Event and Result Nominals: A Morpho-Semantic Approach

ISBN-13: 9783034306584 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 317 str.

Melloni, Chiara

Opis

The syntax and semantics of deverbal action nominals, notoriously ambiguous between event and result interpretation, have been a thought-provoking issue in many areas of theoretical linguistics. This volume contributes to current work on this topic by showing how the analysis of these nouns can benefit from a morphological and lexical-semantic treatment.
While being a revealing synthesis of a number of formal accounts on this popular research domain, this study specifically targets the largely unexplored area of result nouns and addresses several crucial issues. What are result nouns in a strictly lexical-semantic perspective? Why do some verb classes allow ambiguous event/result nominal correlates, while others do not? What are the relevant verbal features involved in result noun formation? Is there a range of predictability in the number and types of meaning conveyed by a derived nominal?
Couched within a framework of decompositional lexical semantic, the analysis offers original formal solutions to the polysemy issues arising in this word formation domain and convincingly argues in favor of the semantic alignment between the morphologically simplex and complex lexicon. A compelling range of Italian data provides empirical support to the author s claims."

Spis treści

Contents: Event/Result nominals: from a morpho-syntactic towards a lexical semantic definition of the target issue - The building blocks of meaning in Event/Result nominals - Affixal semantics and word formation in Lieber's (2004) lexical-semantic framework - "R" nominals as a semantically heterogeneous class - Sense extensions - Nominal Polysemy in Generative Lexicon theory: complex types and inherent polysemy - Event/Result nouns and Qualia Structure - A Result-oriented verb classification - Defining the semantic constraints on Result noun formation - Modeling Event/Result noun formation in a lexical semantic framework for word formation - The lexical semantic skeletons of verbs and affixes - Patterns of coindexation.

O autorze

Chiara Melloni is Assistant Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Verona. Her research interests cover the fields of morphology and lexical semantics, and her investigations focus on the formal and semantic properties of the morphologically complex lexicon. In particular, her work concentrates on word formation phenomena, such as nominalization and compounding. Her scientific production has been published in several international journals and miscellanies.