A Study of Grammatical Gradience in Relation to the Distributional Properties of Verbal Nouns in Scottish Gaelic

Verbal nouns in Insular Celtic languages have long been a subject of interest because they are capable of exhibiting both nominal and verbal properties, posing a persistent challenge when it comes to determining their precise categorization. This study therefore seeks to examine the intersective gradience of verbal nouns in Scottish Gaelic from a functional-typological and multidimensional perspective, providing an insight into the interaction between their morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and their lexical categorization, and, consequently, encouraging a broader discussion on linguistic gradience. This hybrid category plays a central role in the clause structure of Scottish Gaelic, as it appears in a wide range of distinct grammatical constructions. Drawing on a range of diagnostic tests revealing the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of verbal nouns across various contexts (e.g., etymology, morphological structure, inflection, case marking, TAM features, syntactic function, types of modification, form and position of objects, distributional patterns, cleft constructions, argument structure, subcategorization, etc.), this line of research identifies two key environments, depending on whether the construction features a verbal noun functioning either as a verb or a noun. This distinction aims to illustrate the way in which these contexts condition the gradience of verbal nouns. By doing so, it provides strong evidence for their function along a continuum ranging from fully verbal to fully nominal depending on their syntactic context and semantic and pragmatic interpretation. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest that the use of verbal nouns blurs the line between two lexical categories, often displaying mixed properties that challenge a rigid categorization.