Koptjevskaja-Tamm's "Action nominal constructions in the langauges of Europe" describes action nominals as being a parasite:
"ANC Universal 1: ANC a parasite
No language has syntactic means (dependent-marking, head-marking, word order) which are exclusively used in ANCs."
Are there other constructions that follow this definition? If so, what are they and is there more information on this category of a "parasite"?
I would start with Chomsky, T.F. Mitchel, Hillis Miller, Saussure, Michael Brame and Roman Jackbson for a possible answer, dear Philip.
Start with Chomsky but semantic analysis will also be required. Can you please provide with a few examples and some data. The languages that I will examine are Hindi and Punjabi.
I'd advise you not to waste your time searching in Chomsky or any of the other luminaries mentioned. Better to do some thinking and some empirical research to see whether Koptjevskaya-Tamm's 'universal' has any content. She is writing in the framework of linguistic typology, which is concerned with attempting to generalize across languages. Try and imagine what is meant by 'syntactic means'. One syntactic means that is found in ANCs is the double occurrence of a possessive: "Iraqi's invasion of Kuwait", for example. If that is a "syntactic means", then it is one that only occurs in ANCs. But if you just take "possessive" to be a syntactic means, without counting the occurrences, then it occurs in ANC and in ordinary NP's like "Iraq's army". So I'm not sure that the universal is formulated clearly enough for anyone to be able to prove it or disprove it.
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