Baker (2015) develops a theory of structural case in which various aspects of case competition are parameterized, including the local domain in which the DPs occur and the specifics of the c-command relation holding between them. In his theory, dependent case can be assigned in two local domains, VP and TP, which are the spell-out domains of phases. Significantly for our purposes, the evidence that VP is a local domain comes, in part, from causative sentences in Chamorro. Baker (2015: 137–139) assumes that Chamorro causatives are morphologically complex verbs, and therefore causative sentences have a single VP that contains the complex verb's direct object (= the subject of the inner predicate) and can contain another DP (= the direct object of the inner predicate). The dependent case assignment that he proposes for Chamorro is essentially as follows.

	- a. Suppose DP1 has not been marked for case. If DP1 is c-commanded by DP2 and both are in the VP domain, assign DP1 oblique case;
	- b. Otherwise, assign DP1 unmarked case.

### Sandra Chung

As he observes, this case assignment handles the distribution of oblique versus unmarked case in causative sentences as well as other clause types (e.g. clauses constructed from verbs of transfer).17

Obviously, this proposal does not mesh well with the analysis of Chamorro causatives being explored here. The small clause structure I proposed in §6.1 for causatives locates the subject and the direct object of the inner predicate in different VP domains (see (31)); this will prevent dependent case assignment from occurring. However, Baker's theory of case allows structural case to be assigned under Agree or through case competition, and this suggests other options.

Baker takes unmarked case to be the default case in Chamorro. Suppose we take the opposite position and declare oblique case to be the default case. Then the task becomes to assign unmarked case to the various types of Chamorro DPs that exhibit it.18 Among the DPs that occur in the unmarked case are subjects, possessors, and DPs in topic/focus position. These DPs are the specifiers of the functional heads T, D, and C, which license them via Agree (see Chung 1998). Moreover, each licensing relation gives rise to some type of morphological agreement: person-and-number agreement (for subjects), possessor-noun agreement (for possessors), or operator-C agreement (for DPs in topic/focus position). All this suggests that unmarked case is assigned to these DPs under Agree.

Direct objects also occur in the unmarked case, where the "direct object" of a causative sentence is the inner predicate's subject but not the inner predicate's object. Since direct objects – including the inner predicate's object – are licensed by transitive small v via Agree, the obvious move is to try to get their case to follow from a more limited version of that relation. I claim that unmarked case is assigned to these DPs under Agree, but *only when transitive small v is selected by T*. The italicized extra requirement may look stipulative. But there is evidence from several areas of Chamorro grammar that feature sharing occurs between small v and the T that selects it. Number agreement spells out not only the number feature of small v but the finiteness and mood features of the T that selects it (see §6.1). Further, the morphological operations responsible for personanimacy effects in Chamorro require that this feature sharing extend to person and other features of the DPs licensed by these heads (see Chung 1998; 2014). This feature sharing can be achieved in multiple ways which, frankly, are not of particular interest. What is relevant is that case assignment to direct objects can now be understood as follows: unmarked case is assigned by transitive small v under Agree, but only when it shares features with T.

This achieves the desired outcome. In causative sentences, the subject of the inner predicate will be assigned unmarked case, because it is licensed in an ECM configuration by a small v (= v1 in (31)) that shares features with T. But the direct object of the inner

17 The local case does not enter into the picture, because it is not a structural case.

18 The unmarked case is also used for predicate nominals and the objects of most overt prepositions. The oblique case is also used for various DPs treated in Chung 1998 as objects of null prepositions: passive agents, instruments, and DPs that realize the complements of antipassive verbs, other intransitive predicates, and nominalized verbs. It is unclear whether the proposals for case assignment in the text can, or should, be extended to these other uses.

13 Another way around causatives in Chamorro

predicate will *not* be assigned unmarked case, because it is licensed by the embedded small v (= v2 in (31)), which does not enter into a feature sharing relation with T. This DP will instead be assigned oblique case by default.

The Agree-based case assignment that I have just proposed is summarized below.

	- a. Assign unmarked case to DP if it is licensed by T, D, C, or by a transitive small v that shares features with T;
	- b. Otherwise, if DP has not been marked for case, assign oblique case.

This case assignment handles the distribution of unmarked versus oblique case in causative sentences as well as clauses constructed from verbs of transfer and various other clause types. In other words, it has the same empirical coverage as Baker's dependent case assignment for Chamorro, but does not require causatives to be analyzed as complex verbs.19 A more sustained comparison of the two approaches to Chamorro case assignment is better left for another time. My goal here is merely to show that it is possible to give a coherent description of morphological case in causative sentences within the small clause analysis I propose.

### **8 Conclusion**

Chamorro has many types of inflectional material that could perfectly well be analyzed as affixes or clitics; for instance, the material that realizes person-and-number agreement (and – conceivably – even the material that realizes number agreement). I hope to have shown here that the same freedom of analysis, when extended to material that is apparently derivational, can have thought-provoking theoretical consequences.

### **Abbreviations**

19 Mark Baker (personal communication) observes that a dependent case account of Chamorro morphological case can be maintained if the VP embedded under *na'* is what he calls a 'soft phase'. For reasons of space, the details are not spelled out here.

Sources for the Examples:

### **Acknowledgements**

This paper is for Steve, who for many years has been my teacher, mentor, intellectual role model, and friend.

### **References**

Zwicky, Arnold. 1977. *On clitics*. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

### **Chapter 14**

# **Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian**

### Mark Hale

Concordia University, Montréal

Beginning with Wackernagel (1892), scholars have dedicated a great deal of attention to the question of the placement of enclitic elements within their clause, particularly those which (tend to) appear in so-called "Second Position". Anderson (2005) summarizes the honorand's long-standing interest in and contribution to the critical "interface" issues which arise for linguistic theory from these elements. As has been well known, again since at least the time of Wackernagel's writings on the matter, several archaic Indo-European languages enjoy particularly rich inventories of relevant elements. Greek, in particular, has a set of toneless ("enclitic") and tonic ("postpositive") so-called "second position" lexemes. Since only one entity can technically occupy "second position" in any given string, an obvious empirical issue arises regarding clauses which contains multiple "second position" elements. This matter has received significantly less careful attention than has "second position clisis" generally in the past 125 years. In this paper I present a detailed analysis of what happens when multiple elements seem to have a demand on "second position" in the Attic Greek clause (focussing on the Plato and Euripides corpora), and demonstrate that in developing an account for why the ordering is the observed one, a richer understanding of the actual mechanisms behind our (ultimately epiphenomenal) Wackernagel's Law can be developed.

### **1 Introduction**

In Anderson (2005) the honorand of this volume presented a detailed analysis of clitic placement, including the positioning of so-called "second position" (henceforth, 2P) clitics. I have neither the competence nor the space to fully engage with his insightful and intriguing proposals in this venue. However, given that his analysis was developed against the backdrop of a consideration of empirical data from a broad set of languages, we can all recognize that it is necessary for such cross-linguistic approaches to abstract away from a certain number of seemingly low-level technical matters which arise in individual linguistic systems so as to not impede the development of a general theory. In

Mark Hale. 2017. Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian. In Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), *On looking into words (and beyond)*, 289–310. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.495451

### Mark Hale

some cases, one is leaving to one side matters which are both well described and well understood in the specialist literature on the language in question. However, in the case of what is perhaps the most famous data on 2P clitics – the Greek and Indo-Iranian data made use of by Wackernagel (1892) in the grounding document for so-called "Wackernagel's Law" – this is not the case. Surprisingly, the empirical data for these languages is relatively poorly understood, in my view, even in the specialist literature.

It should be clear that building a general theory of clitic behavior in human linguistic systems is only going to be as successful as the quality of the empirical data on individual languages used as input to the theory construction process allows. The more poorly such data is described, or understood, the potentially weaker the resulting general theory. In this paper I focus on one aspect of clitic behavior in systems of the Greek/Indo-Iranian type:1 the sequencing of 2P clitics. I argue that the weakness in our capacity to insightfully account for observed sequencing of 2P clitics highlights the shortcoming of our understanding of the phenomenon in these languages generally, and point toward some ways we might, in my opinion, approach these issues so as to improve our understanding. This would allow the Greek and Indo-Iranian data to play their rightful role in the evaluation of more broadly-based theories such as that of Anderson (2005).

### **2 Wackernagel's so-called Law**

The literature on so-called "second-position" clitics goes back at least to Bartholomae (1886). Wackernagel's Law universally recognizes a *tendency* for certain types of prosodically deficient element to occupy "second position" in the clause in Ancient Greek and Indo-Iranian (at least). A very clear statement of Wackernagel's own version of his "law" can be seen at the beginning of his famous *Vorlesungen über Syntax* (Wackernagel 1920: 7).

Z. B. im ältesten Griechisch, in sehr hohem Masse bei Homer, auch noch bei Herodot, ist das Gesetz lebendig, dass schwach betonte Wörtchen, welches immer ihre syntaktische Beziehung sei, unmittelbar hinter das erste Wort des Satzes gestellt werden.2

In spite of the 130 years which has passed since Bartholomae first posited the tendency, and the heaps of follow-up scholarly literature, work which addresses the specific issue we will concern ourselves with today – the sequencing of 2P clitics – in any serious way is quite sparse. Early work was impeded by the descriptive goals of traditional Indo-European studies: after all, if you only need to catalogue observed sequences of 2P clitics, the task simply involves gathering and reporting on the data provided by one's corpus.

1 I think it is widely recognized that these two systems are very similar to one another, in an Indo-European context, both in terms of the richness and diversity of their clitic inventory and in the syntax of these elements.

2 "For example, in the earliest Greek the law is active – to a very large extent in the case of Homer, also still in the case of Herodotus – which holds that weakly stressed 'little words', whatever their syntactic relationship might be, are placed directly after the first word of the clause."

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

However, when we try not to describe the superficial properties of a string, but to view that string as the epiphenomenal *output* of a computational device (the grammar), the system needs to be imbued with powers which will enable it to bring the linear order of the output string into existence, rather than just describe that order after the fact (the way the researcher does).

### **3 The "clitic cluster"**

The various modern Indo-Europeanist approaches to Wackernagel phenomena in Greek and/or Indo-Iranian reference different methods for dealing with the sequencing problem. One approach, commonly seen in work that takes a "prosody-centric" view of things, posits a "second position" clitic "cluster" (or "chain") into which the clitics are placed, and assumes some kind of (usually stipulative) ordering algorithm which arranges the clitics within this cluster. This is my understanding of the general approach (though, of course, they differ in detail) of Keydana (2011), Lowe (2014) and Goldstein (2016). A rough graphical representation of such approaches is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The "Clitic Cluster"

Typically, the domain within which 2P is defined is taken in these approaches to be prosodically defined, and the entities which undergo 2P placement (the clitics) are taken to be a prosodic class, but I have never seen an empirically-grounded proposal claiming that the observed ordering *within the clitic cluster* is determined by prosodic considerations alone. I imagine that this is because it is pretty hard to see any trace of the domination of such a factor in the observed clitic sequences in these languages.

### Mark Hale

But in general these authors have not yet ventured a systematic hypothesis about the sequencing, so it is hard to determine in any detail the nature of the envisioned system. For example, Keydana (2011: 108, fn. 3) says "[a]nother issue not to be addressed in this paper is the internal structure of clitic clusters." Goldstein (2016: 88) says that because the matter is a "difficult issue", he will "leave it for future research, and for the moment assume templatic ordering…"3 Lowe (2014: 28) writes that "there are regular (though not inviolable) orders when more than one element from any one of those categories occurs…It is beyond the scope of this paper to account for those patterns."

Interestingly, each of the authors does seem to feel that the observed ordering is related to "classes" into which the clitics fall. Thirty years ago (Hale 1987: 73), I argued that there were three distinct classes of 2P clitics, taking distinct 2Ps for distinct reasons. Although these are not the labels I would use if I were creating them today, and the mechanisms described in 1986 for *how* the categorization of the clitic relates to its placement are woefully antiquated, the classes were: (1) "emphatic" clitics, (2) "sentence connective" clitics, and (3) "sentential" (usually pronominal) clitics. The first I took to involve word-level attachment and the second clause-level. The third were constrained to appearing in a very low position in what we would now call the CP domain, or, indeed, at the top of the IP domain.

I wrote then that "[t]he position of these elements relative to one another follows naturally from this account of their origins: the regular sequence is emphatic + sentence connective + sentential…" It is hard to see this statement as anything more than either wishful thinking or blissful ignorance, both of which I possessed in spades back in those days. From my crankier contemporary perspective, it is pretty easy to see that no explicit characterization of the membership in these classes was provided (though I gave isolated examples of each), nor was any mechanism even hinted at for what might trigger any specific ordering in cases of multiple instantiations of one of these categories in a single clause. In these matters, unfortunately, I have been largely followed by more recent work.

I think it is clear enough, however, what we would all like to see. Overt stipulation is in essence an admission of explanatory failure, and all principles of the scientific pursuit demand of us that we attempt to minimize the role of stipulation in our models. So, our hope must be that the clitics fall into non-arbitrarily-defined classes, and that these clitic classes occupy well-motivated positions (relative to the functions the clitics instantiate) in the linguistic representation. Since it is safe to assume that no two clitics do exactly the same work and co-occur in a single clause, if order falls out in some way from function, we should always be able to generate a predicted ordering for any pair of clitics. It is the "in some way" that I want to explore today. As a step in that direction, though, I must dwell a little longer on previous work.

