Argument inheritance as a metonymic effect

Abstract

Nominalization combines morphological aspects (the derivation of nouns from verbs) with syntactic ones (argument structure/valency). The notion of argument inheritance captures the intuition that both aspects seem to obey the same (syntactic) regularities. However, as will be argued in the present paper, this impression is incorrect. Although morphological derivation and nominal valency make use of the same conceptual knowledge (which explains the apparent similarities between them), both types of linguistic structure serve different functional purposes and therefore differ in the way in which this knowledge is exploited linguistically. The metonymy-based account proposed in this paper provides simple explanations for a wide range of problems concerning morphological as well as syntactic aspects of nominalization. This will be illustrated with particular reference to the so-called activity model proposed by Schwarze (1995).