Introduction

The introduction to this book reviews detail the major claims put forth in RoN in 1970, and in particular, the claim that complex words, with deverbal nominals being the case at point, represent a formation that is neither predictable nor productive, and are hence lexically listed. This claim goes hand in hand, in RoN, with the claim that whatever similarities do hold between the deverbal nominal such as destruction and the verb destroy emerge from the existence of a category neutral listed form, DESTROY, which has a consistent subcategorization frame (an object in this case), which is realized identically in the syntax, in accordance with the X’-theory, and where the form DESTROY itself inherits its category from its categorial insertion context (N, V etc.). Since 1970, a rich body of studies has emerged which investigated the properties of lexical formations such as destruction and their relationship with the verb destroy, giving rise to multiple accounts of the emergence of complex words, as well as to the emergence of distinct argument structure combination in the context of nominalizations in particular, and word formation in general. Particularly influential was Grimshaw’s (1990) work, which introduced a typologically sound distinction between nominalizations with event structure (Complex Event Nominals, or Argument Structure Nominals) and nominals which lack event structure, and which may be result nominals or referential nominals or Simple Event Nominals, i.e. nouns which denote an event, but which do not have an event structure in the verbal sense (e.g. trip). More recently there has been the questioning of the partition between word formation and syntactic constituent building altogether, starting with Marantz (1997), and continuing with influential work by many of the contributors to this volume. This volume brings together a sample of contemporary approaches to nominalization, based on the historical record, but also branching into new grounds, both in terms of their syntactic approaches, and in terms of the range of languages considered.<320>

Light verb variations and varieties of Mandarin Chinese: Comparable corpus driven approaches to grammatical variations

This article presents a classification and clustering based study to account for the differences among five Chinese light verbs (congshi, gao, jiayi, jinxing, and zuo) as well as their variations in Mainland China Mandarin (ML) and Taiwan Mandarin (TW). Based on 13 linguistic features, both competition and co-development of these light verbs are studied in terms of their distinct and shared collocates. The proposed method discovers significant new grammatical differences in addition to confirming previously reported ones. Most significant discoveries include selectional restrictions differentiating deverbal nominals and event nouns, and degrees of transitivity of VO compounds. We also find that most variations between Mainland China Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin are in fact differences in tendencies or preferences in contexts of usage of shared grammatical rules.

The processing of process and result deverbal nominals in Serbian and English

Process and result deverbal nominals are two types of nouns derived from related verbs. These two types of deverbal nominals exhibit different behavior in a number of aspects. The aim of this study was to test the differences of process and result deverbal nominals, in both Serbian and English, with respect to their cognitive processing. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was conducted in Serbian, with target constructions, process and result deverbal nominals (e.g., drhtaj/drhtanje [EN trembling]), embedded in the sentence contexts, whereas Experiment 2 dealt with the equivalent constructions in English. Data were analyzed with the Generalized Additive Mixed Models - GAMMs (Wood, 2006, 2011) measuring reading times (RTs) at the word level (deverbal nouns) and the sentence level (the whole sentence, including the deverbal nominal) in both languages. The final results in general suggested that result deverbal nominals were processed faster than process deverbal nominals. It was assumed that these differences were obtained because process deverbal nominals are syntactically more complex than result deverbal nominals.

Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations1

Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw’s (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.

Instrument and Means interpretation of deverbal nominals: The role of ambiguous stative verbs in French VN compounding1

This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied ‘blanket’, lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr’s (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine “pure” Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a “pure” Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).

Pre-D non-possessor positions in Hungarian

The paper investigates pre-D non-possessor positions in Hungarian. In Hungarian, non-deverbal nominal constructions containing pre-D non-possessor positions are acceptable only if they contain a demonstrative pronoun and also an adjective, and the appearance of a pre-D possessor does not impact the acceptability of the sentence. The paper also gives a brief discussion of similar constructions with pre-D non-possessors in German, mainly to shed light on the Hungarian data. Although German also allows for pre-D non-possessors, it does so under different conditions. A short topicalized element can readily appear in German sentences as a non-possessor dependent, but in this language a possessor can never appear in the same noun phrase. The paper also discusses deverbal nominal constructions with pre-D non-possessor dependents in Hungarian. In these constructions the presence of a possessor argument is indispensable. This is due to the fact that the placement of the non-possessor argument in a position preceding the possessor is legitimized by the fact that the former takes scope over the latter within the internal information structure of the matrix noun phrase. The paper also deals with the syntactic structure of said deverbal nominals.