| Abstract (about 50 words): | The paper offers an overview of the main syntactic and semantic analyses of nominalizations from the literature, focusing on –ing deverbal nouns. We will discuss the lexicalist hypothesis put forth by Chomsky (1970), Abney’s (1987) syntactic account of English gerunds and we will adopt a Distributed Morphology (Marantz 1997, 1999, Alexiadou, 1999, Harley, 2008) view on the formation of deverbal nouns. This amounts to saying that vocabulary items are a-categorial roots which acquire a category by merging with a grammatical element, which may be a verbalizer v0, a nominalizer n0 or an adjectivalizer a0. In our case, an abstract root such as kick will combine with a nominalizer to give rise to a nominalization. |