Syntactic realizations of plural in Romance and Germanic nominalizations

This paper offers a syntactic account for the various ways in which Plural is expressed within Argument-Supporting Nominals (ASNs) in Romance and Germanic. We first show, starting from Romanian data, that pluralization is connected to aspectual properties like (a)telicity and (un)boundedness. These properties may be realized under the syntactic category of verbal Aspect, that of nominal Number, or encoded by a [±count] features on the nominal category Classifier.We then support our theory with a comparison between the Romanian Infinitive/Supine and Spanish Nominal Infinitives (SNIs). The latter are fully nominal, but lack plural and we relate this to a [–count] feature in their Classifier. The comparison with English also shows the relevance of inner Aspect to nominalizations. The picture we get allows a better understanding of morphological and syntactic processes at work in nominalizations and of their nominal and verbal properties.