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Chapter 1 Introduction 

1.1 Nominalization as a ubiquitous phenomenon 
Nominalization as a syntactic process is found to exist in most human languages,  if not  all.  However,  under  the  seemingly  simple  terminology, there is no simple picture: nominalizations show enormous and perplexing variations  both  within  certain  languages  and  across  languages.  And nominals  derived  from  verbs,  together  with  the  whole  constructions  to which the nominals serve as the head and their ambiguous trans-categorial status, have especially intrigued not a few linguists ever since Lees’ (1960) and Chomsky’s (1970). Literature on nominalization abounds. Take English, the most studied language as a case. Consider first the derived nominal per se:  (1) zero affixation: attempt, worship, answer, report, etc. (2)  affixations  with  -(a)tion  and  -ment:  destruction,  examination, payment, movement, etc.  (3) affixation with -ing : possible with all verbs (4) affixation with -er/or and -ee: dancer, inventor, nominee, detainee, etc.  At a superficial observation, nominalization in English employs four types of morphological forms to signal the change of categorial nature from verb  to  noun.  Some  nouns  are  morphologically  identical  to  the  related verbs, as shown by examples in (1). Yet, expression like John’s attempt to repair the car clearly shows that it is exactly like typical deverbal noun in that it has a subject in possessive form and takes an infinitival phrase that is  controlled  by  the  argument  John.  Moreover,  within  this  type,  the corresponding pairs are not necessarily homophonous. The verb record has its stress on the second syllable, while its nominal counterpart has the stress on  the  first,  though  the  noun  record  denotes  the  result  or  product  of recording, rather than the process. The phonological process nonetheless signals the effect of nominalization. 
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1.2 A problem of interest  
Chinese  as  an  analytic  language,  its  nominalization  constructions have unique characteristics. A few example are in order.  Unlike  those  morphologically  rich  languages,  Chinese  is  an  inflection-impoverished  language,  with  lexical  items  lacking  inflectional  endings altogether. And grammatical relations, like aspectual features or plurality, are expressed through some word markers, like le or men respectively, the behavior and status of which are more like those of a LI than a morpheme. (9b) is a typical nominalization construction in Chinese. At the first sight, the most conspicuous trait about (9b) is the deverbal noun per se, which is identical in form to its verbal counterpart in (9a). At the level of the head noun, it is therefore impossible to tell its categorial status by itself alone. In  this  case,  we  could  only  turn  to  look  at  other  constituents  in  the construction and examine their relations wit本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。