English Nouns explores the mechanisms by which English nominalizations come to have a variety of readings depending on their syntactic context.

Rochelle Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches a wide range of courses on theoretical linguistics and the English language. She is the recipient of the Carpenter Professorship (2016) and the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Teacher and Scholar in Liberal Arts (2013) from the University of New Hampshire, and the Bloomfield Award given by the Linguistic Society of America for the Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (with Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, 2015). She is the author of four previous monographs and over fifty articles and book chapters on morphology and related topics, and is the co-editor of three handbooks on morphology.

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction; 2. Terminology and methodology: 2.1 Terminology; 2.2 Methodology; Part II. Data: 3. Event/result nominalizations: 3.1 Previous claims; 3.2 Nineteen questions; 3.3 Adding it all up; 4. Nominalizations as a derivational ecosystem: 4.1 The derivational ecosystem; 4.2 Forms and readings; 4.3 Inanimate patient nouns; 4.4 Conclusion; Part III. Nominalization within the LSF: 5. A lexical semantic approach to nominalization: the basics: 5.1 Recap of the LSF; 5.2 E versus R skeletons: a first pass; 6. The eventive reading: 6.1 ATK nominalizations with the eventive reading; 6.2 -ing nominalizations; 6.3 Conversion nouns; 6.4 A note on simplex nouns; 6.5 Conclusion; 7. Referential readings: 7.1 Basic skeletons; 7.2 Referential readings for ATK, -ing, and conversion Ns; 7.3 Personal and participant nominalizations; 7.4 Abstract nominalizations; 7.5 Collectives; 7.6 Underpopulated habitats; 7.7 Modal and evaluative elements of affixal meaning; 7.8 Conclusion; 8. Nominalizations and compounding in the LSF: 8.1 Claims; 8.2 The corpus data; 8.3 The LSF analysis; 8.4 Conclusions and loose ends; 9. Nouns in the wild.