Understanding deverbal nominals: World knowledge or lexical semantics? Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2224 - 2229. (original) (raw)
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DEVERBAL -ER AND -TI(S) NOMINALS: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS ON THE LEVEL OF LEXICAL SEMANTICS
Using extensive data, with this paper we aim at comparing deverbal -er and -tis (-της) nominalization -two apparently parallel morphological processes. The corpus search revealed that -tis nominals do not display the same range of polysemy that -er nominals do. Moreover, unlike its English counterpart process, -tis nominalization does not license object-oriented nominals. Our data also demonstrate that in Greek there is no strong correlation between inheritance of obligatory complements and event interpretation of the nominals. We interpret this as evidence for a diminished verbal character displayed by -tis nominals. With regards to semantic interpretation, we argue that -tis poses special semantic restrictions on the linked R argument of the nominal. Namely, the highest argument must designate an entity, either sentient or non-sentient, that is actively involved in carrying out the action (i.e. controller). This is an intrinsic property of -tis nominals that cannot be captured in terms of Argument Structure and syntax. Lastly, we claim that this semantic condition is what constrains -tis suffixation from forming object-oriented nominals.
Sentential arguments of deverbal nouns
Talk at the SLE 2014 conference, Poznan, Poland
In the talk, the factors allowing / prohibiting retention of the verbal argument after nominalization are considered. It turns out that the semantic role of the sentential argument and the modal vs. non-modal distinction are sometimes the most relevant.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2009
The Deverbal Nominal Construction of modern Italian belongs to a class of phenomena that present interesting theoretical challenges given their ambiguous status between morphological compounding and syntax. In this paper, we combine evidence from corpora and a systematic elicitation experiment to propose that Deverbal Nominal Constructions are actually a spurious class, including both true compounds and constructions that belong to the impoverished syntax of telegraphic language, signs and headlines. Besides providing results that allow us to maintain a stronger view of the separation of morpho-lexical and syntactic phenomena, the study also serves as a general illustration of how empirical methods from corpus analysis and psycholinguistics can be brought to bear on issues of interest to the general theory of language.
The Grammar of English Deverbal Compounds and their Meaning
We present an interdisciplinary study on the interaction between the interpretation of noun-noun deverbal compounds (DCs; e.g., task assignment) and the morphosyntactic properties of their deverbal heads in English. Underlying hypotheses from theoretical linguistics are tested with tools and resources from computational linguistics. We start with Grimshaw’s (1990) insight that deverbal nouns are ambiguous between argument-supporting nominal (ASN) readings, which inherit verbal arguments (e.g., the assignment of the tasks), and the less verbal and more lexicalized Result Nominal and Simple Event readings (e.g., a two-page assignment). Following Grimshaw, our hypothesis is that the former will realize object arguments in DCs, while the latter will receive a wider range of interpretations like root compounds headed by non-derived nouns (e.g., chocolate box). Evidence from a large corpus assisted by machine learning techniques confirms this hypothesis, by showing that, besides other features, the realization of internal arguments by deverbal heads outside compounds (i.e., the most distinctive ASN-property in Grimshaw 1990) is a good predictor for an object interpretation of non-heads in DCs.
Verbs as nouns: empirical investigations on event-denoting nominalizations
2017
In this thesis, I study the differences in form and interpretation presented by event-denoting nominalizations. Frequently, languages have more than one type of event nominalization, such as deverbal nouns derived by means of suffixes (Italian mutamento / mutazione, ‘change’, ‘mutation’, or English assignment, explosion) and their corresponding verbal nouns, e.g. infinitives (il mutare, ‘the changing’) or gerunds (exploding). These are usually perceived as alternatives, since their semantic difference is not clearly understood by neither native speakers nor linguists. The aim of this work is to understand the rationale that leads us to choose one form instead of the other and to define the linguistic features involved. The hypothesis underlying the whole thesis is that different forms are never true synonyms and, thus, present some differences in use, distribution or meaning. In a first study, I explore the role of the base verb in the nominalization selection. I investigate if the various nominalizations are formed from different types of base verbs and which characteristics define their domain of application. By means of statistical modeling, I highlight how the transitivity of the base verb partially determines which nominalization is preferred. Moreover, I show that NIs are not used to make up for the lack of a corresponding EDN, refuting previous claims. Then, I move forward analyzing the cases in which both forms are derived from the same base and I try to understand if they differ in meaning. In the second study presented, I use collocation analysis to observe their semantic dissimilarities. With focus on a single syntactic pattern, I find out that nominal infinitives and deverbal nouns inherit only part of the base verb senses. The former usually prefer metaphorical and abstract senses, whereas the latter select more concrete and literal ones. Lastly, I use distributional semantic models to observe quantitatively the semantic shift of the two processes. I confirm the hypothesis that nominal infinitives are more transparent and more semantically regular than deverbal nouns, given their inflectional nature. The studies presented have been conducted on Italian and German; however, the findings are relevant for the general treatment of nominalizations and may be replicated for further languages. Overall, my work shows how quantitative analyses of corpus data can help us investigate problems that are hardly addressed by linguists introspection. Moreover, it includes in the study of nominalizations nominal infinitives, non-finite verbal forms which, contrary to English gerunds, have not received the attention they deserve.
Case assignment and argument realization in nominals
Language, 2017
Case assignment and argument licensing in process nominals, that is, nouns such as destruction that are morphologically related to verbs, are assumed to operate in a verblike manner both within government-and-binding theory and, more recently, within the distributed morphology framework. The data from Russian challenge this approach and reveal that there is an important difference between the verbal and the nominal domains: case assignment in verbs is sensitive to the underlying argument structure, but in nominals to surface structure, that is, the collection of overt arguments. We propose a hierarchy of case-assignment rules that applies in the nominal domain. Moreover, within the nominal domain, case assignment is uniform: the same rules apply to different types of nominals, including prototypical process nominals and relational nouns. The main theoretical advantage of our lexicalist, constraint-based approach is that it can capture similarities between the verbal and the nominal domains, seen in the assignment of inherent and lexical cases, but also in their fundamental differences.