French Psych Verbs and Derived Nouns

Since Chomsky's 1970 "Remarks on nominalization", there has been much discussion of the similarities and differences between verbs and their corresponding derived nouns (e.g., Alexiadou 2001, Falk 2001, Grimshaw 1990, Laczkó 2000, Markantonatou 1995, to mention only a few recent publications). One of the most disputed issues in these studies is the question whether the nominal inherits the argument structure of its base verb or not. The paper addresses this question on the basis of an analysis of French psychological or psych verbs and their corresponding deverbal nouns.

The theoretical framework assumed in the paper is Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Bresnan 2001) combined with Dowty's 1991 proto-role proposal. It is argued that the correct mapping of the participants of psych verbs onto syntactic structure can be predicted via an elaboration of LFG's mapping theory with Dowty's 1991 proto-role approach, as proposed by Zaenen 1993. For the mapping of the nominal's arguments, a nominal argument realization principle is introduced that implies that the nominal arguments are obliques, i.e. restricted functions. Optionality of the nominal's arguments follows from the assumption that optionality is a default property of obliques (Alsina 1996).

Starting from Meinschaefer's classification, distinguishing three semantically motivated psych verb classes in French (cf. Meinschaefer 2001), it can be shown that this conception, together with a number of language-specific realization rules for nominals, correctly predicts argument realization for French psych verbs and their corresponding nominals. The aspect of verbs and their derived nouns is expressed in terms of Dowty's proto-role properties.

The question of whether the nominal inherits the verb's arguments or not can be answered in the following way: verbs and nominals share semantic argument structure, represented as proto-role properties and proto-roles. However, assignment of features and mapping onto syntactic structure are different for verbs and their derived nouns.

References

• Alsina, Alex. 1996. The Role of Argument Structure in Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
• Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Functional Structure in Nominals: Nominalization and Ergativity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  
• Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Readings in English Transformational Grammar, ed. Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum, 184-221. Waltham, Mass.: Ginn.
• Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67:3:547-619.
• Falk, Yehuda N. 2001. Constituent structure and grammatical functions in the Hebrew action nominal. In Proceedings of the LFG01 Conference, ed. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King. 83-103. On-line, CSLI Publications: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/6/lfg01.html.
• Grimshaw, Jane 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Laczkó, Tibor. 2000. Derived nominals, possessors, and Lexical Mapping Theory. In Argument Realization, ed. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King. 189-227. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
• Markantonatou, Stella. 1995. Modern Greek deverbal nominals: an LMT Approach. Journal of Linguistics 31:267-299.
• Meinschaefer, Judith. 2001. Nominalization of French psychological verbs. Paper presented at Going Romance 2001. Amsterdam, December.
• Zaenen, Annie. 1993. Unaccusativity in Dutch: integrating syntax and lexical semantics. In Semantics and the Lexicon, ed. James Pustejovsky. 129-161. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

To appear in: Butt, Miriam and Tracy Holloway King, ed. Nominals: Inside and Out. Stanford: CSLI Publications.