Lexical Borrowing Targets Spans

Abstract

In this study, I revisit the claim that nominals denoting complex events must derive from discernible verbal stems and must be headed by an overt nominalizer. I show that Turkish has a set of nominals, crucially of foreign origin, which provides counter-evidence to both claims. From the perspective of Turkish grammar, they are morphologically noncompositional, manifesting neither a detectable verbal basis nor an overt nominalizer although they are categorically complex event nominals. Since (zero-)derived nominals of Turkic origin do not allow argument structure, the puzzling makeup of underived complex event nominals in question boils down to their loan word nature. I show that their behavior is different from both derived nominals as well as gerundive nominals in important ways. I claim that they are defective nominalizations lacking an nP representation. After reviewing previous accounts of these nominals, I consider three syntactic approaches to word derivation, which differ in their theoretical assumptions only in granularity, and conclude that the Spanning approach of Bye and Svenonius provides us with a conceptually superior account.