Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism

Event nominalizations and agent nominalizations provide evidence that all affixation is morphological, and that phrasal categories are projected from words in the syntax. Departing from both transformational and earlier lexicalist approaches to nominalizations, I first argue on the basis of English and Finnish evidence that gerunds are not DPs built on heads that embed an extended verbal projection (Baker 2009, Kornfilt 2011), but IPs that need Case.  They are categorially verbal at all levels of the syntax, including having structural subjects rather than possessor specifiers.  Their nominal behavior is entirely due to the unvalued Case feature borne by their Infl head, which they share with all participial verb forms.  I then argue that agent nominalizations are categorially nominal at all levels of the syntax, and that the verb-like case assignment of transitive agent nominalizations is due to the verbal Aspect feature borne by their nominalizing head.  Vedic Sanskrit, Northern Paiute, and Sakha evidence is shown to favor this analysis over B & V's analysis of intransitive agent nominalizations as nominal equivalents of Voice heads and transitive agent nominalizations as Aspect heads.  The two "mixed" categories -- gerunds and transitive nominalizations -- thus prove to be formally duals:  respectively verbs with Case and nouns with Aspect.