Abstract for the entry ‘Nominalization’. In L. Matthewson, C. Meier / H. Rullmann / T. E.
Zimmermann (eds.): The Blackwell Companion to Semantics, Blackwell, New York.
Nominalizations: The Case of Nominalizations of Modal Predicates
Friederike Moltmann
CNRS-IHPST and NYU
Nominalizations describing events and tropes have a received considerable interest in the
semantic (and philosophical) literature. By contrast nominalizations of modal verbs and
the modal objects they describe have received little if any attention in the literature
so far. This paper is a case study of nominalizations of the sort 'need', 'possibility',
'necessity', as well as nominalizations arguably describing the same sorts of modal
objects, namely 'permission', 'obligation', 'invitation', and 'offer'. The paper will
give a general caracterization of the modal objects such nominalizations describe and
address the question of how familiar semantic nominalization strategies may fare in
regard to how the semantics of the nominalization may be obtained from the underlying
predicate. Those strategies include the Davidsonian view that takes nominalizations to
pick up an implicit argument of the underlying predicate, the Kimian or pleonastic view
that takes nominalizations to introduce 'new' semantic objects into the semantic
structure that would not have been present otherwise, and the truthmaker view, which
takes nominalizations to stand for the truthmakers of the corresponding underlying
sentences. The paper will furthermore address the question of the importance of modal
objects in the semantics of sentences and for the semantics of modality in particular.