Abstract Deverbal nominals with verbal morphology and PROCESS as their semantic character have been claimed to possess syntactic VP structure ( Bruening, 2018a , Borer, 2013 , Alexiadou, 2009 , Roeper, 2005 , Fu et al., 2001 , etc.). The paper shows that this claim is incorrect. Specifically, properties such as adverbial postmodification and coreference with ‘do so’, so far admitted only of deverbal nominals and argued to be evidence of VP in them, are shown to be possible also with simple nominals. I argue that some of the proposed evidence of VP in deverbal nominals, namely adverbial postmodification, is in itself flawed since postnominal adverbs are not syntactically internal to nominal phrases (NPs/DPs). The two acceptability surveys conducted affirm the corpus data, offering at the same time new insights into an understudied area, that is, coreference between nominals and ‘do so’. I propose that simple and inanimate role nominals are likely to be coreferential with this anaphor if the former denote a semantic event and the latter are perceived as performing an intransitive action. I further argue for a distinction between internal and external syntactic structures, showing that Payne et al.'s (2010) rejection of the complementarity claim of adjectives and adverbs lacks syntactic support.

中文翻译：

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Deverbal 名词没有内部 VP 结构

摘要 以动词形态和PROCESS为语义特征的Deverbal名词被声称具有句法VP结构（Bruening, 2018a , Borer, 2013 , Alexiadou, 2009 , Roeper, 2005 , Fu et al., 2001, etc.）。论文表明这种说法是不正确的。具体来说，诸如状语后修饰和与“do so”的共指等属性，迄今为止仅承认 deverbal 名词并被认为是其中 VP 的证据，被证明也适用于简单名词。我认为，一些提议的 VP 在动词名词中的证据，即状语后修饰，本身就存在缺陷，因为后名词副词在语法上不是名词短语 (NPs/DPs) 的内部。进行的两次可接受性调查肯定了语料库数据，同时提供了对未研究领域的新见解，即，名词和“这样做”之间的共指。我建议，如果前者表示语义事件而后者被视为执行不及物行为，那么简单和无生命的角色名词很可能与这个回喻共指。我进一步主张区分内部和外部句法结构，表明 Payne 等人 (2010) 拒绝形容词和副词的互补性主张缺乏句法支持。