"Du contrat social"-etik "gizarte-hitzarmenera", edo nominalizazioen eragina diskurtso berezituetan

Abstract

Any language, and particularly minority languages, in order to survive, need to extend their use to all specialized fields. Nominal structures and deverbal nouns being one of the main features of specialized texts, it has been argued by some linguists that, as specialized discourse is being developed in Basque, a considerable increase is to be expected in the productivity of morphological rules of deverbal noun formation; it has been even pointed out that, depending on the type of specialized text, certain deverbal suffixes will be more productive than others. Without denying the place nominalizing strategies have in specialized texts, other linguists warned against the abuse of such strategies, especially when dealing with not highly specialized texts, because of the acceptable noun-phrase structures in Basque, much more limited than in other surrounding languages. In this article, through the analysis of juridical and odontological terminology, it will be argued that the distinction between event nominals and result nominals is crucial; and that nominalized sentences are perfectly valid in Basque as equivalents of deverbal nouns denoting an event or an action, being particularly productive the structure '[(nominalized sentence) + -tzeko] + noun' to translate terms which, in English or in Romance languages, have the structure 'noun + preposition + deverbal noun'. As a last point, it will be suggested that the kind of semantic verbs used in each specialized field is the clue to understand the differences in productivity of the deverbal suffixes according to the type of specialized text.