Determination, nominalisation and conceptual processing

The purpose of this article is to account for the interpretive process initiated by nominalisations in Spanish. I shall start from the assumption that both morphological nominalisations and syntactic nominalisations, in which a determiner merges with either an infinitive phrase or a complementizer phrase, generate a complex interpretive process due to a clash between an interpretation in terms of ‘entity’, on the one hand, and an interpretation as ‘situation’, on the other. I shall substantiate this claim by analysing nominalised infinitive phrases, nominalised complementizer phrases and morphological nominalisations.