Recent Studies on syntactic categories have suggested that syntactic categories such as noun or verb are not syntactic primitives, but rather defined contextually (Chomsky 1998, Marantz 1997, Harley and Noyer 1998, Borer 2000, Embick 2000, Pesetsky and Torrego 2002). Marantz (1997), for example, has proposed that the determination of a predicate as noun or verb is the result of the combination of a category-neutral predicate with a higher (argument-taking) functional head (v or D). Scrutinizing data from gerundive nominals in English, Korean, and Turkish, however, I will argue that the extremely impoverished nominal character of mixed categories can be best explained in terms of a [-interpretable] categorial feature in an existing functional head, without recourse to postulating a redundant functional head D. If the purported analysis is on the right track, it is suggested that Universal Grammar still has to utilize a categorial feature as part of the lexical information.
1. Introduction 2. Syntactic Categorization and Gerundive Nominals 3. Deriving PRO-ing/Acc-ing Constructions: A Minimalist Analysis 4. Cross-linguistic Support 5. Conclusion References
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