ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some general properties of nominalisation processes but focuses on this important group, summarising the long-standing discussion on the nature of morphological and syntactic inheritance of argument and event structure of the base verbs in the resulting nominals. Nominalisation processes, in a broad sense, can be understood as encompassing any derivative processes that form nouns by adding affixes to a lexical base. In any case, Spanish nominalisations have the potential, diversely realised in the different suffixes and varieties of the language, for denoting a process related to its base verb as well as the result of that process, either abstract or concrete. The semantic properties of these two types of nominalisations correlate with different sets of morphosyntactic properties. Deverbal nominalisations denoting events display almost the same aspectual properties as the verb base. The difference between the verbal and the nominal infinitival constructions in Spanish can be made clearer applying a few of Bosque’s set of tests.
