Basay Nominal Constructions

Abstract

This paper examines the distributional and syntactic facts of various kinds of nominal constituents in Basay, an extinct East Formosan language, and identifies two suspicious "nominalized" verbal elements the verbs of the nominalized clauses and the headless relative clauses. Following Chomsky 1970, we adopt two binary category features, [±N] and [±V] and establish the morphosyntactic criteria for features [+N] and [+V] in Basay. The established criteria then help us identify the morphosyntactic properties of the derived nouns, verbs in the nominalized clauses and verbs in the headless clauses. Our study shows that the derived nouns are lexicalized nominals with [+N, -V] values, while the verbs of the nominalized clauses and headless relative clauses carry verbal properties only, being identified as [-N, +V].