This talk aims to present a research project to be developed from September 2021 to July 2022 at the Collegium de Lyon and at the DDL Laboratory. This research is focused on nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages, a family of more than 30 languages spoken in North and Central America. Nominalizers are affixes attached to a base in order to derive a nominal constituent. These affixes are important in world’s languages because they contribute to the development of language complexity. They can be used for creating new words in a language (in this case, nominalizers are working at the level of lexical morphology, and the derived nominal constituents are thus lexical nominalizations, that is complex lexical items associated with lexical complexity), but they can also be involved in the construction of grammar (syntactic complexity), in particular in the domain of clause combination (in this case, nominalizers are working at the level of morphosyntax, and the nominalized constructions are thus grammatical nominalizations functioning as subordinate clauses embedded in a complex clause). Based on the functional approach to nominalization recently proposed by Shibatani (2019), this study seeks to identify the different synchronic functions associated with these nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages and to propose the origins of these markers as well as the contexts and the evolutionary paths involved in their emergence and development. At this stage of the research, I will focus on the event and argument nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages, considering their uses in lexical and grammatical nominalizations as well as the possible source constructions at the origin of the nominalization function of these markers. Additionally, it will be shown how the different uses of these nominalizers in Uto-Aztecan languages represent a good morphological support that provides clear evidence in favor of the functional approach to nominalization.
Shibatani, M. 2019. What is nominalization ? Towards the theoretical foundations of nominalization. In Roberto Zariquey, Masayoshi Shibatani, David W. Fleck (eds.), Nominalization in the Languages of the Americas, John Benjamins Publishing: Amsterdam/Philadelphia. 15-167.