Non-event nominals and argument structure

Bowers (2010a) proposes that all argument DPs are introduced in the specifiers of ‘light verb’ categories of different types. It is argued in this paper that such a theory is given direct support by the existence of three types of non-event nominals in English whose morphosyntactic and semantic properties correspond precisely to those of the basic argument categories Ag(ent), Th(eme), and Aff(ectee). Assuming that these argument categories are spelled out in derived nominal structures as the morphemes –er/-or, -ment/-ion/-ure, -ee, respectively, each type of non-event nominal can be derived by standard syntactic processes such as head movement. The proposed analysis, if correct, extends to derivational morphology the claim of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993) that word formation is syntactic, not lexical (Marantz, 1997; Embick, 2004; Harley, 2009), thereby making syntax the only generative component of the grammar. It is further shown that if noun incorporation is syntactic, then productive compounds such as deer hunter, painting consignor, etc. can be derived syntactically as well and that the order of incorporated nouns in such structures mirrors precisely the order in which argument categories are merged.