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Nominalizations: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives

Subject Area Practical Philosophy
Term from 2011 to 2015
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 187087874
 
Final Report Year 2016

Final Report Abstract

The use of nominalizations is ubiquitous in ordinary and scientific discourse and the overall research interest was a deepened understanding of this phenomenon. Nominalizations are what appears to be singular terms (e.g. ‘wisdom’, ‘the proposition that Socrates is wise’, ‘Socrates’s wisdom’) derived from non-nominal expressions, such as predicates (‘is wise’) or sentences (‘Socrates is wise’). By deriving nominalizations speakers seem to introduce categories of things (e.g. properties, modes or tropes, propositions, etc.) which are systematically related to the semantics of the non-nominal expressions that are the basis of the derivation. From a theoretical point of view, the urge to use nominalizations might be said to manifest the speakers’ cognitive need of reifying aspects of their own linguistic practise. The topic of nominalization thus relates both to language and world. In the project, it was accordingly studied from, firstly, the perspective of linguistics and the philosophy of language, and secondly, from the perspective of metaphysics and ontology. From the first perspective, nominalizations were examined in terms of their semantic, syntactical and pragmatic profile, using pertinent theories from both linguistics and philosophy. The second perspective shifted the interest from the nominalized expressions themselves to the categories of things that they introduce. That gave rise to ontological questions about the nature of entities such as properties, tropes, numbers, propositions etc. Furthermore, a number of meta-ontological questions proved central to a systematic understanding of nominalization, as e.g. the question of what it takes for a speaker to ontologically commit herself to some entities, or the question of which concepts we need for a systematic account of such categories – in so far as the existence and/or nature of entities introduced by nominalizations can often be explained in terms of facts about other entities, notions of dependence and grounding seem to be central here. The close cooperation between linguists and philosophers proved to be extremely insightful. While nominalizations had been studied for a long time in both disciplines, the respective research often proved to be a valuable input to the debate in the other disciplines. The publication output of the project was very substantial. Since many researchers contributed to the project, pursuing a broad range of specific research interests, and since the individual members sometimes developed antagonistic answers to the questions they studied, an informative summary of the many individual results that were obtained in the project can hardly be given here; instead, one must refer to the work published in course of the project. But apart from the individual research goals pursued by the individual members of the project, there was something like a noble, overarching goal of the project: To lay the groundwork for a unified theory of nominalizations. Here we would hope that some of the work in the project helps approaching the goal. But at the same time, we must admit that some of the work in the project made it doubtful whether the goal can ever be achieved in a full generality. For, it may well seem that the most attractive semantic analyses of certain classes of nominalizations (e.g. number terms in sentences such as ‘the number of continents is five’) are tailor-made for the class in question and cannot be applied to other sorts of nominalizations. In how far nominalization is a unified phenomenon thus remains an urgent question.

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