Slavic nominal construction

[George Fowler]

Greetings!

Gil Rappaport wrote:

> ...  and they should be clearly distinguished from a
>rather distinct nominal construction which is totally absent in Slavic (cf.
>English: `I was shocked by John('s) rejecting my article').

Seems to me that this construction DOES occur in Slavic, namely in
Macedonian (where it is quite productive) and Bulgarian (where it is rather
limited).

In these languages, a distinction is made between nominalizations which
apparently case-mark an objective complement vs. those which do not, and
therefore require a preposition to introduce the objective NP, e.g.,

(i) chetene(*to) knigata 'reading the book'

(ii) chetene(to) na knigata 'reading of the book'

The construction in (i) is quite a lot like "I was shocked by John
rejecting my article", although it's different from "John's"; the
construction in (ii) is like "John's rejection of my article". Howard
Aronson coined (as far as I know) a terminological distinction between
verbal noun (i) and deverbal noun (ii); Ilija C^as^ule wrote his
dissertation on this construction in Macedonian (published as a book in
Macedonia, maybe the Academy of Sciences).

George Fowler

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