Two syntactic strategies to derive deadjectival nominals 1 Artemis Alexiadou & Gianina Iordăchioaia Universität Stuttgart artemis/gianina@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de 1. Introduction We investigate two morphological types of abstract deadjectival nominals ̶ suffix-based and bare nominals ̶ that combine with an argument-like genitive/PP, as illustrated with the French examples in (1). We will refer to them as suffix-based nominals (SN in (1a)), partitive bare nominals (PBN in (1b); see Villalba (2009) for a similar pattern in Spanish) and quality bare nominals (QBN in (1c)). Such patterns have been separately investigated in French, Spanish and Dutch (Bécherel 1979, Bosque & Moreno 1990, Sleeman 1996, Lauwers 2008, Villalba 2009, Villalba & Bartra-Kaufmann 2010, McNally & de Swart 2011, 2013). (1) a. la vulgarité de l'histoire Suffix-based Nominal (SN) the vulgar of the-story ‘the vulgarity of the story' b. le vulgaire de l'histoire Partitive Bare Nominal (PBN) the vulgar of the-story ‘the vulgar thing in the story’ c. le vide de l'espace Quality Bare Nominal (QBN) the empty of the-space ‘the emptiness of space’ In this paper we compare the properties of these types of nominals in German, Romanian, Greek, and partly in French. 2 We are concerned with two specific issues: 1) the status of the genitive phrase that accompanies the nominal and 2) the morpho-syntactic representation of the various patterns with their specific interpretation. The first issue relates to the long discussion in the literature on deverbal nominalization that was initiated by Grimshaw (1990) and concerns the question of whether the genitive phrase is an argument of the nominal and how its presence influences the interpretation of the nominal. In this respect, our comparative approach shows that the genitive does not play the same role in all three nominal patterns in (1) as the French data may suggest at first sight. Unlike French, the other three languages commonly use the genitive only in SNs and QBNs. On the basis of the semantics of these constructions, we argue that the genitive phrase is an argument only in this context. For the second issue, we employ two syntactic strategies of word formation that are provided by the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle & Marantz 1993, Harley & Noyer 1999, Alexiadou 2001, Arad 2005, Embick 2010 among others): word formation from the root and word formation from another word. We use the first mechanism to derive the unproductive nominals, among which we include Greek and Romanian PBNs, and the second mechanism to build the productive patterns, namely, SNs in all languages and PBNs in German. An additional outcome of this approach is that we account for the rather idiosyncratic meaning of the former and the compositional meaning of the latter, as predicted 1 Our research has been supported by a DFG grant to project B1, The form and interpretation of derived nominals, within the SFB 732, at the University of Stuttgart. 2 Part of the empirical results reported here, especially the ones on French, is based on joint work with Daniela Marzo and Birgit Umbreit that we presented at the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics 7, Dec. 2012.