[Lingtyp] Question about nominalized verbs

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Keren and Masha (and everyone) – Only semi-on-topic, but it appears to be an odd and conspicuous quirk of Mayan languages that they disallow nominalization of transitive verbs. That is, verbs have to be detransitivized via antipassivization or object incorporation before they can be nominalized. This factoid appears all the more striking once it’s taken into account that Mayan is among the not so many language families that systematically conflate ergative and possessor marking (via cross–reference morphology).

The constraint against nominalization of transitive verbs certainly holds for the Yucatecan languages, and Robertson (1992) claims that it applies family-wide. Inexplicably, if I understand him correctly, Robertson seems to have assumed that the constraint is in fact a universal. In actual fact, I’m not aware that anybody has been able to offer a plausible explanation for the constraint.

I’m curious whether there are known instances of this phenomenon outside Mayan (and also whether there are truly no counterexamples anywhere in Mayan). Maybe Masha’s typology covers it?

Best – Juergen

Robertson, J. S. (1992). The history of tense/aspect/mood/voice in the Mayan verbal complex. Austin, TX: UT Press.



Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm <tamm at ling.su.se>
Date: Tuesday, August 15, 2023 at 20:18
To: Keren Ruditsky <krudit at uw.edu>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Question about nominalized verbs
Dear Keren,

This is an example of the nominalisation type that I call “Possessive-Accusative” type in my book “Nominalizations” (1993, Routledge) – I can send you a couple of other publications that summarise my typology.
All the best,
Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm



On 15 Aug 2023, at 17:48, Keren Ruditsky <krudit at uw.edu<mailto:krudit at uw.edu>> wrote:

Dear everyone,

I am working on a master's thesis and I was wondering about any cases of languages which have nominalized verbs taking two arguments where the argument syntactically closer to the nominalized verb is marked like the argument of a noun, and the one syntactically further is marked like the argument of a verb.

One example of such a language might be Standard Arabic where, as shown below, the subject of a nominalized verb zayd-in ‘Zayd-GEN’ is marked with genitive case (which is the case used to mark a nominal possessor) while the object  camr-an ‘Amr-ACC’ is marked with accusative case (which is the case used for typical verbal objects).

ntiqaad-u                 zayd-in            camr-an
criticizing-NOM     Zayd-GEN       Amr-ACC
“Zayd’s criticizing Amr” (Fassi Fehri 1993: 223f)

Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 1993. Issues in the structure of Arabic clauses and
words. Dordrecht: Kluwer

Thank you,
Keren
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Prof. Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm
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