3 No explicit template is provided which accounts for the cited data.

14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

### **4 The Hock template**

Around the same time as I was writing the account discussed above, Hans Hock was working out the details of an overtly "templatic" approach to clitic sequencing in Vedic Sanskrit (e.g., Hock 1996, with earlier literature). The Hock system was not a model of internal consistency. In this system, the 2P clitics fall into three classes, P, Ṕ, and D:

	- Ṕ: tonic non-"deictic" clitics (sometimes called "postpositives")
		- D: atonic "deictics" (i.e., pronominal clitics)

Clearly, the classification is based on *both* prosodic (tonic vs. atonic) and functional considerations (deictic vs. non-deictic). The template is basically stipulative, but in its most common instantiation, shown in (2), it is supposed to be partially motivated: non-deictics precede deictics (thus P, Ṕ before D, D´) and atonic elements from each class precede the corresponding tonic elements (thus P before Ṕ, D before D´).

(2) X´ P Ṕ D D´ …

The template is often described as "phonological" or "prosodic" (including by Hock himself), but that, of course, is not accurate. It is important to note that no motivation is cited for either of the two ordering principles: no reason for why non-deictics should come earlier in the clause than the deictics is given, nor for why the atonic element of each category should precede the tonic one.4

The graphical representation of the template in (2), especially when coupled with the claim that the template is "prosodic", invites the inference that the "goal" of the system is have an alternating strong vs. weak tonicity sequence. But since P, Ṕ and D can all double, and since any of those elements can be absent in any given clause, no such alternating pattern is observed in the vast majority of utterances in the actual corpus. The prosodic motivation for the template is thus highly abstract (not that that determines whether it is accurate or not).

My actual point in discussing the Hock system, however, is to point out that the mechanisms involved are quite distinct from that which we saw in our discussion of "clitic cluster" approaches to clitic sequencing. We can visualize the system as seen in Figure 2 below.

There is no "second position" in this conception of things, but a variety of ordered positions into which clitics are placed based on their properties (prosodic and functional). We can see the differences between the two general models if we imagine a clause with only a single 2P clitic in it. In the "clitic cluster" approach that clitic will be "in 2P", plain and simple. The ordering algorithm will have no work to do. In an approach such as that found in the Hock template, we can (and must) still ask the question: where is the clitic?

4 In fact, D´ elements may appear in the X´ position and, for Hock's version of the Rigvedic template, also in the Ṕ position, and thus come earlier in the clause than D elements, indicating that there isn't much content to this latter principle in any event.

Mark Hale

Figure 2: The "Hock template"

It could be in P (with Ṕ and D empty), or in Ṕ (with P and D empty), or in D (with P and Ṕ empty).

There is, of course, an inherent advantage, given that we are seeking to develop a non-stipulative account of ordering, if we assume that specific clitics map consistently to specific positions in the string, and that whether that position ends up being "second" or "third" or "fourth" is simply the epiphenomenal by-product of the mapping algorithm. A model which, by contrast, dumps the clitics unordered into a 2P cluster and then must impose an order on them has, in some sense, missed a chance to impose that ordering earlier in the initial mapping. Particularly if that mapping is prosody-driven, only a general slackening of constraints on the relationship between position (at the point of insertion) and interpretation – constraints which seem to hold of the linguistic representation generally – can allow a set of unordered elements, placed by a prosodic algorithm, to be realigned in an interpretationally-relevant manner (i.e., on the basis of the "functional class" of the clitic).

Hale (1996) represents an attempt to link the "positions" in the Hock template to specific structural elements within the clause (a similar orientation is found in other syntaxcentric but prosody-sensitive approaches). I will not dwell on that reinterpretation of Hock here, but instead turn to one more modern model of 2P placement.

### **5 Wackernagel's optimality-theoretic approach**

Wackernagel himself pretty clearly conceived of the 2P phenomenon as a kind of a compromise between a clitic element representing the kind of information which should come early in the clause (generally because of its "linking" function to the preceding context) and that same element being atonic, and thus not particularly suitable for initial position. This traditional conception is very closely followed by modern Optimality Theoretic approaches to 2P placement, as reflected, for example, in Anderson (2005).

The basic idea of such approaches, as with Wackernagel's, is that there is a drive for 2P clitics to be initial (captured by an AlignLeft constraint, which incurs one violation

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

for each step away from the left edge a clitic is) and a prohibition against the clitic appearing in initial position (captured by a NonInitial constraint). Obviously, both of these constraints cannot be satisfied in the same string. As always in OT, the conflicting demands are resolved via a ranking of the constraints. As long as NonInitial outranks AlignLeft, the clitic will appear *as close as possible* to string-initial position, but not *in* initial position – hence the 2P effect.

We can see this with a tableau fragment concerning the positioning of Greek *gár* 'because, since' relative to two tonic lexical items, which I designate simply as X´ and Ý. Greek *gár* is a standard example of a "Wackernagel's Law" element in the language.5

Wackernagel believed that the drive towards initial position was of different strength for different enclitic objects. As long as we make the AlignLeft constraints clitic (or clitic class) specific, a strict ranking version of OT will require us to decide for each clitic just how strong the demand is that it be aligned left. For example, if we take the Greek focus-marking enclitic *mén,* we are *compelled by the model* to ask: is it more important for *mén* to be on the left, or for *gár* to be on the left? (In Wackernagel's terms, is the "drive for initial position" stronger for *mén* or for *gár*?)

The tableau in (4) below shows how such a system generates – again by necessity – a sequencing of clitics. We should always be attentive, I think, when our modern models seem to converge on the ideas of important scholars like Wackernagel, who could not have envisioned the workings of OT, and thus independently had a similar conception of a certain class of linguistic phenomena. If Wackernagel and Anderson agree, it would be wise to not dissent too quickly! But is OT the happy confirmation of Wackernagel's less formal and more intuitive analysis?

The model in some sense combines properties of the two earlier approaches I sketched: there is a sense of a "fixed stipulative order" (as seen in the Hock Template) in the relative rankings of the AlignLeft(x) constraints, but there is no sense of fixed stipulative positions in the resulting representation (as that model implies), thus making it more like the "clitic cluster" analysis. It has the advantage, over the "clitic cluster" analysis, of not adding a new object to our model of the grammar (the "clitic cluster"), nor requiring a distinct computational process which is responsible for explicitly ordering the elements within the cluster (the "ordering algorithm" mentioned above).

5 The reader will notice that this tableau fragment does not select between two "winning" outputs: X´ *gár* Ý and Ý *gár* X´. Obviously other constraints will determine the ultimate optimal output form with respect to the relative ordering of the tonic elements to one another.

### Mark Hale

I have both conceptual and empirical concerns about the model. At the conceptual level, stipulation is built into the model pretty deeply: the so-called "factorial typology" argument says that we could just as easily have AlignLeft(gár) outrank Align-Left(mén), and indeed that every ordering of every available AlignLeft(x) constraint should be, in principle, observed. This does not seem to me to be very consistent with the data I have seen from archaic Indo-European languages (which often involves etymologically unconnected, but functionally similar enclitics showing the same ordering principles).

Empirically, one of the great challenges to this model holds, in my view, for all of the other models we have treated to this point as well. The domain over which the AlignLeft(x) constraint must be assessed is, in the model, a pure stipulation (i.e., there are no principles regulating what a given enclitic might be "aligned" to). The same problem, in my view, plagues the so-called "prosody-centric" approaches which have become popular: the clitic is said to move into the "clitic cluster" in second position of some domain, but none of the approaches I have seen (Keydana 2011; Lowe 2014; Goldstein 2016) present a non-stipulative characterization of how the appropriate domain is established.

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

A clitic is said to take 2P within (some) Intonational Phrase, but the question of which one (when there are multiple IPs in the string) is left unclear. It also seems like the "Intonational Phrase" portion of the specification (and, in non-OT approaches, the 2P part as well) is purely stipulative: could one place a clause-conjoining clitic in 2P of (some) Utterance Group or (some) Phonological Word? How about in 3P in the Intonational Phrase? The models proposed are so inexplicit it is difficult to determine precisely what their allowable elements and operations are – the models are thus both highly stipulative and poorly constrained.

As mentioned above, my concerns about the Hock Template have been spelt out in considerable detail in Hale (1996), where I attempt to reduce the empirically valid aspects of the template to the interaction of (1) normal syntactic placement of the relevant entities and (2) Halpern's (1995) "prosodic inversion". I won't go through these details here, except to note that in this conception of things enclitic elements can be in a variety of structural positions (in the syntax) and may (or may not) undergo "prosodic movement" in the phonology (depending on whether they are "properly hosted" without such movement).

It is obvious that a system which leverages both syntax and phonology to account for observed clitic placement is in some sense more complex than either a purely syntactic or a purely phonological one. But the evidence that the process is not *purely syntactic* is, as far as I can tell, universally accepted. The 2P clitics often interrupt manifest syntactic constituents (in a manner the syntax does not allow) and are quite regularly placed in positions in the string from which appropriate scope relations could not possibly be established. "Prosodic" rearrangement allows the syntax to be mundane rather than strikingly bizarre (with all of the implications such bizarreness would have, if allowed, for our theories of grammar).

That the syntax is involved is, in my view, absolutely required if we are to solve the "domain" problem. Sanskrit*ca* and Attic *te* are 2P clitics, but they appear in clause-second position only when their domain is the clause. They appear in "DP-second" position when their domain is the DP, and in VP-second position when their domain is the VP. Their domain simply cannot be defined with respect to *prosody* alone.

### **6 Sample application: Enclitic subordination**

Both of these observations can be seen to be at work in a set of examples involving enclitic subordinators. Before examining this data, which will also display the mechanisms I believe are at work in clitic placement (and thus what we might use to explain clitic sequencing), I will remind the reader that Hale (1987) showed that there was a process manifest in the language of the Rigveda, in Avestan, and in Greek, whereby a single constituent could be fronted to the left of a WH-element. Obviously, this analysis extends (though the matter was not overtly discussed – but rather implicitly assumed – in that earlier work) to other subordinators present in C ('if', 'when', 'because'). I will call that fronting process "topicalization" (and the position into which the fronting takes place Top), with no particular commitment to the discourse functions involved.

### Mark Hale

Familiar examples of this fronting looks like this:

Armed with the following assumptions, then, let us see what some structures look like, and how they might impact the development of a theory of clitic sequencing:

Wackernagel proposed long ago that there were traces in the Rigveda of a reflex of IE *\*kʷe* which (like OLat. *absque me esset* 'if it were without me', some uses of Gothic *nih*, and, although not known to Wackernagel, Hittite *takku*) is subordinating in function, generally rendered 'if, when.' As might be expected, the verb in such clauses, as in subordinate clauses in Vedic generally, is accented. This has given rise to some anxiety that the true subordination marker is the verbal accent, and that *ca* is simply (weakly) coordinating. Typical examples are:

I have provided the translation of Jamison & Brereton (2014) because it reflects directly the unease that some Vedicists feel about "subordinating" *ca*: they have translated 'and as soon as (=when)' and 'and if', leaving it unclear whether they believe that *ca* is coordinating ('and') and the verbal accent subordinating ('as soon as', 'if'), or whether perhaps they believe that this *ca* actually means 'and as soon as/if'.

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

As one can imagine, determining whether or not such clauses are weakly connected to the preceding discourse – i.e., whether the 'and' should be in the English translation – is no easy task. And from this example, and other widely accepted ones (such as RV 8.21.6ab below), in which *ca* occupies second position, it doesn't seem likely that our approach to clitics is going to be much help in this task.

(7) áchā PV ca **ca** tvainā́ you*cl*=this-ISg námasā homage-ISg vádāmasi we address kím Q-marker múhuś for a moment cid even*cl* ví PV dīdhayaḥ you will think 'When we address you with this homage, will you hesitate even for a moment?'

RV 8.21.6ab

Hettrich (1988: 252) notes overtly on subordinating *ca* that *ca* stands "wie nach Wackernagels Enklisengesetz[fn deleted] zu erwarten, überwiegend an zweiter Stelle im Satz."6

It is somewhat striking to see the *überwiegend* in this statement, because coordinating *ca* is extremely regular in its "second position" behavior, being postponed only in cases in which there is a "phonological word" at the start of the conjoined domain. Are there actually cases of "late *ca*" in subordinating function? The following examples seem to answer this question "yes".

6 '…as would be expected according to Wackernagel's Law, overwhelmingly in the second position in the clause.'

dhiyā́ thinking-ISg śáviṣṭha most-powerful-NSg ā́ PV gamat will come

'When Indra nearby will hear this twofold speech of ours, the most powerful benefactor will come here to the soma-drinking by reason of our fully focussed insight.' RV 8.61.1

To understand this data (and there are one or two more examples), we need to ask the following question: how does conjunctive *ca* end up in "second position" when it conjoins clauses, and how would we expect a "subordinating *ca*" to behave given the assumptions outlined above?

The behavior of coordinating *ca* is fairly straightforward. No matter what kind of syntactic (or prosodic!) entity *ca* is coordinating, it appears in this configuration:

[X Y Z] can be a clause, as in the case under discussion, or an DP or VP or PP or whatever. Obviously, *ca* sits at the left edge of the XP-domain and thus does not have a proper prosodic host to its left. It therefore must undergo the "prosodic flip", and, assuming X is a "phonological word", the resulting operation will give rise to this string:

$$\text{(10)} \quad \stackrel{\text{''}}{ca} \text{X } \stackrel{\bullet}{ca} \text{Y Z}$$

It should be clear that one thing that *ca* can bring into a coordination relationship with what precedes it is a clause introduced by a *topicalized* phrase. Here's an example.

