Psych Nominalizations in English and in German
Psych Nominalizations in English and in German

Summary/Abstract: This paper will be an attempt at outlining a contrastive analysis of the inheritance properties of psych nominals in two related languages, English and German. We rely on two important contributions to the study of psychological nominalizations concerned with the interpretation of the argument structure of deverbal nominals (Grimshaw, 1990) and with the formulation of a hypothesis for their derivation (Pesetsky, 1995) and we will see to what extent these proposals are supported by data from the field of German psych nominals. The first part will present some word order facts noticeable at the level of the simple clauses containing psych verbs and in their corresponding nominalizations. The second part will support the event vs. result distinction in the interpretation of psych nominals in both languages. For the sake of simplicity, where possible, we give German equivalents for the English examples of Subject Experiencer and Object Experiencer verbs (hence SubjExp and ObjExp) in their agentive or non-agentive use and their related nominals.

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