Acknowledgments

I’ve always been mystified by nominalizations. Ever since I read ‘Remarks on Nominalizations’ (Chomsky Reference Chomsky, Jacobs and Rosenbaum1970) as an undergraduate, I’ve been intrigued by the intricacies of eventive nominalizations in English, but I never felt that I could get a handle on them. I avoided them in my scholarly work for as long as I could. So I thank Chiara Melloni for coming to work with me in the summer of 2006 and for showing me just how much I didn’t understand about nominalizations. Inadvertently she set me off on this project. I am also grateful to Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, with whom I spent three pleasant years working on The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology; they trusted me to write the first drafts of the three nominalization chapters and thereby gave me the opportunity to wallow in corpus data until I began to get a grip on the data. By the time we finished that book, I felt that I understood the many ways in which nominalizations could be polysemous, but I was still confused about the larger syntactic configurations in which nominalizations could be found and about the relationship between syntactic context and polysemy. I therefore thank the University of New Hampshire for a sabbatical in the spring of 2015 that finally gave me the time to explore the syntactic side of nominalizations, to let the pieces fall into place, and ultimately to write this book. I thank my new colleague Sean Madigan for reading the first half of the manuscript. And I thank Ingo (again) and his team – Lea Kawaletz and Marios Andreou – for reading a nearly complete draft of the book and commenting on it extensively. It is very much better for all of their careful attention. Thanks finally to David and the furry kids for being there through all.