Ezafe, PP and the nature of nominalization

In the paper we argue that the English VP/NP structures in (i) a-d have exact counterparts in the i(ranian)Persian PP/NP structures in (ii) a-d, where P1-P3 are three different classes of iPersian Ps and where -EZ is the so-called “Ezafe” morpheme. (i. a) John [_VP destroy the evidence] “Pure VP”; (i. b) John -’s [_NP destroying the evidence] Nominalized VP; (i. c) John -’s [_NP destroying of the evidence] Nominalized V; (i. d) John -’s [_NP destruction of the evidence] Deverbal N; (ii. a) NP [_PP P1 NP] “Pure PP”; (ii. b) NP -Ez [_NP P2 NP] Nominalized PP; (ii. c) NP -Ez [_NP P2 -Ez NP] Nominalized P; (ii. d) NP -Ez [_NP P3 -Ez NP] “Deprepositional” N. The notion “nominalization” is thus shown to be relevant to both of the lexical categories - V and P - identified by Chomsky (1974) as [-N]. Our demonstration proceeds in three steps: 1) We establish a common syntactic function for English -’s/of and iPersian -EZ, viz., case-assignment, following Samiian 1994; Karimi and Brame 1986/2012; Larson and Samiian 2020; 2) We argue for a shared cross-categorial structure for VP-PP, developing proposals by Jackendoff 1973; van Riemsdijk 1990; Svenonius 2003. We show that if Jackendoff’s (1977) “scopal nominalization” analysis of gerunds is extended to iPersian PPs, the parallelism in (i) and (ii) is accounted for; 3) We show that the full extension of nominalization to iPersian PPs suggests a more general view of nominalization than has been recognized previously, viz., a “split-feature” view of category specification. This has a variety of implications, which we briefly explore.