(11) yád when agna Agni-VSg eṣā́ this-NSg sámitir assembly-NSg bhávāti will become devī́ godly-NSg devéṣu gods-LPl yajatā́ sacrifical-NSg yajatra sacrificial one rátnā treasures-APl ca and*cl* yád when vibhájāsi you will share out svadhāvo having-independent-will-VSg bhāgáṃ share-ASg no us*cl* átra then vásumantaṃ rich-in-goods-ASg vītāt pursue 'When, o Agni, this assembly will become godly among the gods, a sacrificial one, o sacrificial one, and when you will share out treasures, o you of independent will, then pursue a share for us rich in goods.' (SJ/JB)

RV 10.11.8

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

The c-pada of this verse arises from a *syntactic* structure of the form:

So where do we expect **subordinating** *ca* to be *syntactically*? Well, it is *isofunctional* with *yád* in the clause above. So the structure of the subordinate clause in (6a) at the end of *syntactic* computation would presumably be:

Since *ca* is alone up there in the left periphery, it must undergo the "prosodic flip" in the phonology to be properly hosted.

What would happen if we were to have a Top element in such a clause? In the case of coordination, it of course is the entire clause, including its initial Topic-phrase, which gets coordinated to a preceding (or following) clause, and *ca* thus dominates TopP. But topicalized material appears to the *left* of the subordinator (relative pronouns, *yádi* 'if', etc.), so if *ca* is a subordinator, we predict a structure such as (contrast coordinating *ca* in (12)):

### Mark Hale

If the proper "hosting domain" for *ca* is the CP, then it is unhosted on its left, and we predict the *phonology* to restructure this to:

(15) Topic [*ca* X *ca* Y Z]

Note that, if there are such examples, since coordinating *ca* won't act this way, but subordinating *ca* should, we would have clear and unambiguous evidence for the *syntactic separation* of *ca* into two distinct types of grammatical element. And of course there are such examples. We saw them above in (8ab), whose structures are:

(16) a. [Top *mr̥gā́ṇāṃ ná hetáyo*] [CP *ca* [*yántica imā́bŕhaspáter áhimāyām ̥ ̐abhí dyū́n*]] b. [Top *ubháyaṃ*] [CP *ca* [*śr̥ṇávac ca na índro arvā́g idáṃ vácaḥ*]]

The construction as a whole is rare, but confirmation for this analysis is provided by the reflex of subordinating *ca* in later Vedic texts (and, rarely, already in the Rigveda) – the subordinating particle *céd* (etymologically from *ca* + *íd*). The "normal" position for this particle is, of course, in second position.

(17) a. ná Neg vā́ PTCL araṇyānír Lady of the Wilderness-NSg hanti slays anyáś another-NSg cén **céd** nā́bhigáchati Neg=attacks 'In truth, the Lady of the Wilderness does no slaughter, if someone else does not attack.' (SJ/JB) RV 10.146.5ab b. yó who-NSg asyā her-GSg*cl* ū́dho udder-ASg ná Neg vedaknows -atho thereto=PTCL asyā her-GSg*cl* stánān teats-APl utá as well ubháyenaivā́smai both-ISg=PTCL=him-DSg*cl* duhe she yields milk dā́tuṃ to give céd **céd** áśakad he was able vaśā́m cow-ASg 'Whoever knows not the udder of her, and likewise the teats of her, to him she yields milk with both, if he has been able to give the cow.' (Whitney) AVŚ 12.4.18

But, as with subordinating *ca*, we find unexpectedly "late" instances of *céd* as well.

(18) a. [arthíno] having-a-task-NPl yánti proceed céd **céd** árthaṃ task-ASg gáchān they will go to íd PTCL dadúṣo giver-GSg rātím generosity-ASg 'If those having a task proceed to their task, they will attain the generosity of the giver.' RV 8.79.5ab

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

AVŚ 12.4.21

And note that we can use our analysis of these "late" instances to make our interpretations of certain Vedic passages more precise. Look at the AB passage (from the Śunaḥśepa legend) in (19).

 That is, his analysis (ignoring for a moment the *ced*, to which we will turn momentarily) is that the subject and predicate divide like this:

### (20) [*pitā*] [*putrasya jātasya paśyet jīvato mukham*]

There are two possibilities for where *pitā* could be under Keith's interpretation: it could have been fronted into the Topic position, or, of course, it could be in some position lower than C (in Focus, or in IP, e.g.). If it were below C, the output of the syntax (now with *ced* reintroduced) would have been as below, with the "prosodic flip" indicated:

Mark Hale

(21) [CP *ced* [*pitā ced putrasya jātasya paśyet jīvataḥ mukham*]]

If *pitā* were in Topic, we would have instead expected:

(22) [Topic *pitā*] [CP *ced* [*putrasya ced jātasya paśyet jīvataḥ mukham*]]

Neither of these is the sentence in the text. It is clear what the structure must be if the placement of *ced* is to fit with all the other evidence for the use of this particle in early Vedic:

(23) [Topic *pitā putrasya jātasya*] [CP *ced* [*paśyet ced jīvataḥ mukham*]] 'when the father of a (just) born son*i* sees the face of (him*i* ) living'

### **7** *hí***,** *gár***, and clitic sequencing**

In my dissertation (Hale 1987), I dealt fairly extensively with the data from Vedic *hí* 'because, since'. I noted that while the vast majority of instances of *hí* are in "second position" (appropriately defined), there were a number of counterexamples. Note that *hí* occupies, at the end of the syntactic computation, the very same position ("C") as subordinating *ca* and *céd*.

I won't bother citing second position instances of *hí* – as I said, the vast majority of the approx. 630 attestations of the particle are in that slot, properly defined. Some of the not terribly numerous exceptions are given in (24) below. Several interesting issues arise, so I cite a healthy number of the exceptions.

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

In all of the "exceptions" I will cite here, we can analyze the data just as we did in the case of *ca* and *céd*: the first constituent of the clause is in the Topic position above the CP, *hí* is in C itself, and is not "properly hosted" by a tonic element *within its domain* on its left, and thus undergoes inversion. Thus we have [Top *urukramásya*] in (24a), [Top *asmā́ñ ca tā́ṃś ca*] in (24b), [Top *tribhíḥ pavítrair*] in (24c), and [Top *ákṣetravit*] in (24d).

In my dissertation, I rather unwisely said, regarding examples such as these, that the poets were able to treat the *caesura* as equivalent to a clause-boundary, and thus place *hí* in second position after the caesura, rather than after the actual start of the clause. This is a not a particularly good idea, giving the meter far too much power to determine the data – certainly far more than I would be willing to concede at this stage of my research on the matter.

We can give a much more sensible assessment of this data if we instead note that the boundary between the element in Topic and the start of the CP-domain is marked by an intonational reset (or pause), and that the natural place to align this pause within the rhythmic structure of the verse line is at the caesura. In all of the examples above, the Topic ends at the caesura of a trimeter line (this will be true of the examples I cite below as well).

As usual, there are many other interesting things going on with these examples as well. For example, in support of the topicalization analysis, we see in an example such as (24a) a discontinuity (*urukramásya…bándhur*). We need to account for this discontinuity, and movement is the way to do it in our model – topicalization provides the relevant explanation for that movement. We will see additional examples of this type below.

Finally, and returning to the matter of clitic sequencing, we may be able to learn something important about how exactly the "prosodic flip" works to trigger specific orderings from examples such as those in (25).

RV 10.45.5c

Recall that pronominal clitics occupy the lowest position in the C-domain (or the highest in IP), so one possible structure for what the *syntax* would have sent to the prosody for (25a) would be:

(26) [Top *índro vidvā́m̐*] [CP *hí* [*tvā* [*ánu cacákṣa*]]]

### Mark Hale

In this structure, neither *hí* nor*tvā* can be properly hosted on their left, with the expected "prosodic inversion" being thus triggered:

$$\text{(27) } \quad \left[ \text{Tọn ìndro vidvấtọ̀} \right] \left[ \text{.} \quad \text{hí } \left[ \begin{smallmatrix} \text{fọ̀nà } \text{hí tvā } \text{aicáksa} \end{smallmatrix} \right] \right]$$

However, as we all also know, there are many "exceptions" to the syntactic "weak pronoun fronting" that seems to be responsible for making pronominal clitics targets for Wackernagel's Law-type effects in archaic IE languages. If the *tvā* of (25a) were to represent one of these exceptions, and thus be unfronted, the most likely input structure for the prosody would have been:

(28) [Top *índro vidvā́m̐*] [CP *hí* [*ánu tvā cacákṣa*]]

Which would have been operated on by the prosody so as to create:

(29) [Top *índro vidvā́m̐*] [CP *hí* [*ánu hí tvā cacákṣa*]]

These two possible analyses have quite different implications for how the system I have assumed gives rise to clitic sequencing. In the analysis in (26) we would be looking at the effects of *iterative prosodic inversion* events, and the examples would reveal an (as far as I can see somewhat unexpectedly) "outside-in" processing (*hí* flips in first, then *tvā*).

Under the analysis in (28), we are looking at the relationship between the resolution of the hosting needs of an unmoved *tvā* relative to the ability of an inverting *hí* to "slip in" between *tvā* and *tvā*'s potential (and ultimate) host *ánu*. The details of the processes involved under the latter set of assumptions are too complex for me to deal with in this context, but there is evidence that that approach does represent the correct analysis of examples such as (25ab).

Recall our earlier discussion of the Attic Greek *mén gár* clitic sequence. *gár* is of course essentially isofunctional with Rigvedic *hí*. In addition, Thomson's (1939) wellknown paper on the "postponement of interrogatives" in Attic drama supports the idea that one could still front into a high Top position in this language. This has a specific entailment, since the WH-elements Thomson talks about are in CP, and the topics he deals with are higher, and since *gár* is in C, there should be Attic drama cases exactly like the "postponed" subordinating *ca*, *céd*, and *hí* examples we walked through earlier. And there are.7

(30) a. pròs in light of taũta these-APl mḕ Neg psaúsēi should touch tis any-NSg*cl* Argeíōn Greek-GPl emoũ· me-GSg

7 Note that in (30c) the articular infinitive construction has a proclitic article, and the first prosodic word after which *gár* 'flips' is thus tō̃i=plouteĩn.

### 14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

[spʰagē̃i knife-DSg paréksō I submit to gàr **gár** dérēn neck-ASg eukardíōs. bravely 'In light of these things, no one of the Greeks need touch me, because I will bravely submit my neck to the knife.' Eur. IphA 1559–1560 b. hō̃n which-GPl g᾿ PTCL oúte Neg métron measure-NSg oút᾿ Neg aritʰmós number estí is moi· me-DSg*cl* [kakō̃i trouble-DSg kakòn trouble-NSg gàr **gár** eis to hámillan competition-ASg érkʰetai. comes 'Of which (woes) there is neither measure nor number for me, because woe comes into competition with woe.' Eur. Tro 620–621 c. kaì and nḕ by dí᾽ Zeus-ASg eí if tí something-NSg g᾽ PTCL ésti is lampròn splendid-NSg kaì and kalòn beautiful-NSg ḕ or kʰaríen elegant-NSg antʰrṓpoisi, men-DPl dià through sè you-ASg gígnetai· it comes about [hápanta] everything-NPl tō̃i=plouteĩn Art-DSg=being rich-INF gár **gár** estʰ᾽ is hupḗkoa. subservient-NPl 'and, by Zeus, if something is splendid and beautiful, or elegant for men, it comes about through you (=Wealth), because everything is subservient to being rich.' Ar. Plutus 144–146

In cases involving both *mén*, which marks focus,8 and *gár*, meaning 'because', the interpretation of scope within the clauses indicates that we are dealing with a structure such as 'because (*gár*) *one the one hand* (*mén*) … *on the other hand* (*dé*) …' When there is nothing for the *gár* to lean leftwards on, we get the surface order *mén gár*. This indicates sequential "prosodic inversion" of the form:

$$\{\mathbf{31} \mid \text{ [cp gár [mén [X mén gár \\$ Z]]]}\}$$

But this is an "inside-out" (*mén* first, then *gár*) resolution of the hosting needs of these elements. If the Vedic mechanisms are the same – and all indications are that they are – then this is clear evidence against the analysis in (26), favoring the (28) analysis. The implications of this prosodic "tucking in" have not been explored in any significant detail.

### **8 Conclusions**

If we tie the domain of a clitic like *hí* or *gár* to its semantic scope – which we can easily do by positioning it via the syntax, whose job, after all, is to create precisely these kinds

8 The particle *mén* normally has a contrasting element, marked by the particle *dé*. I translate the contrastive relationship between these two elements as 'on the one hand X, on the other hand Y' below.

### Mark Hale

of scope relations – we need not worry about finding the structure for it to be in "second position" in. If the clitic cannot be hosted on its left *in situ*, that structure will be the one which provides the nearest prosodic host to the right of the *syntactic position* of the clitic, regardless of what entity that is.

As with other syntactic entities that take arguments, we sometimes do have to specify the nature of those arguments. But it doesn't follow from that that we need to do it *stipulatively* – it isn't chance that there is no word-level *hí* or *gár* 'because' clitic. A word doesn't express the kind of things 'because' needs to take as an argument to generate a coherent semantics.9 But that same word would work fine as an argument of 'and'.

Given a sufficiently rich understanding of the semantics of a particular enclitic or postpositive, we should be able to deduce the nature of the kinds of syntactic entities it can take as an argument. No stipulation should be needed. Of course we are far from having this kind of understanding of the meaning of many Vedic and Attic Greek enclitics.

