Whatʹs nominal in nominalizations?

This article investigates the nature of syntactic categories: What does it mean to be a noun or a verb? The discussion focuses on nominalizations. It is shown that there is a distinction between nouns and verbs at a basic level. The essential difference between verbs and nouns resides in the availability in principle of merging instructions in the sense of Reinhart (2002). What makes a nominalized verb nominal is consequently shown to reside in the instructions determining the way it is merged in the syntactic representation. Modifying a thesis formulated in Vinokurova (2005), it will be shown that Verbs represent relational concepts for which merging instructions are defined, and Nouns represent concepts for which merging instructions are not defined.