[Athapbasckan-L] A question about nominalizations in Athabaskan languages

[Eitan Grossman]

Dear all,

I am writing with a question about nominalizations in Athabaskan languages,
specifically, agentive nominalizations that refer to the doers of an action
and that behaves syntactically like a noun.

Looking through grammars of North American languages, it seems that many
don't have dedicated agentive nominalizations, but either have very
specific constructions ("an X who is good at verbing") or simply use finite
verbs as referring expressions.

So here is the question: do Athabaskan languages have specific agentive
nominalization constructions, and of so, is anything known about their
diachrony? Can their source constructions be identified, or are they
reconstructible to the protolanguage?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Eitan



Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809
Fax: +972 2 588 1224
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