To the extent we can determine with some degree of confidence the *syntactic* position of the enclitic elements we are interested in, we are in an excellent position to examine their *surface position* (which may be the same as their syntactic position, but may be perturbed by the "prosodic inversion" process) with a view to determining the detailed mechanics of the interactions involved when multiple 2P elements are present in a string. The more explicit a conception we have of the relevant algorithms, the easier this task will be. One of the strengths, in my view, of the model assumed here is that its parts are all clearly enough defined that it should be easy to discover those instances, if any, in which stipulation may be, unfortunately, required.

By contrast, approaches which leave vague the processes that give rise to clitic sequencing are revealing in that shortcoming their general inadequacy. Getting prosodic positioning to interact in the required way with, on the one hand, syntactic positioning (which all grammatical theories require) and, on the other, with semantic interpretation (ditto), is a very non-trivial problem: it goes to the core architecture of the grammar. Working out the details of one's assumptions in this domain cannot be left as an exercise to future work – one needs to be formulate a clear notion about such things going in. When there are multiple clitics we see overtly the failure of inexplicit models (such as Hale 1987, and a lot of subsequent work), but those same problems are present, if obscured, in the case of simple clitics as well.

9 Yes, I know about the prepositional 'because' phenomenon. If you think about what such strings *mean*, and assume that their meaning is representationally present (but not all pronounced), as in

Q: Who slew Vrtra?

A: Indra.

in which 'Indra' *means* 'Indra slew Vrtra' (because it can be a lie, and only propositions can be false, not nouns), then you'll see why I don't think this is a problem. Anyway, there's no evidence that the speakers of Rigvedic Sanskrit could say: 'Indra slew Vrtra. Because, the waters.'

14 Preliminaries to the investigation of clitic sequencing in Greek and Indo-Iranian

### **References**

### **Chapter 15**

# **Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism**

### Paul Kiparsky

Stanford University

Event nominalizations and agent nominalizations provide evidence that all affixation is morphological, and that phrasal categories are projected from words in the syntax. Departing from both transformational and earlier lexicalist approaches to nominalizations, I first argue on the basis of English and Finnish evidence that gerunds are not DPs built on heads that embed an extended verbal projection (Baker & Vinokurova 2009; Kornfilt & Whitman 2011), but IPs that need Case. They are categorially verbal at all levels of the syntax, including having structural subjects rather than possessor specifiers. Their nominal behavior is entirely due to the unvalued Case feature borne by their Infl head, which they share with all participial verb forms. I then argue that agent nominalizations are categorially nominal at all levels of the syntax, and that the verb-like case assignment of transitive agent nominalizations is due to the verbal Aspect feature borne by their nominalizing head. Vedic Sanskrit, Northern Paiute, and Sakha evidence is shown to favor this analysis over B&V's analysis of intransitive agent nominalizations as nominal equivalents of Voice heads and transitive agent nominalizations as Aspect heads. The two "mixed" categories – gerunds and transitive nominalizations – thus prove to be formally duals: respectively verbs with Case and nouns with Aspect.

### **1 Nominalizations**

The earliest generative work derived all nominalizations syntactically (Chomsky 1955; Lees 1960). Chomsky (1970) then argued that only *-ing* gerunds are derived syntactically, while all other types of event nominals, such as *refutation, acceptance, refusal*, are derived morphologically in the lexicon from bases that are unspecified between nouns and verbs. The suffix *-ing* was shown to serve both as the gerund formative and as one of the formatives that derive lexical event nominals. Chomsky's main argument was based on the fact that gerund phrases have the structure of verb phrases whereas other event

Paul Kiparsky. 2017. Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism. In Claire Bowern, Laurence Horn & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), *On looking into words (and beyond)*, 311–346. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.495452

### Paul Kiparsky

nominals have the structure of noun phrases.1 The differences are completely systematic. Unlike derived event nominals, gerunds are modifiable by adverbs, assign structural case to their complements (Table 1a,b), disallow articles and other determiners (Table 1c) and plurals (Table 1d), allow aspect (Table 1e) and negation (Table 1f), and they have a grammatical subject which is assigned a Th-role as in finite clauses (Table 1g), and which may be an expletive (Table 1h). In (Table 1g), *reading* refers to an event and *her* to its agent, the reader. In the derived nominal, *her* could also be a sponsor, organizer, or some other participant of a reading event not necessarily identical with the reader (Kratzer 1996; 2004), and *reading* could also mean 'manner of reading', 'interpretation'. Without an *of* complement, derived nominals are also interpretable in a passive sense: in *Mary's confirmation*, Mary could be the confirmer or the confirmee.

The lexicalist line of analysis continues to be developed in different ways (Malouf 2000; Blevins 2003; Kim 2016). But many recent treatments have reverted to a uniformly syntactic derivation of nominalizations, in which nominalizing heads project a nominal structure and have a verbal complement whose type determines the nominalization's properties. The differences between the two types in Table 1 is captured by introducing

1 Chomsky also contrasted the uniformity, regularity and full productivity of gerunds with the morphological and semantic diversity, idiosyncrasies, and limited productivity of derived event nominals. As Anderson 2016 notes, these points played a subsidiary role in Chomsky's argument. Indeed, they are not compelling criteria by themselves, for there is no shortage of productivity and regularity in the lexicon, and syntax has its share of idiosyncrasy.

2 *I can't help but feel a little despondant due to it seeming to me that the TIE/fo and the T-70 make the original TIE and T-65 somewhat redundant* (Internet), *evidence that "explains away" its seeming to me that p is the case* (James Pryor, The Skeptic and the Dogmatist, *Noûs* 34: 534, 2000). The variation between Poss*-ing* and Acc*-ing* gerunds seen here is briefly addressed in 2.3 below.

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

them at different levels in the functional structure. The gerund *-ingV* is structurally high, and derived nominals in *-ingN , -ion, -al, -ance* are structurally low.

Kornfilt & Whitman (2011) dub this the Functional Nominalization Thesis (FNT), and propose a typology of four levels of nominalization, CP, TP, vP and VP. In this typology, English gerunds are TP nominalizations, while derived nominals are VP nominalizations.3 This paper vindicates a uniform treatment of nominalizations in a different way: all true nominalizations are derived lexically; gerunds are not nominalizations at all – they are neither DPs nor NPs but IPs that need Case.

As my point of departure I take Baker & Vinokurova's (2009) theory, which extends the FNT from event nominalizations to agent nominalizations. For gerunds, B&V posit the structure (1a), based on the version of the DP analysis originated (along with the DP itself) by Abney 1987. The DP's complement here is an NP headed by the gerund nominalizer *-ingV* , below which the structure is entirely verbal: an AspP which hosts aspectual material and certain adverbs, and which has a vP complement whose v (v=Voice) head assigns structural case and introduces an external agent argument. This external agent argument shows up as a genitive in D head. B&V do not say exactly how it gets there in (1a); perhaps it is base-generated in D and bears a control relation to the PRO in the Spec-vP position where the agent role is assigned.

For derived nominals B&V propose the structure (1b), where the head (*-ingN* , *-ion*, etc.) takes a bare VP complement. Because it has no Asp or v projection, it contains neither adverbs, agents, nor structural case.4

The structures in (1) take care of the contrasting properties Table 1b, e, f, and g, but leave the remaining four properties (Table 1a, c, d, and h) to fend for themselves. On the one hand, the DP in (1a) provides too little structure: expletive *it*-subjects are believed to occupy Spec-IP or Spec-TP, but (1)a provides no Spec-IP or Spec-TP for them.5 On the other hand, the DP, needed in the analysis as a site for the gerund's subject, generates unwanted structure. Since DPs can have plural heads, adjective modifiers, determiners, and quantifiers, the DP analysis wrongly predicts that Table 1a, c, and d should be grammatical. To maintain it one must somehow prevent functional projections like AP, QP, and NumP from appearing in DPs that have NP complements that have AspP complements, while allowing them in other kinds of DPs, and one must prevent the head of a

3 A syntactic derivation of gerunds from TP/IP is also developed by Pires 2006. The aspectual content of the gerund is treated in Pustejovsky 1995; Alexiadou 2001, andAlexiadou, Soare & Iordăchioaia 2010. Alexiadou and her co-workers conclude that gerunds are imperfective Aspect heads that dominate VoiceP and vP, while nominalizers are n heads that also dominate VoiceP and vP, but under NumberP and ClassifierP, housing adjective modifiers, determiners, and plural.

4 All analyses have to contend with the fact that certain adverbs can occur as postmodifiers with derived nominals, and even with some underived ones (Payne, Pullum & Huddleston 2010); they cite examples such as *the opinion generally of the doctors*, *a timber shortage nationally*, *the people locally*, and *the intervention again of Moscow*. We shall see similar Finnish data in §3 below.

5 Expletive *there*, which likewise appears in gerunds, may sit in a lower subject position, since it is sensitive to the argument structure of the predicate – the absence of Cause according to Deal 2009, who puts it in the specifier of v. Like expletive *it*, *there* does not appear in derived nominals (*\*there's appearance to be a problem*). On Deal's analysis, the distribution of expletive *there* is consistent with my IP analysis of gerunds, but adds no further support to it.

Paul Kiparsky

DP whose complement is an NP whose complement is an AspP from being an article or a demonstrative pronoun.6

Contrary to what the FNT seems to promise, then, the morphosyntactic properties of a nominalization cannot be fixed just by locating its nominal head in a universal hierarchy of verbal functional categories, or even in a language-specific one. In that approach to mixed categories, it seems that the functional content that a given nominalizing head may combine with must be specified on an item-specific basis. But not just any arbitrary mixed category is possible. Consider the awesome unused power unleashed by the FNT. If functional N heads can convert AspPs into NPs in the syntax, as in (1a), why aren't there such things as Q heads with vP complements (\**[some [he read it]vP ]QP*), let alone multiple verbalizing and nominalizing syntactic heads interspersed to generate phrases in which layers of verbal and nominal structure alternate in various combinations?

6 Some of the overgeneration could be curbed by by eliminating the DP layer, or by eliminating the NP layer and having D select for AspP directly. But these projections cannot be struck from (1) because their heads are essential to the analysis. The D head serves as the site of the structural subject, and the N head houses the nominalizer *-ing*. Neither of these elements can be accommodated in the Asp head, for that is required for the aspectual auxiliary *have*.

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

The empirical problem of overgeneration is a direct result of the theoretical approach behind the FNT-style analysis. The derivation of gerunds in (1a) involves syntactic affixation of *-ing* to the phrasal projection AspP.7 A lexicalist perspective rules out affixation to phrases. It dictates an entirely different kind of derivation, in which the gerund suffix *-ing* is added to verbs in the morphology to build words (e.g. *reading*), which are then inserted in terminal nodes in the syntax. On this view, a gerund phrase is the syntactic projection of a gerund, not of a determiner as in (1a). On that basis we can build a simple and restrictive theory of nominalizations that explains *all* the data in Table 1.

The key idea is that gerunds are participles, and that participial suffixes, *-ing* included, are Infl heads that differ from finite and infinitive Infl heads in that they bear a Case feature. The extended projection of a gerund is then an IP with a Case feature, which needs to be checked (or, from a non-lexicalist perpective, valued) in the syntax. The Case feature restricts participial phrases to two syntactic functions: arguments – gerunds – in positions where their value for Case can be checked by a predicate, and participial modifiers in positions where their value for Case can be checked by head-modifier agreement.

Lexicalism excludes not only FNT-style analyses of gerunds, but every kind of syntactic affixation to phrasal categories. This means that no syntactic process can have the effect of changing the category of a word. That holds for all types of nominalization: event nominalizations, result nominalizations, and agent nominalizations. All "mixed categories" must then arise from morphological specifications of lexical heads, rather than from syntactic embedding as in (1). In §3 I support this more general prediction by showing that transitive agent nouns do not have an embedded vP projection and that their verbal properties come from a Tense/Aspect feature on the agent suffix.

I assume that a phrasal constituent is a projection of its head, which inherits its category (Noun, Verb, etc.), its inflectional features (such as Aspect and Case), and its thematic roles (Agent, Patient, Instrument, Event, etc.).8 Mixed categories are verbs, nouns, and adjectives that have an extra phi-feature. Their extended projections behave like extended projections of ordinary verbs, nouns, and adjectives, modulo the properties enforced by that feature content. The language-specific syntax of gerunds is determined by their Case feature. A gerund that can bear any Case projects a phrase with the distribution of a DP. A gerund that has a partially specified Case feature projects a phrase that is restricted to positions compatible with the specified values of the feature. For example, Finnish gerunds are restricted to internal argument positions (section 2.2). Similarly, the verbal properties of transitive agent nouns are due to a Tense/Aspect feature assigned to these nouns by the agent affix that forms them. This feature may likewise be lexically unvalued and specified by additional aspectual morphology (as in Northern Paiute), or inherently specified on the agent noun affix itself (as in Sanskrit and Sakha), see 3.3. Since the mixed categories under lexicalist assumptions are projected from a single head, we correctly predict the absence of mixed categories in which verbal and nominal structure

7 A similar earlier proposal is Yoon (1996).

8 E.g. ⟦-er⟧ = λPλxλe[P(e) ∧ Agent(e,x)] (the set of human individuals that are the Agent of some event), ⟦-ee⟧ = λPλxλe[P(e) ∧ human(x) ∧ Undergoer(e,x)] (the set of human individuals that are the Undergoer of some event).

### Paul Kiparsky

is alternately layered in weird combinations, of vPs that function as DPs, and of the other abovementioned monstrosities.

A theoretical gain is that we need not divide nominalizations into a syntactic type and a lexical type, as in standard lexicalist analyses. Once gerunds are recognized as IPs, we can maintain that all nominalizations are derived morphologically in the lexicon. This can be done either in a realizational morphology of the type pioneered by Anderson (1992), or in a morpheme-based one such as the minimalist morphology of Wunderlich (1996a). It remains to be seen whether the analysis can be recast in a DM-friendly syntaxbased format. What is clear is that it does not *follow* from any theory that countenances structures like (1). To that extent at least, its empirical success constitutes new empirical support for lexicalism.

