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Deverbal Semantics and the Montagovian Generative Lexicon \(\Lambda \!\mathsf {Ty}_n\)

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Abstract

We propose a lexical account of event nouns, in particular of deverbal nominalisations, whose meaning is related to the event expressed by their base verb. The literature on nominalisations often assumes that the semantics of the base verb completely defines the structure of action nominals. We argue that the information in the base verb is not sufficient to completely determine the semantics of action nominals. We exhibit some data from different languages, especially from Romance language, which show that nominalisations focus on some aspects of the verb semantics. The selected aspects, however, seem to be idiosyncratic and do not automatically result from the internal structure of the verb nor from its interaction with the morphological suffix. We therefore propose a partially lexicalist approach view of deverbal nouns. It is made precise and computable by using the Montagovian generative lexicon, a type theoretical framework introduced by Bassac, Mery and Retoré in this journal in 2010. This extension of Montague semantics with a richer type system easily incorporates lexical phenomena like the semantics of action nominals in particular deverbals, including their polysemy and (in)felicitous copredications.

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Notes

  1. Chambers, John David. Lights before the Sacrament: an argument, scriptural, historical, and legal in a letter to a member of convocation, London, 1866.

  2. http://seinenkai.com/articles/noble/noble-shorin1.html.

  3. http://japerionline.com.br/japeri/saiba-como-acontecem-as-contagens-de-votos-para-eleger-vereadores-e-prefeitos/

  4. Syntactical categories are learnt from annotated corpora, but semantical typed \(\lambda \)-terms cannot yet, as discussed in the conclusion.

  5. If there were entries for abstract event we would chose them rather than the base verb, but we have no dictionary of events while we do have precise electronic dictionaries, [e.g. the TLFi (Pierrel 2006)] which include the verbs.

  6. “The signing was delayed by three days.” Example from http://noticias.uol.com.br/inter/efe/2004/03/05/ult1808u6970.jhtm.

  7. “The signature was illegible.” Example from http://www.reclameaqui.com.br/3372739/dix-saude/cancelamento-do-plano-a-mais-de-um-mes-e-nada/.

  8. Home made example tested on native speakers.

  9. Observe that with an opposition the sentence would be fine: “This translation although quite easy, earned me a lot of money.”

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Christian Bassac (University of Lyons 2), Marcos Lopes (University of São Paulo), Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (University of Opole), and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Lingüística, Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas Universidade Federal do Paraná, Rua General Carneiro, 460, Curitiba, Brazil

    Livy Real

  2. LaBRI Université de Bordeaux, 351 cours de la Libération, 33405, Talence Cedex, France

    Christian Retoré

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  1. Livy Real
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  2. Christian Retoré
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Correspondence to Christian Retoré.

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The research of Livy Real is funded by a CAPES PhD grant, and benefited from a stay at LaBRI and from funds from ANR project Polymnie.

The research of Christian Retoré was done while on CNRS sabbatical at IRIT (Toulouse) and benefited from funds from ANR projects Polymnie and Loci.

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Real, L., Retoré, C. Deverbal Semantics and the Montagovian Generative Lexicon \(\Lambda \!\mathsf {Ty}_n\) . J of Log Lang and Inf 23, 347–366 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-014-9187-y

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