Deriving Nominals

This book provides a detailed study of nominalizing patterns in Malagasy (Austronesian) and discusses the broader theoretical issues that arise from these patterns. It explores new and original fieldwork data drawn from the largely unexplored domain of Malagasy deverbal nominals. Offering new insights to long-standing puzzles in the derivation of argument-structure, referential, and clausal nominals, the book promotes a single structure-building mechanism, which allows nominalizers to attach at different heights in the clausal spine to derive nominals with different morphosyntactic properties. In addition, it provides a novel analysis of participant nominalizations, showing that they are derived through the same mechanism that derives relative clauses, and thus setting the stage for new and exciting research directions.