Functional Heads and Eventive Nominals: The Basque Perspective

Abstract

This article shows that Basque has a few suffixes (-era, -keta, -pen) which give rise to the type of eventive nominals described in the literature (Grimshaw; Picallo; Alexiadou, Functional Structure). Nominals headed by these suffixes are passive-like (cf. Alexiadou, Functional Structure), obligatorily take genitive arguments and are mostly restricted to unaccusative and transitive predicates, but have a very limited eventive reading: they do not take adverbial modification (aspectual modification is realised through adjectives) and adpositional phrases show up with the functional linker -ko, typical of nominal structures (de Rijk, “Basque Hospitality”). A peculiar feature of Basque is that the external argument has genitive case, just like the internal argument; this double genitive structure suggests that Basque has a neutralised case system at the nominal level. On the other hand, Basque has nominalised clauses which admit all kinds of adverbial and PP modification, as well as regular subject case-marking (be it ergative or absolutive); this type of nominalised clauses may have an eventive reading. I propose that Basque nominalised clauses have the structure DP-TP-(NegP)-AspP-VoiceP-vP-root. For derived event nominals, I claim that Basque only projects up to VoiceP, with the nominaliser selecting a Voice head with a [-external argument] feature (Alexiadou, “Ergativity”). The selection of an unsaturated VoiceP forces the external argument of the root to be projected at the nominal level (Bruening): DP-PossP-NumP-ClassP-nP[ext. argument]-Voice[-ext. arg.]P-vP-Root. Basque grammar resorts to structural case-checking by the head Possesor (de Wit), which attracts all the DPs in its c-commanding domain and creates a multiple-specifier configuration of the kind defended in Richards. The rest of the features displayed by derived event nominals follow from the limited number of verbal functional projections available.