Argument structure and morphologically underived nouns in Spanish and English

• We identify a class of morphologically underived nominalizations that carry argument structure.
• These are problematic for a theory where nouns get their argument structure from the underlying verbal structure.
• We argue that these nouns are syntactically derived from verbs, but spelled out with a portmanteau exponent.

One of the main topics on the study of the relationship between argument structure and lexical categories is the proposal that nouns (and adjectives) structurally do not introduce arguments. This proposal is matched by some morphological facts, such as the one that observes that AS-nominals have to carry overt nominalizers. In this paper, we address some previously unexplained counterexamples to this generalization involving cases of morphological conversion relating nouns to verbs. We argue that these cases of conversion have to be divided in two groups, and that there is one class that carries verbal structure, even though the morphological make up does not reflect this directly. We argue that these cases have to be dealt with by using portmanteau exponents that synthetically lexicalize verbal projections and a syntactic nominalizer. In doing so, this article provides evidence in favour of the hypothesis that single exponents can lexicalize series of heads.