Passive Nominals in English and Polish: An Optimality-Theoretic Analysis

Published in limited academic edition of 250 copies.

"This dissertation has two main aims. The first is to investigate argument realization in event nominals, focusing on passive nominals, the second is to argue for the adequacy of the OT (Optimality-theoretic) framework in syntactic studies. Chapter 1 discusses basic facts concerning restrictions on the occurrence and semantic interpretation of pre-head possessives and post-head genitives in English and Polish noun phrases. Chapter 2 includes a brief introduction, the basic assumptions of Optimality Theory and illustrations are given of OT studies concerning argument structure of verbs. Chapter 3 deals with the parallelism between noun phrases and verb phrases. In Chapter 4 issues relating to the event structure of nominals are discussed. In Chapter 5 attemps are made to employ the Optimality-theoretic mechanism of aligning prominence scales to predict most optimal argument linking in selected noun phrases. Chapter 6 shows how OT prosodic and syntactic constraints interact in selecting the most felicitous structural realization of pronominal object-type arguments in Polish verbal nominals."