Book Review - Diana Ștefan-Dinescu. 2023. On the Syntax of Deverbal Nominalizations in English and Romanian. Bucharest: Editura Universității din București. 250 pp.

Deverbal nominalization, that is, the linguistic process through which a verb is turned into a noun/noun phrase by the addition of a (zero) suffix (e.g. examination < (to) examine or smile < (to) smile), has attracted a lot of interest from numerous scholars, thus, it has been the subject of thorough investigation over the last few decades. This interest dates back to Chomsky’s (1970) preliminary remarks on nominalizations but receives special attention due to, first and foremost, Grimshaw’s (1990) tripartite division of derived nominals into complex event, simple event and result nominals. The distinction proposed in this seminal work has become so foundational that it has not only generated keen interest in the deeper understanding of this phenomenon (cf. Borer 2012, Alexiadou & Borer 2020 a.o.) but also prompted syntacticians and semanticists to go beyond English and bring forward novel data from a wide variety of genealogically unrelated and typologically distinct languages. The book under review here, the slightly revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Bucharest, is one of these cross-linguistic works, which aims to delineate and characterize the parameters that underlie the differences between the system of deverbal nominalization in English and Romanian.