Versatility of nominalizations

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of Japanese and Korean nominalized constructions, i.e. (I) Head Internal Relatives (HIRs) and (II) Sentence-final nominalized constructions. Japanese HIRs are shown to manifest a greater degree of cross-constructional extension than their Korean counterparts. Sentence-final nominalized constructions, which take on various pragmatic-semantic functions, also display a parallel cross-linguistic contrast in terms of interpretive versatility. This paper argues that these cross-linguistic contrasts are correlated with the differential degrees of functional extension of non-conclusive verb forms as nominal, and finally with the differential preferences toward noun-oriented structures between Japanese and Korean.