I begin in §2 with "high" event nominalizations. I show that the lexicalist approach correctly predicts the syntax of English and Finnish gerund phrases, including aspects that go unexplained in FNT analyses, and that it curbs the typology in a good way. In §3 I apply the same idea to agent nominals, and support the resulting analyses with data from Vedic Sanskrit and Finnish that is new to the theoretical literature.

### **2 Gerunds**

### **2.1 English gerunds**

Gerunds and participles are formally identical in English (Pullum 1991; Yoon 1996; Huddleston & Pullum 2002; Blevins 2003). For example, they are the only verb forms that overtly distinguish perfect aspect but not progressive or past tense. Given the modest morphology of English this identity might be dismissed as an accident, but the testimony of richly inflected languages, such as Finnish (2b), Classical Greek (2c), Sanskrit (2d), and Latin (2e) leaves no doubt that participles are systematically used in two functions: adjectivally as modifiers and nominally as arguments.

	- i. *Modifier:* I saw Bill reading the book. (⇒ I saw Bill.)
	- ii. *Argument:* I hated Bill's reading the book. (⇏ I hated Bill.)
	- b. Finnish participles
		- i. *Modifier:*

Muist-i-n remember-pst-1sg hunaja-a honey-prtc syö-vä-n eat-ptc-gen karhu-n. bear-acc 'I remembered the/a bear (that was) eating honey.'

ii. *Argument:*

Muist-i-n remember-prtc-1sg karhu-n bear-gen syö-vä-n eat-ptc-gen hunaja-a. honey-prtc 'I remembered that the/a bear ate honey.'

	- i. *Modifier:*

tòn the-acc adikoũ-nt-a act-unjustly-prtc-acc Phílippo-n Philip-acc apéktein-a kill-aor-1sg 'I killed the unjustly acting Philip.'

ii. *Argument:*

adikoũ-nt-a act-unjustly-prtc-acc Phílippo-n Philip-acc eksḗlenk-s-a prove-aor-1sg 'I proved that Philip acted unjustly.'

	- i. *Modifier:*

rājān-am king-acc ā-ga-ta-ṃ to-go-prtc-acc śṛ-ṇo-mi hear-pres-1sg 'I hear the king (who has) arrived.'

ii. *Argument:*

rājān-am king-acc ā-ga-ta-ṃ to-go-prtc-acc śṛ-ṇo-mi hear-pres-1sg

'I hear that the king has arrived.'

	- i. *Modifier:*

Hannibal Hannibal.nom vic-tu-s defeat-prtc.masc-nom ad to Antiochu-m Antiochus-acc confug-i-t flee-perf-3sg 'Defeated, Hannibal took refuge with Antiochus.'

ii. *Argument:*

Hannibal Hannibal.nom vic-tu-s defeat-prtc.masc-nom Romano-s Roman.acc.pl metu fear.abl libera-vi-t free-perf-3sg 'Hannibal's being defeated freed the Romans from fear.'

Traditional grammars of these languages treat participles as verb forms which are inflected for Case, for good reasons. Participles distinguish the verbal categories of voice and tense/aspect, and they are formed off the same tense/aspect stems as the finite verbs. They supply the periphrastic forms that complete gaps in inflectional paradigms. They assign the same cases to their objects as the corresponding finite verbs and infinitives do. They are modified by adverbs, not by adjectives. They select for the same prefixes as the corresponding finite verbs and infinitives, with the same (often idiosyncratic) meanings. Those languages that disallow noun+verb compounds (such as classical Greek and Sanskrit) also disallow noun+participle compounds. As I show below, participles have structural subjects.

### Paul Kiparsky

So there must be some property that distinguishes participles from finite verbs and infinitives, and which supports the double function of participles as nominal arguments and adjectival modifiers. The obvious candidate is Case. Suppose then that participial formatives are Infl heads that need Case. On lexicalist assumptions, they are affixed in the morphology to a verb to make a participle, which is then inflected for case if the language has case morphology, and enters the syntax with a specified Case feature that – like any Case feature – must be checked in the syntax. In a language that lacks case morphology, such as English, the participle remains unvalued for Case, and projects an IP with a Case feature that must be valued in the syntax. Both "checking" and "valuing" can be formalized as identical operations of feature unification, or as optimal matching in OT Correspondence Theory.

As an illustration consider first the derivation of gerunds in English. Prescinding from vP, AspP, VoiceP, and other possible functional projections, their syntactic structure is as in (3).

Infl[uCase] combines with V in the same way as Tensed Infl does. How this happens depends on the model of grammar. If we assume both lexicalist syntax and lexicalist morphology, the case-needing Infl *-ing* is suffixed to V in the morphology to form a participle, and the participle then projects a case-needing IP in the syntax, where the Case feature is valued. In argumental participles (gerunds), it is valued by the governing Case-assigner, and in participial modifiers it is valued by agreement with the nominal they modify.

If we assume minimalist syntax, we can comply with lexical morphology by using spanning (Svenonius 2016), which allows the lexically generated participle to be inserted under the two corresponding syntactic terminal nodes. In DM, *-ing* would be a syntactic terminal that is postsyntactically Lowered onto V. Thus, the idea that gerunds are caseneeding IPs can probably be implemented in any grammatical architecture. However, in non-lexicalist frameworks this analysis is merely motivated on empirical grounds. In lexicalist frameworks that prohibit affixation to phrases it is required on principled grounds as well.

In languages where participles are morphologically inflected for Case, such as (2b-e), participles project an IP that bears a specified Case value that must be checked in the

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

syntax. The lexicalist approach now makes an interesting prediction: in such languages, gerunds may be morphologically restricted to particular Case features, which restrict their syntactic distribution to contexts compatible with those features. This prediction is confirmed in Finnish. Finnish gerunds bear an oblique Case – glossed as Genitive in (2b.ii) – which confines them to internal argument positions (section 2.2).9

Returning to English, the analysis of participial clauses as IPs that have the single special property of needing structural Case explains at a stroke which clausal and nominal properties they have and which ones they lack. To start with the latter, it explains why gerund phrases, unlike DPs, have no articles, quantifiers, or numerals, why they cannot be modified by adjectives and relative clauses, why their head cannot be genitive or plural.

	- b. \* Both/every compiling corporas took over a year.
	- c. \* His two compilings corpora each took over a year.
	- d. \* His careful compiling the corpus was a turning point.
	- e. \* His editing texts that is funded will take a year.
	- f. \* His compiling corpora's results were dramatic.

The missing categories are just the ones that would originate in a DP.

As for the nominal properties that gerunds do have, they are accurately covered by the generalization that gerunds appear in Case positions. They function as subjects, objects, and predicates, as objects of prepositions (6e,f,g), and as objects of a small set of transitive adjectives (6f,g), all diagnosed as Case positions by the fact that full-fledged DPs occur in them.

	- b. I regret [ Bill's leaving Paris ].
	- c. The problem is [ Bill's leaving Paris ].

9 There is no agreement relation between the genitive subject and the gerund in (4).

### Paul Kiparsky

This does not mean that all transitive verbs take gerund complements. Particular verbs can select for whether they take gerunds, *that-*clauses, or infinitive complements, just as they can select for whether they take DPs:

	- b. I said it/something/several things.

What the analysis correctly predicts is that gerunds, unlike *that*-clauses and infinitives, appear *only* in Case positions:

	- ii. \* I hope it.
	- iii. I hope that Bill is leaving Paris.
	- iv. I hope to leave Paris.
	- b. i. \* It is rumored Bill's leaving Paris.
		- ii. \* The proposal is rumored.
		- iii. It is rumored that Bill is leaving Paris.
		- iv. It is rumored to be happening.
	- c. i. \* It seemed / was expected Bill's leaving Paris.
		- ii. \* It seemed / was expected this event.
		- iii. It seemed / was expected that Bill would leave Paris.
		- iv. It seemed / was expected to happen.

A further consequence is that the subjects of gerunds are IP specifiers. If overt, they are Genitive or Accusative,11 just as the subject of a finite IP is Nominative, and the overt subject of an infinitive requires a Case-assigning *for*. Crucially, they are true structural subjects analogous to subjects of finite clauses, not necessarily "agents" as in B&V's Table 1a, nor "possessors" with their varied functions as in derived nominals. This prediction is confirmed by three generalizations. Unlike genitive specifiers of nouns (including derived nominals), but like structural subjects of finite clauses, the specifiers of gerunds can be expletives:

	- b. \* It(s) appearance to you that you dreamt is not evidence of it(s) truth that you dreamt.

10 Cf. *It's no good this sort of game.* (Dickens, *Our Mutual Friend)*

11 On Acc+*ing* gerunds see the brief and inconclusive remarks in §2.3 below.

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

Like structural subjects of finite clauses, they are subject to control (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1190):

	- b. Mary remembered the/a locking of the door. [the rememberer might not be the locker]

like structural subjects of finite clauses, and unlike genitive agents of nominals, they cannot be paraphrased with *of* or *by*:

	- b. the Persians' quick running = the quick running of/by the Persians
	- c. the Persians' quickly running ≠ \*quickly running of/by the Persians
	- d. the Persians' quickly attacking the Greeks ≠ \*quickly attacking the Greeks of/by the Persians
	- e. the Persians quickly attacked the Greeks ≠ \*of/by the Persians quickly attacked the Greeks

To summarize: the analysis of gerunds as IPs with Case explains the cross-linguistically common convergence of nominal and adjectival functions in a single morphological class of verbal forms. By not positing any DP or NP structure over the IP it avoids the overgeneration problem that FNT-type analyses face. It excludes the possibility of multiple alternating verbalizing and nominalizing syntactic heads to which the FNT opens the theoretical door, and gets rid of the constraint that heads of DPs whose complements are NPs whose complements are verbal projections may not be articles or demonstrative pronouns. It provides the basis for a uniform structure for all DPs, and for a uniform lexical derivation of all nominalizations. It correctly predicts that gerunds and participles have subjects – specifiers of Infl that are structural counterparts to the subjects of finite clauses. What is important is that the analysis is not motivated merely by these empirical arguments; it is a consequence of lexicalism, and, if correct, supports the lexicalist organization of grammar.

The question arises whether there might be a CP layer above the IP, headed by a null complementizer. This additional structure is not justifiable for English, because the distribution of gerunds differs from that of any type of CP. First, gerunds need Case, whereas CPs do not (Vergnaud 1977). Secondly, gerunds are permitted in clause-medial position, while *that-*clauses and other CP clauses must extrapose.12

That gerund phrases are full IPs with a structural subject, that they bear Case, and that, unlike derived nominals, they have no DP or NP projection, and in particular no possessor-type Specifier, makes many additional predictions that are testable in morphologically richer languages. They turns out to be abundantly supported, as demonstrated for Finnish in the next section.

12 However, the case marking of participles in inflected languages could be considered as a kind of complementizer, as conjectured for the inherent case affix *-n* on Finnish gerunds in §2.2.

Paul Kiparsky

### **2.2 Finnish gerunds are IPs**

Finnish participial propositional complement clauses are the closest functional counterparts of English gerunds, and I will call them gerunds here. They are not DPs with possessors but IPs with true structural subjects. Their Case is inherently marked by the oblique suffix *-n*, arguably functioning as a complementizer, which restricts them to internal argument positions. This illustrates how the typology of gerunds emerges from variation in what cases they can bear.13

Unlike English gerunds, Finnish gerunds are never external arguments. Thus they can be objects of transitive verbs such as *say*, *think*, *want*, *prove*, *remember* and *hear*, and subjects of presentational intransitives like *appear* and *become evident*, but they cannot be subjects of such predicates as *be obvious*, *prove*, and *mean*. 14

(12) a. Selvis-i become-clear-pst.3sg Mati-n Matti-gen ampu-nee-n shoot-perf.prtc-gen karhu-n. bear-accgen 'It became clear that Matti had shot the/a bear.'

b. \* Mati-n Matti-gen ampu-nee-n shoot-perf.prtc-gen karhu-n bear-accgen suututt-i anger-pst.3sg Liisa-a.

Liisa-part

'That Matti had shot the/a bear angered Liisa.'

This distribution suggests that the ending *-n* that participles bear in their gerundial function, glossed "gen" in (12), marks an object Case that is compatible with internal arguments but not with external arguments. Historically, it is probably the old dative ending, which has fallen together phonologically with the genitive, but persists as a morphosyntactically distinct type of genitive which (unlike the structural genitive) cannot function as a subject (Kiparsky In press).

As shown in (13), Finnish gerunds behave more like bare finite CP clauses with *että-* (*that-*) than like DPs, whether nominal DPs (13c) or pronoun-headed finite clauses with *se että-* (*it that-*) (13d).

(13) a. Huomas-i-n notice-1sg / / ymmärrä-n understand-1sg / / luule-n think-1sg / / otaksu-n assume-1sg tilante-en situation-gen ole-va-n hankala-n.

be-prtc-gen difficult-gen

'I noticed / understand / think / assume that the situation is difficult.' [lit. 'the situation's being difficult.']

13 The data and analysis of Finnish gerunds presented in this section is condensed from my treatment of Finnish nonfinite complementation in Kiparsky (In press), to which I refer the reader for the details.

