Eventive Nominalizations in Russian and the DP/NP Debate

Eventive nominalizations (ENs) and gerunds in English and other languages are typically analyzed as verbal structures embedded under DP (see, e.g., Abney 1987, Grimshaw 1990). Since many Slavic languages lack articles, the availability of the DP projection in those languages has been hotly disputed (see Pereltsvaig 2013, 2015 for overviews of the debate). Curiously, Russian nominalizations have been used to mount arguments for both the pro-DP position (see Engelhardt and Trugman 1998a,b, Rappaport 1998, 2001, 2004) and the anti-DP position (see Bošković 2008, 2012, Bošković and Şener 2014). Obviously, both arguments cannot be correct: the same data cannot show both that Russian does not have the DP projection and that it does. As the debate is not yet settled, it is important to verify if either argument based on nominalizations is valid. To date, this has not been...