The study of nominals—lingustic expressions whose core constituent is characteristically a noun—is of great interest to both theoretical and computational linguistics. Their internal structure, meaning, and use address intriguing issues of semantics and pragmatics that are intrinsically related to syntactic matters. Dimitra Kolliakou provides a detailed description and formal analysis of a wide range of intricate linguistic phenomena concerning nominal constructions in Modern Greek, while exploring the implications of those phenomena for the architecture of grammar both at a theoretical and computational level. In particular, this book supports the integration of semantic and contextual information in the grammar, formalizing it within the multi-dimensional framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

Since the early 1970s, the proper treatment and nominals and nominalization has been fundamental to syntactic theory. And yet a satisfactory approach continues to prove elusive. Working within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, this book discusses the precise reasons why pronouns show particular distributions, why nominalized verbs inherit the predicational power of the verbs they're derived from, and what kind of syntactic category derived nominals should be assigned. Recent developments in LFG make it possible to examine discourse clitics and case markers as well, meaning this collection can address both "classic" nominal issues and novel new perspectives.