14 In the glosses, accgen and accnom both refer to morphosyntactic Accusative structural case. The subscripts show three different morphological case realizations of this morphosyntactic Case. They will become important shortly, but for now the reader may ignore them.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

b. Se-n It-gen huomat-tiin notice-pass-pst / / ymmärre-tään understand-pass / / luul-laan think-pass / / otaksu-taan assume-pass ole-va-n be-prtc-gen hankala-n. difficult-gen

'It is noticed / understood / thought / assumed to be difficult.'

c. Huomas-i-n notice-pst-1sg / / ymmärrä-n understand-1sg / / \*luule-n think-1sg / / \*otaksu-n assume-1sg häne-t him-accacc / / se-n that-accgen seika-n. thing-accgen

'I noticed / understand / think / assume him / this point (fact).'

d. Huomas-i-n notice-pst-1sg / / ymmärrä-n understand-1sg / / \*luule-n think-1sg / / \*otaksu-n assume-1sg se-n, it-accgen että that tilanne situation.nom on is hankala. difficult

'I noticed / understand / think / assume that the situation is difficult.'

The distinction between verbs that allow DP objects (*huomat-* 'notice' and *ymmärtä-* in (13)) and verbs that do not allow DP objects (*luule-* 'think' and *otaksu-* 'assume' in (13)) is correlated with factivity, but the correlation is not exact and my argument does not depend on it.

Since gerunds are not DPs but case-marked IPs, their genitive subjects behave like structural subjects and not like genitive specifiers of DPs. This is shown by five arguments.

The first argument that the genitive specifier of gerunds is a grammatical subject is that it gets assigned exactly the same Th-roles as the subjects of the corresponding finite clause, not the diverse range of interpretations that "possessors" of derived nominals receive (see above under Table 1). So *Matin* in (12a) picks out the agent of the shooting event, whereas the specifier *Matin* of the derived nominal (14) could be, among other things, the organizer or theme of the rescue.

(14) Muista-n remember.pres-1sg Mati-n Matti-gen pelastukse-n. rescue-nom-acc 'I remember Matti's rescue.'

The second argument comes from extraction. The subjects of gerunds can be extracted as readily as objects:

	- b. Ke-tä who-part väit-i-t claim-pst-2sg häne-n he-gen ampu-nee-n? shoot-pfp-gen 'who did you claim he shot at?'

### Paul Kiparsky

But possessors cannot be extracted (16a), and neither can genitive specifiers of tenseless nonfinite complements such as the third infinitive (16b) and the second infinitive (16c) (the Left Branch Condition, Ross 1967: 127).

	- b. \* Kene-ni who-gen väit-i-t claim-pst-2sg *e*i ampu-ma-n shoot-3inf-gen karhu-n bear-gen paina-nee-n weigh-perf.prtc-gen 500 500 kilo-a? kg-part

'The bear shot by whom did you claim weighed 500 kg?'

c. \* Kene-ni who-gen itk-i-t claim–pst-2sg *e*i ampu-e-ssa shoot-2inf-iness karhu-n? bear-accgen 'Who did you weep while he shot the/a bear?'

A third diagnostic which shows that gerunds have structural subjects and not possessors is that they do not undergo possessor agreement. Nouns and infinitives agree with their genitive specifiers, as exemplified for nouns in (17a), for the second infinitive in (17b), and for the third infinitive in (17c).

	- b. Matti Matti.nom itk-i weep-pst.3sg (minu-ni ) (my-gen) ampu-e-ssa-nii shoot-2inf-1sg karhu-n bear-accgen 'Matti wept as I shot the/a bear.'
	- c. (minu-ni ) (my-gen) ampu-ma-nii shoot-3inf-1sg karhu bear.nom 'the/a bear I shot.'

But gerunds do not possessor-agree with their subjects, as we can see in (18a,b) and (with a raised subject) in (18c).

(18) a. Matti Matti.nom ties-i know-pst.3sg minu-ni me-gen ampu-nee-n shoot-prf.prt-gen (\*ampu-nee-nii ) (shoot-prf.prt(-gen)-1sg) karhu-n bear-accgen 'Matti knows that I've shot the/a bear.'

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

Of course the subjects of gerunds cannot subject-predicate agree with the gerunds like nominative subjects of finite clauses agree with the finite verb, for genitive subjects never subject-predicate agree in Finnish.

The fourth argument that gerunds have structural subjects comes from the distribution of accusative Case morphology. Descriptively, Finnish morphosyntactic Case is realized as morphological case as follows.15

	- b. The object of a participial clause can be morphosyntactic Accusative or Partitive. Partitive is assigned to objects under the same conditions as in finite clauses:
		- i. Objects under overt or implicit negation are Partitive.
		- ii. Objects of certain predicates (such as *love* and *touch*) are Partitive.16
		- iii. Otherwise objects are Accusative.

Morphosyntactic Partitive is always realized as morphological partitive. And now comes the essential and trickiest part. Morphosyntactic Accusative is realized by three morphological cases:

	- b. otherwise as morphological genitive if the object is plural, or if the clause has a subject with structural case (this last condition is called Jahnsson's Rule),
	- c. otherwise as morphological nominative.

Clause types that lack subjects with structural case for purposes of Jahnsson's Rule include imperatives, bare infinitives ("to see Naples and to die"), passives (which in Finnish do not involve "promotion" of the object), and clauses with "quirky case" subjects.

Since the argument to be presented below uses Jahnsson's Rule as a diagnostic for the presence or absence of a structural subject, I will gloss the examples in such a way that the reader can see whether Jahnsson's Rule has taken effect in them. This means glossing not only morphosyntactic Accusative Case, but whether morphosyntactic Accusative

15 For details see Kiparsky 2001; a sophisticated OT treatment of the variation is developed by Anttila & Kim (2016).

16 The class of partitive-assigning predicates is often called "telic" (e.g. Kratzer 2002). This is not quite correct; for an attempt at a more accurate formulation see Kiparsky 2005a.

### Paul Kiparsky

Case is realized as morphological accusative case or nominative case. So I will mark morphosyntactic Case by the main gloss and morphological case with a subscript on it. For example, in (21) both objects bear morphosyntactic Accusative Case, realized in (21a) as morphological genitive case and in (21b) as morphological nominative case.

(21) a. Matti Matti.nom ampu-i shoot-pst(3sg) karhu-n bear-accgen 'Matti shot the/a bear.' b. ammu shoot-imper karhu! bear-accnom 'shoot the bear!'

Through the rest of the text in this section I use capitalization to distinguish morphosyntactic Case (such as Accusative) from morphological case (nominative, accusative, etc.).

At last we are ready for the argument. Nonfinite complement clauses are translucent to the triggering of Accusative and Partitive Case and to the realization of Accusative case as genitive or nominative, in the sense that (19) and (20) can be conditioned either within the gerund clause or in the larger domain of the higher clause with its gerund complement. So in (22a) the object of the lower clause, which contains no negation, can have either Accusative Case (realized as morphological genitive case by (20a)), or Partitive Case from the negated main clause by (19b.ii). In (22b) the morphosyntactic Accusative Case on the object of the gerund is realized either as morphological genitive case because the main clause has a subject, or as morphological nominative case, because the participle, being passive, is subjectless (Jahnsson's Rule, (20b)).17 In (22c) the morphosyntactic Accusative Case on the object can only be realized as morphological nominative case because both the matrix verb and the participle are subjectless.

17 The variation between case governed locally within the subordinate clause and in the larger domain that includes the main clause is sensitive to as yet poorly understood semantic, stylistic and discourse factors. The distribution of the Partitive in particular is affected by factivity and the scope of negation ("Lausetyyppien käsittely transformaatioteoriassa [The treatment of sentence Types in Transformational grammar]" 1970: 31, Hakulinen & Karlsson 1979: 365). For example, in (22a), the Partitive registers surprise or skepticism, and in (22b) the Accusative (realized as nominative) is likely to be interpreted factively.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

The crucial case is (23), where the morphosyntactic Accusative Case of the object may be realized as morphological genitive case. Since the matrix verb is subjectless, the object's realization as morphological genitive case must be licensed by the subject of the gerund, *Matin*. Therefore the subject has structural Case.

(23) Ilmen-i turn.out-pst.3sg Mati-n Matti-gen ampu-nee-n shoot-perf.prtc-gen karhu-n bear-accgen / / karhu. bear.accnom 'It turned out that Matti shot the/a bear.'

This completes the fourth argument that the genitive subject of gerunds is a structural subject.

In contrast, the fact that "quirky" genitive subjects induce the nominative form of the object tells us, by Jahnsson's Rule, that they are non-structural:

(24) a. Hänen He-gen pitää must-3sg osta-a buy-1inf auto. car.accnom

'He has to buy the/a car.'

b. Hänen He-gen on be-3sg helppo easy nosta-a lift-1inf tämä this.accnom säkki. sack.accnom 'It is easy for him to lift this sack.'

This is as expected, since they are not assigned structurally but idiosyncratically by particular predicates.

A fifth argument that gerunds have structural subjects is that they can have a generic null subject *proar b* . In Finnish *proar b* can be a subject (Hakulinen & Karttunen 1973) but it cannot be a possessor: contrast (25a) and (25b). So, the fact that gerunds can have a generic *proar b* subject, as seen in (25c), is another datum in support of the claim that gerunds have structural subjects and not possessors. Moreover, gerunds can be subjectless under the same conditions as subjects of finite clauses. For example, gerunds can have the impersonal passive form, see (25d).

	- b. \* On be-3sg mukava nice katsel-la look.at-1inf ∅ *pro* valokuv-i-a. photo-pl.part \*'It's nice to to look at one's photos.' (OK without ∅: 'It's nice to look at
		- photos.'
	- c. Siellä there väite-t-ään claim-pst.pass ∅ *pro* voi-va-n can-pres.prtc-gen tanssi-a. dance-1inf 'It is claimed that one can dance there.'
	- d. Siellä there väite-tt-iin claim-pst.pass voi-ta-va-n can-pass-pres.prtc-gen tanssi-a. dance-1inf 'It was claimed that there is dancing there.'

### Paul Kiparsky

I conclude that Finnish gerunds are IPs like English gerunds, albeit with a different syntactic distribution due to their oblique Case specification.

### **2.3 Desultory remarks on Acc-***ing*

The English "Acc-*ing*" construction differs in many ways from the "Poss-*ing*" gerund considered here so far. I have no serious analysis of it to offer. Its behavior resembles Acc-Inf ("ECM") constructions in some ways. First, unlike gerunds with genitive subjects, it is degraded by intervening adverbs, extraposition, and fronting, under roughly the same conditions as nominal objects ("Quantification, Events, and Gerunds"; Pires 2006):

	- b. (We anticipated his resignation, but) \*?him/his leaving Paris we did not anticipate.

This is the same pattern as:

	- b. (We believed him to have been mistreated, but) \*?him to be telling the truth we did not believe.

Acc-Inf gerunds allow extraction, like Acc-Inf complements and unlike Poss-*ing* gerunds:

	- b. Who do you resent Bill/\*Bill's hitting? (Williams 1975: 263)
	- c. Who/\*whose do you resent hitting Bill? (cf. \*Who do you resent (it) that hit Bill?)
	- d. Who do you believe to be telling the truth?
	- e. What do you believe him to be saying?

Another frequently noted difference between the constructions is that the genitive subject of gerunds is preferentially human, and cannot be expletive *there* at all, whereas the accusative is unrestricted in this respect, again like Acc-Inf subjects.

	- b. ? I imagined the water's being 30 feet deep.

Accusative subjects of gerunds do not seem to be getting their case from the main verb, since they can appear in gerunds that function as subjects. Possibly the accusative case assigner is a null preposition or complementizer, an analog of the overt *for* of *for-to* infinitives.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

### **3 Agent nominals, transitive and intransitive**

Like the FNT, my alternative theory of nominalizations is in principle applicable to every type of nominalization, including agent nominalizations and result nominalizations. The mixed category that most gravely challenges analyses of agent nominals is transitive agent nouns, which function as nominals except for assigning structural case to their objects and allowing some adverbial modifiers. I will make a case that, just as gerunds are categorially verbal at all levels of the syntax and their noun-like behavior is entirely due to a nominal Case feature borne by their Infl head, such transitive agent nominalizations are categorially nominal at all levels of the syntax and their verb-like behavior is entirely due to a verbal feature borne by their nominalizing head, namely Aspect. Gerunds and transitive nominalizations thus prove to be duals in a sense – respectively verbs with Case and nouns with Aspect.

I show that this idea predicts the distinction between transitive and intransitive agent nouns, whereas the functional properties of nominalizations neither correlate with each other as the FNT predicts, nor match the height of their nominalizing heads in syntax or word structure. In Vedic Sanskrit (sections 3.1-3.3) and in Finnish (2.2), high agent nominalizations *do not* assign structural case if they lack Tense/Aspect features, and even low agent nominalizations *do* assign structural case if they have Tense/Aspect features.

### **3.1 Agent nominals and subject nominals**

In their illuminating study based on the FNT approach, Baker & Vinokurova (2009) propose an analysis and typology of agent nominalizations similar to the one I have called into question for event nominalizations. They begin by noting an asymmetry between agent and event nominals. "High" event nominals like (1a) have no agent noun counterpart such as (30).

B&V claim that this is a systematic gap, and propose to explain it on the basis of two key assumptions. First, agentive nominalizing morphology is added by a nominal head immediately above VP.18 Secondly, in some languages, such as English, structural case is assigned to objects by an active Voice/v head, whereas in other languages, structural case is assigned configurationally (dependent case).19 Together, these assumptions rule out transitive agent-denoting nominalizations, such as (30) *\*the reader the book*. Instead, they require the structure (31). Here the agent nominalizer pre-empts the case-assigning active Voice morpheme in v that assigns structural case to objects in English, but (by hypothesis) has no case-assigning force itself.

