The syntax of nominalized complex verbal predicates in Dagaare

Abstract.  Nominalization and verb serialization are widely attested phenomena in the generative linguistic literature, but an in‐depth study of their interaction remains to be undertaken. Based on data from Dagaare, a Gur language of West Africa, this paper analyzes a type of complex predicate construction, nominalized serial verbs, in which only one of the verbs carries a nominalization affix. With this, a number of issues about the nature of complex predicatehood, syntactic alternations, and lexical categorial differences involving nouns and verbs across languages are addressed. The paper proposes that, basically, serial verb nominalizations are VPs headed by a NomP functional projection.