| Summary: | This paper is concerned with the morphosyntax of deverbal zero-derived nominals (e.g., to climb > a
climb), which have received much less attention in the literature than suffix-based nominals (cf. the
climb-ing, the examin-ation, the assign-ment). In the generative literature, in particular, after Grimshaw’s
(1990) seminal work on suffix-based nominals and their possibility to inherit verbal event and argument
structure, zero-derived nouns have been claimed to lack such properties: e.g., in syntax-based models of
word formation, which take argument realization in deverbal nouns to indicate the inheritance of functional
structure from the base verb, they have been analyzed as derived not from a verb but from an
uncategorized root, as implemented in Borer (2013). Following Rappaport-Hovav and Levin’s (1998)
theory of event structure and argument realization, I investigate zero-derived nouns built from verbs with
preposed and postposed particles and show that they may realize argument structure on their event readings,
which can only come about from the event structure of their base verbs.
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