Description of English and Modern Greek nominals

The present paper deals with the derived nominal formation in English and Modern Greek; nominals are characterized by their hybrid noun-verb nature (cf. Comrie and Thomson 1985) and more specifically by the fact that some of them, just like verbs, can express actions, processes and resultant states, and also, just like verbs, they have argument taking properties. As we shall see, some of them appear to have a similar Argument Structure (AS), though not identical to that of a verb. On the other hand, however, nominals seem to exhibit certain anisomorphism compared to the verbs they are derived from, as far as their argument realization is concerned in the sense that an external argument in the AS of the verb (i.e. the subject), which is always obligatory in the verb's syntactic structure, becomes something which looks more like an Adjunct in the argument structure realization of the derived nominal, as we shall see. Notice in passing that there is a similar case with Modern Greek verbs, too, that is, there too, the NP subject behaves like an adjunct. Compare (o Janis) trexi, where the ΝΡ subject ο Janis is optional, with the ungrammatical *(John) is coming. This has led to the conclusion that phonologically realized grammatical subjects in Modern Greek function as adjuncts (as the 'subjects' of nominals do) given that it is the verb endings (e.g. Sg: -o 1st p., -is 2nd, and -i 3rd; and Pl: -ume 1st, -ete 2nd, and -un 3rd) in which subject function is reflected. The present paper will attempt to probe into the syntax and semantics of nominals and will try to show that the syntactic behavior of nominals crucially depends on their distinction into two semantic classes, i.e. action/process/event nominals, on the one hand, and result (concrete) nominals, on the other. But most importantly, we will show that there are some non-trivial differences (apart from the similarities) between English and Modern Greek derived nominals, which any comparative study of those two languages should account for