Zero nouns with and without objects

Abstract

One of the main topics on the study of the relationship between syntax and morphology is (deverbal) nominalizations. In this area, several generalizations that tie the morphological make-up with the syntactic structure have been made. Most relevantly, it has been argued that only overt nominalizations (those that include a nominalizer like -ation or -ment) are allowed to have internal arguments introduced in their structural representation. In this paper, we address some previously unexplained apparent counterexamples to this generalization, and we argue that they can be captured if particular restrictions on the spell out of the syntactic structure are taken into consideration.