18 It is fair to ask why it is added there and not in a higher position. B&V hint that this is "a position apparently forced on it by the natural (iconic) semantic composition of the clause" (Baker & Vinokurova 2009: 521), but this remains to be justified.

19 B&V equate Voice with v, following Kratzer (2004), but contra Alexiadou (2001); Alexiadou, Soare & Iordăchioaia (2010); Harley (2012), among others.

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

The analysis further predicts that, since voice markers cannot attach to unaccusatives,20 such agent nouns cannot attach to unaccusative verbs.

B&V then draw a distinction between agentive and non-agentive "agent" nominalizers – let's call the latter subject nominalizers. Subject nominalizers do assign structural case, and can be attached to unaccusative verbs. B&V (p. 547) analyze them as "nominal equivalents of an aspect head", in the sense in which agentive nominalizers like *-er* are nominal equivalents of a voice head. Their example is Gikũyũ *-i*, another example is Northern Paiute *-dɨ* (Toosarvandani 2014). B&V propose the structure (32):

As an immediate challenge to the FNT in the domain of agent nominalizations, B&V note that otherwise low agent nominalizations unexpectedly assign structural case in some languages. For B&V, these languages must be special in that they assign structural case by a dependent case mechanism, whereas languages in which low agent nouns have oblique complements assign structural case by little v. The need to maintain two entirely distinct mechanisms of structural case assignment on the basis of evidence that cannot loom large in the learner's experience would be another disappointing consequence of the FNT.21 We'll also see that B&V's analysis of agent nominals imposes a functional

20 In fact an incorrect premise: unaccusative verbs passivize in numerous languages, including Finnish and Sanskrit (Kiparsky 2013).

21 Levin, Preminger & Omer (2015) propose that *all* structural case can be assigned by dependent case, provided that the algorithm is parametrized in certain ways. However, they do not touch on the case variation in objects of agent nominalizations, and the parametrization of structural case assignment that they propose does not account for it, as far as I can tell.

### Paul Kiparsky

overload on little v that makes the FNT's various criteria for syntactic height mutually irreconcilable.

In summary, B&V's proposal generates the typology of agent nouns shown in Table 2. In the remainder of this section I show that the predicted correlations do not hold for agent nouns of Vedic Sanskrit and Finnish, and propose a much simpler alternative that does justice to the data.

Table 2: Typology of agent nouns predicted by Baker & Vinokurova (2009).

### **3.2 Vedic agent nouns**

Vedic and Pāṇinian Sanskrit has a large number of agent noun suffixes, which fall into two clearly demarcated types. A minimal pair that highlights the contrast are the two agent noun types in accented *-tár-N* and preaccenting *′-tar-V* . 22 Agent nouns in accented *-tár-N* have genitive objects and get only adjective modifiers, never adverbs, e.g. (33a). Agent nouns in preaccenting *′-tar-V* (boldfaced in (33)) regularly assign structural case to their objects and, can get certain aspectual adverb modifiers, such as *punaḥ* 'again' in (33b).23

Both suffixes are true nominalizers: they form nouns, not verbs. They have a complete nominal case and number inflection paradigm, take denominal derivational suffixes, such

22 Their Indo-European provenance is guaranteed by Greek and Avestan cognates (Lowe 2014). The following exposition of their contrasting semantics, morphophology, and syntax draws on the generalizations and evidence in Kiparsky 2016, to which the reader is referred for details.

23 Other agent nouns with verbal properties are attested in early Vedic include *-i-V* RV 9.61.20 *jághnir vr̥trám* 'killer of V̥tra', *-(i)ṣṇu-V* RV 1.63.3 *dhr̥ṣṇúr etā́n* 'bold against them', *-u-V* AV 12.1.48 *nidhanám titikṣuḥ* 'enduring poverty', *-∅-V* RV 1.1.4 *yáṃ yajñám … paribhū́r ási* 'the sacrifice that you embrace'.

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

as derived feminines, and can be compounded.24 They allow adjectival modification (in addition to adverbial modification, in the case of *′-tar-V* ). These nominal properties are unsurprising for the noun-like *-tár-N* formations; that they hold also for the more verblike *′-tar-V* is documented in (34).

Semantically both *-tár-N* and *′-tar-V* are *agent* nominalizers, not *subject* nominalizers: they are never added to non-agentive verbs or unaccusatives of any kind, and the meaning of the nominalization is canonically agentive.25 So by these criteria both nominalizations are "low" in the sense of B&V, not Gikũyũ-type "high" nominalizations.

The agent nominalizers *′-tar-V* and *-tár-N* form a *privative* semantic opposition, missed in the modern philological literature but correctly delineated already by Pāṇini, whose description turns out to tally perfectly with the Vedic data. The unmarked member of the opposition is *-tár-N* , which simply denotes agency (like English *-er*). The marked member *′-tar-V* has two additional meaning components:

(35) a. *′-tar-V* denotes agency in ongoing time.

b. *′-tar-V* denotes habitual, professional, or expert agency.

The criteria of the FNT make contradictory predictions. Since both nominalizations are agentive, both should be structurally low "little v" heads. On the other hand, *′-tar-V* nominalizations, which have the verbal properties of assigning structural case and allowing adverbial modification, should be structurally high, while *-tár-N* nominalizations, which have strictly nominal properties, should be structurally low. Neither of these is the case. In fact, as far as the case and adverb properties are concerned, the structure is just the opposite of what is predicted: verbal *′-tar-V* is low and nominal *-tár-N* is high. This is shown by four arguments (details in Kiparsky 2016).

The first argument that verbal *′-tar-V* is low and nominal *-tár-N* is high is their morphological position in the word. *′-tar-V* always follows the bare verbal root directly, without

24 E.g. *kṣirá-hotar-* 'milk-offerer' (ŚBr.), and *neṣṭā-potā́rau* 'leader and purifier' (TS.), co-compounds (Kiparsky 2010b) denoting pairs of priests.

25 Thus, the following roots do *not* take either *-tár-N* and *′-tar-V* or any other agent suffixes for that matter: *as* 'be', *ā́s* 'sit', *śī* 'lie', *sru* 'flow', *plu* 'float', *tras* 'tremble', *vyath* 'sway', *bhraṃś* 'fall', *svap* 'sleep', *kṣudh* 'be hungry', *tr̥ṣ* 'be thirsty', *svid* 'sweat', *r̥dh* 'flourish', *ru(d)h* 'grow', *pyā* 'swell', *riṣ* 'sustain damage', *mr̥*'die', *śam* 'become calm', *mad* 'get drunk', *mud* 'rejoice', *hr̥ṣ* 'get excited', *dhr̥ṣ* 'dare', *bhī* 'fear', *hīḍ* 'be angry', *krudh* 'become angry', *gr̥dh* 'be greedy', *ruc* 'shine', *śubh* 'shine, be beautiful', *bhā* 'shine' *bhās* 'gleam', *dyut* 'to strike' (of lightning), *pat* 'to fall'.

### Paul Kiparsky

any other intervening suffix; it cannot be added to compound or prefixed bases. *-tár-N* , on the contrary, can be separated from the root by verb-to-verb suffixes commonly analyzed as Voice/v heads (causative, denominative, intensive, desiderative). It is affixed to the whole verb base, including the extended root plus any prefix that combines with it:

	- b. TS *pra-dāp-ay-i-tár-* 'bestower' (caus. *prá-dāp-ay-a-ti* 'bestows'),
	- c. *ni-dhā-tár-* 'one who sets down' (*ní-dadhā-ti* 'sets down')

The morphological data point to the respective constituent structures in (37):

$$\text{(37)} \quad \text{a. } Low \text{:} \{ \text{Prefix} \{ \text{Root '-}tar\text{-}^{V} \} \}$$

b. *High:* [ [ Prefix [ Root (Caus)… ] ] *-tár-N* ]

The second argument that verbal *′-tar-V* is low and nominal *-tár-N* is high comes from word accentuation. The morphological conditioning of accent placement provides a convenient probe into the constituent structure of words. In Vedic and Pāṇinian Sanskrit, the accentuation of words is computed cyclically from the accentual properties of the morphemes from which they are composed. Morphemes may be accented or unaccented, and at the word level, all accents but the first in a word are erased (Kiparsky 2010a). Both of our agent suffixes (like the majority of derivational suffixes) belong to the accentually dominant type: they erase the accent off the bases to which they are added. The crucial fact for present purposes is that dominant affixes exercise this erasing effect exactly on the stems to which they are added, no more and no less. Thanks to this property we can use accentuation to diagnose constituent structure in morphologically complex words.

The empirical generalization is that prefixes always prevail over low (bare-root) suffixes, including *′-tar-V* , whereas high suffixes always prevail over prefixes, dictating the place of the word accent. The reason is that prefixes are added after the low suffix *′-tar-V* :

On the other hand, *-tár-N* is accentually dominant, causing all accents on its base to be deleted, and attracting accent to itself. This shows that it is added to the entire stem including the prefix, causing the resulting word to be accented on the suffix.

(39) Suffixation of high *-tár-N* to prefixed verbs: bhar- Root

The third argument that verbal *′-tar-V* is low and nominal *-tár-N* is high comes from tmesis, the splitting of prefixes from stems. Prefixes can be separated from verbs and from nominals formed with low suffixes like verbal *′-tar-V* .

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

	- b. *úpa sū́re ná dhā́tā* (= *sū́re nópadhātā*) 'like the Placer of the Sun' (*RV* 9.97.38).

Prefixes are never separated from nominals formed with high suffixes such as nominal *-tár-N* .

The explanation comes from the same constituent structure that accounts for the accentual difference: low suffixes such as the agent suffix *′-tar-V* are added directly to the root to form a noun, which can then be composed with a prefix (see (41a)), while high suffixes such as the agent suffix *-tár-N* are added to the entire verb, which may already bear a prefix and/or another suffix (41b,c).

It will be seen the prefix is an immediate constituent of the word in (41a), but not in (41b) or in (41c). The natural generalization is that a prefix can only be split if it is an immediate constituent of the word.

The fourth argument that verbal *′-tar-V* is low and nominal *-tár-N* is high comes from selectional properties of prefixes. Prefixes that only combine with verb roots require high *-tár-N* , because the right-branching constituent structure (41a) would require them to combine with nouns.26 Conversely, prefixes and other elements that cannot be combined with roots, only with nouns, require the right-branching constituent structure (41a), which is available either with *-tár-N* or with *′-tar-V* . 27

26 Many examples are given in Kiparsky 2016. One will have to suffice here. The interjection *hiṁ* 'the sound *hmm*' cannot be compounded with nouns. It can only combine with the root *kṛ* 'do', 'make'. The agent noun from *hiṁ-kṛ-* 'to make the sound *hmm*' must therefore have the high suffix *-tár-N*, viz. *hiṁkartár-*.

27 Again we must make do with a couple of examples. There is no compound verb such as *\*para-apara-i-* 'to go far and near' from which *párāpara-etar-* 'one who goes far and near' might be derived. In fact *párāpara-* 'far and near' is never compounded with verbs. Instead, the agent noun is a nominal compound formed from *para-apara-* 'far and near' plus *e-tár-* 'goer' (← *i-tár-N*). Another illustration of this generalization is that the negation *a-* combines only with nouns. From *hótar* 'priest' (← *hu-′tar-V*) we get *á-hotar-* 'a non-priest'.

### Paul Kiparsky

The above arguments establish the morphological constituency displayed in (37) and (41). But Distributed Morphology is a resourceful theory that makes available various movement operations that cause mismatches between morphology and syntax. So could the morphologically low nominalizing morphemes be spelled out high where B&V predict they should be, and then undergo Lowering to their actual position? And conversely, could the high nominalizing morphemes be spelled out low as predicted, and then undergo Raising to their actual position? The answer is negative on both counts.

The way morphologically low suffixes such as the agent suffix *′-tar-V* could be syntactically high for purposes of the FNT is by DM's Lowering operation, which applies before Vocabulary insertion to adjoin a head to the head of its complement (Embick & Noyer 2001):

(42) X0 lowers to Y0:

[XP X0 …[YP …Y0 …]] → [XP …[YP …[Y0 Y0+X0]…]]

In English, Lowering of T is assumed to adjoin T to v (Embick & Marantz 2008). But if *′-tar-V* is generated in the N head of (32) and is lowered from there into the v, it would, on B&V's assumptions, have the properties of a subject nominalizer, forming nouns from unaccusative and non-agentive verbs. But it does *not* have any properties of a subject nominalizer – it is a true agent nominalizer, as we showed above.

The other thing required to maintain the FNT is to generate *-tár-N* low in v (as in (31)) and then raise it to its actual high position. This is not going to work in the DM model either, for morphological head-raising can only adjoin a head to the next head above it (Harizanov & Gribanova 2016), and in this case it would have to skip intervening heads, including the v head that may be occupied by causative and other V→V suffixes, which must not raise. Moreover, in more recent DM (Embick 2010), phonology is cyclically interleaved with morphology, and this would cause problems with the abovementioned accent erasure and tmesis phenomena.

It should also be noted that *′-tar-V* is overwhelmingly preferred when its special meaning and morphological restrictions allow its use, and *-tár-N* is used elsewhere. Moreover, other agent suffixes supersede each of them with particular roots and/or in particula special meanings. Since competition in DM obtains only between morphemes that have the same meaning and are realized in the same slot (such as English plural *-s* and *-en*), all these competing suffixes would have to be generated in the same syntactic position.

