiceP forces the external argument of the root to be projected at the nominal
level (Bruening): DP-PossP-NumP-ClassP-nP[ext. argument]-Voice[-ext. arg.]P-vP-Root. Basque grammar
resorts to structural case-checking by the head Possesor (de Wit), which attracts all the DPs in its
c-commanding domain and creates a multiple-specifier configuration of the kind defended in Richards.
The rest of the features displayed by derived event nominals follow from the limited number of
verbal functional projections available.
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