Heidi Harley
Harley, Heidi. (2020) Relative nominals and event nominals in Hiaki. In A. Alexiadou and H. Borer (eds) Nominalizations: 50 years on from Chomsky’s Remarks, Oxford University Press, pp. 203-230
Publication year: 2020

I build on developments since Remarks on Nominalization first appeared to argue that Hiaki possesses nominalizations that embed (outer) AspP but not higher projections, such as TP or CP, supporting the conclusions of Martínez Fabian and Langendoen (1996) and Álvarez González (2012). Although they are not ‘true’ relative clauses (not CPs), I also argue that the filler-gap structure evident in most of them requires an operator-movement treatment. Interestingly, although these constructions are usually predicates of individuals, a subset are event nominalizations. The event nominalizations are for the most part constructed from argumentless predicates—weather predicates and impersonal passives. Building on this observation, I propose that the nominalizing head is an identity predicate, reifying the outermost unsaturated argument in the nominalized projection, whether it is an entity (relative reading) or an event (event-nominal reading). I follow Kraus (2001) in suggesting that the assignment of genitive case to the subject conditions the allomorphy of the main exponents of the nominalizing head.