The conclusion from the Vedic data is that the nominalizations' verbal vs. nominal properties do not correlate with structural height of their heads in the word or in the syntax. In fact, the majority of morphologically high nominalizers in Vedic have nominal properties, and the majority of morphologically low nominalizers have verbal properties – the opposite of what the FNT predicts.

### **3.3 Aspect in Vedic agent nouns**

A preliminary survey of nominalizations suggests that the Aspect feature of a nominalizer is the best predictor of verbal properties. Consider the following alternative to the FNT.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

### (43) The Aspect hypothesis

Nominalizations assign structural case if and only if they have Aspect, either as an inherent feature of the nominalization, or in virtue of combining with overt Aspect morphology.

By aspect features I mean outer aspect features such as imperfective and habitual, not inner aspect (Aktionsart), such as telicity. Sanskrit agent nouns in *′-tar-V* are inherently present/imperfective and habitual. Those in *-tár-N* , English agent nouns made with *-er*, and Finnish agent nouns made with *-ja* have no inherent aspect: a *driver* can be a habitual or professional driver, or just someone who happens to be at the wheel on a particular occasion.28

The Aspect hypothesis is not implausible a priori because Aspect features are crosslinguistically known to affect case assignment – think of split ergativity based on imperfect vs. perfect aspect, and accusative vs. partitive objects in Finnish depending on gradability (Kiparsky 2005a). It looks promising for Vedic Sanskrit in particular because nominalizing endings with verbal properties, such as *′-tar-V* , are added to the bare root, in the same morphological position as the Aorist and Perfect Tense/Aspect suffixes. It is also consistent with the fact that Northern Paiute deverbal nominalizations, which assign structural accusative case, can have overt aspectual morphology below them (Toosarvandani 2014: 793, fn. 6).

The Aspect hypothesis is compatible with a lexicalist treatment of morphology. A Distributed Morphology analysis of Vedic agent nouns is problematic because of the conflicting criteria for structural height. In addition, they show a type of competition between morphemes that DM rejects. The semantically nondescript *-tár-N* , structurally low by B&V's criteria but high in word structure, is the default (elsewhere) case. The semantically restricted *′-tar-V* suffix, structurally high by B&V's syntactic criteria but low in the word morphology, is strongly preferred whenever it is applicable, namely to denote habitual agency in ongoing time with morphologically simple verbs. Elsewhere the default is *-tár-N* , structurally low by B&V's syntactic criteria but high in the word morphology – for past or future agency, or occasional agency, *or* when the verb is morphologically complex (causative, intensive, desiderative, denominative, or prefixed. Suppose then that a structurally low agent is added in a syntactic derivation. The derivation must crash if and only if a structurally high agent can be successfully added in a competing derivation. But DM does not allow rules that spell out syntactico/semantic features in different positions to compete with each other. Moreover, if we assume bottom-up morphological spellout of the syntax (by cycles or phases), the syntactically low agent would have to "know" about the upstairs high agent in order to be blocked by it. On the other hand, in a *morphological* theory of word-formation, morphologically low items naturally block morphologically high items. Besides, blocking of affixes with general meanings by affixes with special meanings regardless of the locus of affixation is straighforward in lexicalist approaches such as those of Wunderlich (1996b; 2001) and Kiparsky (2005b).

28 Gerunds are arguably inherently imperfective (Alexiadou 2001; Alexiadou, Soare & Iordăchioaia 2010).

### Paul Kiparsky

### **3.4 The Finnish subject nominalizer** *-ja*

B&V's formulation of the FNT entails that agent nominalizations don't assign case and subject nominalizations do (§2). We have seen that Vedic falsifies the first of these claims. Finnish (among many other languages) falsifies the second. The fully productive Finnish suffix *-ja* is not an agent nominalizer, but a subject nominalizer, which is to say a high nominalizer in B&V's typology. It can go on non-agentive/unaccusative verbs, and freely attaches to causatives, often assumed to be under v, as well as denominatives, reflexives, inchoatives, and inner aspect morphemes such as frequentatives and semelfactives, thus testing positively for high position by several diagnostics.

	- b. i. Frequentative *-ele-*: *kys-eli-jä* 'inquirer', from *kys-ele-* 'to make inquiries' (cf. *kysy-jä* 'asker', from *kysy-* 'ask'). Similarly *ryypiskelijä* 'tippler', *lähentelijä* 'harasser', *myyskentelijä* 'peddler', *rehentelijä* 'bragger', *riitelijä* 'quarreler'.
		- ii. Causative: *laula-tta-ja* 'one who makes sing', from *laula-tta-* 'to make sing', cf. *lauja-ja* 'singer', from *laula-* 'to sing'.
		- iii. Inchoative + causative: *selv-en-tä-jä* 'clarifier', ← *selv-en-tä-* 'make clear, clarify' (← *selv-en-* 'become clear' ← *selvä* 'clear').
		- iv. Causative + frequentative: *sopi-ja* 'agreer', *sovi-tta-ja* 'fitter, arranger', *sovi-tt-el-ija* 'reconciler, negotiator'
		- v. Reflexive: *puolusta-ja* 'defender' *puolusta-utu-ja* '(self-)defender'
		- vi. Denominative: *testamentt-aa-ja* 'bequeather' (← *testamentt-at-* 'to bequeath' ← *testamentti* 'testament')

However, nominals in the suffix *-ja* do not assign structural case, whether they have any of these suffixes below them or not. Their object complement (unlike that of passive verbs) can only receive genitive case.

	- b. minu-n me-gen (\*minu-t) (\*me-acc) käv-el-ytt-eli-jä-ni walk-freq-caus-freq-er.(nom)-1sg.poss '(the) one who frequently takes me around for walks'

Nominals in *-ja* do take oblique nominal modifiers, as do all nominalizations, including action nominalizations, and even to some extent ordinary basic nouns.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

	- govern-in-iness position-iness be-er.(nom) / be-ing.(nom) '(the) one who is in a governing position'
	- c. palatsi palace Cannesi-ssa Cannes-iness 'the/a palace in Cannes'

They generally do not take adverbs, except for certain perfectivizing adverbs (47d,e):

	- b. \* kilpailu-n competition-gen taas again voitta-ja win-er.(nom) '(the) one who wins/won/will win the/a competition again'
	- c. \* aina always matkusta-ja travel-er.(nom) '(the) one who always travels'
	- d. kilpailu-sta competition-elat pois away jää-jä remain-er.(nom) 'one who does not join the competition', 'eliminee'
	- e. viime-ksi lat-transl tuli-ja come-er.(nom) 'the last to arrive'

In (48) (an example adapted from the internet) the adverb *jälleen* 'again' appears with an agent noun.

(48) Cannesi-ssa Cannes-iness jälleen again palkinno-tta prize-abess jää-jä remain-er.(nom) 'one who ended up prizeless again in Cannes' (lit. 'a remainer prizeless again…')

Possibly it modifies not the nominalization but the abessive modifier *palkinno-tta* 'prizeless'.

Since Finnish *-ja* must be high in order to get a non-agentive interpretation and to scope over every kind of verb-to-verb suffix, it should assign structural case, which it doesn't. So it does not fit into B&V's syntactic typology, and constitutes a problem for the FNT generalization. In this case, morphological raising or lowering, even if they were available and motivated, would not help to resolve the contradiction.

### Paul Kiparsky

The lexicalist alternative, however, holds up. Like English *-er*, nouns in *-ja* are morphologically incompatible with overt Aspect or Voice morphology, and they refer indifferently to prospective, present, or past events, hence have no inherent Aspect features.

(49) *maksaja* 'payer' (one who has paid, is paying, or will pay), similarly *ostaja* 'buyer', *vuokraaja* 'renter', *maahanmuuttaja* 'immigrant', *lähtijä* 'goer', *siittäjä* 'inseminator'

Since *-ja* has no Aspect features and no verbal properties, the fact that it doesn't assign structural case is consistent with the Aspect hypothesis but inconsistent with the FNT. I conclude that Finnish *-ja* supports the lexicalist analysis of nominalizations.

### **3.5 The Sakha agent nominalizer** *-AAccY*

Baker & Vinokurova (2009: 536) note that the correlation predicted by the FNT breaks down for Sakha agent nominalizations, which have structural accusative objects but otherwise conform to the low type, in that they have no Aspect morphology or adverbs. Their solution is that Sakha accusative case is not assigned by Voice/v but by a different mechanism, dependent case assigment.

	- a. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spellout domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP2 as accusative unless NP1 has already been marked for case.
	- b. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spellout domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP1 as ergative unless NP2 has already been marked for case.

Their main argument that Sakha accusative is dependent case is that objects of passives receive accusative case. This argument depends on the fragile assumption that the implicit agent of Sakha passives is a syntactically visible but phonologically null NP, which receives nominative case and serves as the NP1 that triggers the assignment of accusative case to the object of the passive by (50a).

I am skeptical of this solution for both theoretical and empirical reasons. It would be strange for UG to offer two entirely different methods of structural case assignment, since their empirical differences are rather obscure, and offer learners of most languages little core data to choose between them. Secondly, the analysis of impersonal passives as having an invisible nominative agent subject is excluded on general grounds by any kind of demotion analysis of passive, including the typologically grounded theory proposed in Kiparsky 2013. Finnish provides empirical evidence against the idea that objects of passives receive dependent structural case because of a syntactically visible but phonologically null nominative implicit agent. The object of passives in Finnish is assigned structural case as in Sakha, but the case cannot possibly be assigned by the dependent case algorithm (50), for the implicit agent of passives in Finnish is *invisible* to case assignment, as clearly demonstrated by Jahnsson's Rule (20b), see e.g. (22c,d).

### 15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

Our approach predicts the transitivity of Sakha agent nouns in *-aaccy* out of the box. The reason is that they have an aspect feature. Agent nouns in Sakha *-aaccy* denote specifically habitual or generic agents. B&V (p. 531) illustrate this generalization with the following examples:29

(51) a. ynaq-y cow-acc ölör-ööccü kill-ag.nom 'a killer of cows, a butcher' b. \* Misha-ny Misha-acc ölör-ööccü kill-ag.nom 'the killer of Misha'

The habitual aspect feature of the Sakha agent nouns licenses its structural case assignment just as the habitual aspect feature of agent nouns formed by the Sanskrit agent suffix *′-tar-V* does, as opposed to aspectually void agent nouns in *-tár-N* , Finnish *-ja*, and English *-er*. This accounts fully for the case data without resorting to the unsupported syntactic height distinctions demanded by the FNT.

Summing up our conclusions about agent nominalizations so far: the syntactic FNT is falsified by Vedic agent nominalizations in one direction, and by Finnish subject nominalizations in the other, and it requires an otherwise unsupported parametric choice between two heterogeneous structural case assignment algorithms. The analysis reveals that little v can't do *all* of the following things: (1) introduce Agents, (2) host voice heads or agent nominalizer heads, (3) host causative V affixes, (4) host aspectual material, and (5) assign structural case. In agent nominals it is not possible to place nominalizing heads above or below little v in a consistent way that satisfies all of (1)-(5). (1) and (5) cannot be reconciled with an agent nominalizer that assigns structural case such as Sanskrit *′-tar-V* , or with a subject nominalizer that does not assign structural case such as Finnish *-ja*. The Sakha nominalizer *-AAccY* can dominate causatives (high) but not aspectual adverbs – a conflict between (3) and (4) – and introduces agents (low) but assigns structural case (high) – a conflict between (2) and (5).

These difficulties fall away if we assume that that agent nominals are nouns, and that nouns assign structural case if and only if they have Aspect features.

### **4 Conclusion**

The Functional Nominalization Thesis claims that so-called "mixed categories" arise when a nominal head is affixed to an extended verbal projection that is its syntactic complement. My findings instead support a lexicalist approach, in which mixed categories are projections of a nominal or verbal heads with an extra phi-feature. Their extended projections behave like normal extended projections modulo the properties enforced by that feature.

29 This component is foregrounded in the related habitual participle function of the same suffix: e.g. *salaj-aaccy* means both 'manager' (agent noun) and 'habitually managing' (participle), see Vinokurova (2005: 123).

### Paul Kiparsky

In §2 I argued that gerund phrases are not DPs/NPs with AspP complements. They are not even nominalizations. They are participial phrases – IPs with a Case feature that is checked or valued in an argument position. In all other respects their syntax is entirely clausal: they lack DP material such as articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, and adjectives, and they are formally built like IPs, complete with structural subjects. The lexicalist analysis explains these properties.

In §3 I argued that agent nominalizations that assign structural case to their objects are not nouns with vP complements (or with any other phrasal complements), but deverbal nouns derived by agent suffixes that have an Aspect feature. The Aspect feature makes the nouns transitive, and modifiable by aspectual adverbs. Otherwise their syntax is entirely nominal. The merit of this analysis is that it tightly correlates the transitivity of agent nouns with their aspectual meaning. Also, by relieving the burden on little v, it eliminates the mismatches between word structure and syntax that we found in Vedic and Finnish agent nouns under the FNT analysis.

The lexicalist approach retains the key idea of the FNT without the typologically unwarranted overgeneration caused by allowing syntactic affixation. It preserves a uniform mechanism of structural case assigment, a unified analysis of true nominalizations, and the insights that originally led Chomsky to lexicalism.

### **Acknowledgements**

I am grateful to Vera Gribanova and to an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments and queries.

### **References**

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

### Paul Kiparsky

http://web.stanford.edu/ kiparsky/Papers/agentnouns.final.pdf. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.

Kiparsky, Paul. In press. *Paradigm effects and opacity*. Stanford: CSLI.

15 Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

### **Chapter 16**

# **On mechanisms by which languages become [nominative-]accusative**

### Ashwini Deo

The Ohio State University