Deverbal categories and the split vP hypothesis

The goal of this paper is to independently motivate the assumption made by Sleeman & Brito (2009) and Sleeman (2007a,b) that both for nominalizations and for participles five readings can be distinguished. In Sleeman & Brito‟s (2009) and Sleeman‟s (2007a,b) syntactic approach to morphology, these different readings are reflected in different syntactic structures for each of the five types, more specifically in different features attributed to vP and AspP, and in the presence/absence of vP and AspP, dominating the lexical root of the deverbal category. In this paper I show that the verbal root of the five types corresponds to five different combinations of Ramchand‟s (2008) split vP, which is composed of functional heads representing certain features of AspP and vP used in earlier analyses of nominalizations and participles.