Despite its importance in both grammar descriptions and theoretical studies, there has been a general neglect in the study of nominalizations, especially grammatical nominalizations, in the field. A consequence of this neglect has been widespread misunderstanding of the true nature of so-called subordinate clauses in general and so-called relative clauses, in particular, which have long been analyzed in a wrong-headed way. The treatment of the nominalizations in NP-use as headless rela- tive clauses (Andrews 2007, etc.) or as nominalizations derived from relative clauses is putting the cart before the horse.62 Comrie and Thompson (2007: 378), among
others, recognize a connection between nominalizations and relative clauses, but they describe it as “a somewhat more rare function of nominalization: as a relative clause modifying a head noun”, despite the fact that such a connection is found even in English, which uses wh-forms to mark argument nominalizations, as in Figure 2.63
Figure 2: Two uses/functions of English argument nominalization
There is even more striking similarity between Japanese and English. Both have developed a special marker for an NP-use of nominalization, no in central dialects of Japanese, as discussed above, and English one, as used for argument nominaliza- tions in NP-use; cf. You should marry [who [Ø loves you]] and You should marry one [who [Ø loves you]].
As shown above, both historical and dialectal, as well as crosslinguistic perspec- tives play very vital roles in reaching deeper understandings of various aspects of grammatical structures. For example, studies of Middle English, where the NP-use
62 Sneddon (1996: 300) remarks about Indonesian nominalizations thus: “Nominalization occurs when the head noun [of a relative clause] is elipted [. . .] The yang [nominalization] phrase then functions like a noun.”
63 See Shibatani (2009) for a crosslinguistic survey of the extensive use of nominalizations as modi- fiers in relative constructions.
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of grammatical nominalizations did not need the one marker, and of the transition from Middle English to Modern English, and those dealing with dialectal data displaying usage patterns different from the mainstream dialects, such as the East Anglia use of what-nominalization as a modifier (e.g. Gemma screamed at the man [what crashed into our car], would open up the horizon for a comprehensive under- standing not attainable in a narrow investigation focused on synchronic data from a mainstream dialect. We have also mentioned the importance of the descriptive practice of addressing the actual use of grammatical structures rather than relying on native-speaker intuition, which may not reflect actual usage patterns found in natural data.
We argued at length that so-called relative clauses are neither clauses/sentences nor independent structures apart from a use of nominalizations as modifiers. The same applies to so-called content clauses that identify head nouns (the fact [that John is already married]). Treating these as clauses or sentences, as in past studies, fails to distinguish between internal and external properties of grammatical structures. Structure-internal similarities do not guarantee that we are dealing with similar grammatical structures, whose category status must be determined on the basis of their functions and external morphological and syntagmatic properties. Sentences, clauses, and nominalizations differ in both function and external properties, as described in section 5. There are other structures than these nominalizations that require further investigation from a functional perspective, such as those clause- looking structures used as adverbial modifiers (e.g. before/after/since [John arrived here] or [Kenzi ga kuru] ya inaya ‘as soon as Kenji has arrived’ and [Kenzi ga kure-ba] ‘if Kenji comes’ in Modern Japanese), as well as those non-finite structures permitting no-marked modifiers, as in the Classical Japanese form kimi no imasi-seba ‘if my lord had still be here’.
Our radical proposal to reanalyze the so-called genitive case as a nominal-based nominalization finds support in many languages other than Japanese, such as Lahu and other Tibeto-Burman languages, Chinese, Nepali, and Modern Hebrew, where both N-based and V-based nominalizations have the same morphological marking, or in languages such as Korean and Telugu, where the NP-use of both N-based and V-based nominalizations involve the same marker, as in Japanese. Our analysis solves the longstanding mystery why so-called genitive cases are similar to nominalization/ relative clause markers in one way or another in the world’s languages (cf. Aristar 1991).
We suggested that a noun modifier must be nominal based on our understand- ing of what restrictive and non-restrictive, identifying modification amounts to. The modification-use of adjectival roots in Classical Japanese, which requires the -ki derived nominal forms as in [tuyo-ki] hito ‘a strong person’, corroborates this. This raises an interesting issue about the nature of modification by adjectives in other languages, the understanding of which has been a challenge. One proposal has been that a phrase like a strong man involves a secondary predication such as a man is strong, but there is little evidence for it other than that the phrase has such
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an entailment. In the case of Indo-European languages, a closer affinity between nouns and adjectives allows a possibility that adjectival modification turns out to be a case of modification by a noun, or a nominalized form of an adjective. The Sanskrit form śukla:m ‘white’ in saḥ śukla:m ga:m a:nayati (he white cow brings) ‘He brings a white cow’, is like a noun taking noun inflections just like the head noun ga:m ‘cow.FEM
.
SG.
ACC’.64 It also has an NP-use, like any other nouns, as insaḥ śukla:m a:nayati ‘He brings a white (one).’
A similar pattern is seen in modern European languages, most clearly in Romance languages that permit the usage pattern paralleling the Sanskrit case; e.g. Portuguese um carro azul (ART car blue) ‘a blue car’: Eu quero um azul ‘I want a blue (one)’. What about English then? Are adjectival modifiers really nouns or nominali- zations in English as well? Do they have an NP-use like Sanskrit and Portuguese? Well, as seen in the translations of these Sanskrit and Portuguese examples, English requires the one-marking in the NP-use of these “adjectives”. But we noted above that the one-marking is almost obligatorily required in the NP-use of verbal-based nominalizations in Modern English. The parallelism is clear between the pattern Marry a man[who you love] (modification-use): Marry one [who you love] (NP-use) and a blue car (modification-use): a blue one (NP-use). Investigations of languages in which adjectives form a robust independent lexical category would yield interest- ing results.
In the introduction of this chapter we promised that Japanese grammar would look quite different from what we had known once a proper understanding of the nature of nominalization has been attained. We hope that the lengthy discussions above have lived up to this promise. These concluding remarks above suggest that the same point perhaps applies to the grammars of other languages as well.65