Building and exploiting resources for derivational morphology: Data-driven and theory-driven approaches

Richard Huyghe
University of Fribourg

Because of their grammatical complexity, formal variety and semantic diversity, deverbal nouns have challenged linguistic theory for more than half a century. Since Lees (1960) and Chomsky (1970), many studies have been devoted to the syntactic aspects of nominalization, especially with respect to argument realization (Grimshaw 1990, Alexiadou 2001, Borer 2005, among others). Research about the morphosemantic properties of deverbal nouns has developed more recently (Booij 1986, Gaeta 2000, Namer & Villoing 2008, Lieber 2016, Wauquier et al. 2018, among others), still leaving many questions about the semantics of nominalization unanswered. Extended analyses of the morphosemantic properties of deverbal nouns notably require large lexical resources that provide in-depth and systematized semantic information, possibly offering an overall picture of the semantic organization of these nouns.

In this talk, I will present the design of a database of French deverbal nouns created to answer specific research questions about derivational semantics, cross-categorial semantic preservation, affix rivalry, and affix polyfunctionality. The database consists in a sample of 4,000 verb-noun pairs extracted from the FRCOW16A corpus (Schäfer 2015, Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012), involving 37 suffixes and 3 forms of conversion. It includes information about ontological and relational nominal classes, as well as aspectual features and semantic role assignment for both verbs and nouns. In order to account for the polysemy of nominalizations, the different meanings of each verb and noun are carefully distinguished and systematically paired. The semantic description is based on controlled manual annotation and explicit definitions of the annotated criteria.

An example of theoretical use of the database will be provided through the investigation of the aspectual features of nominalizations. The Aspect Preservation Hypothesis (APH), which stipulates that eventuality-denoting deverbal nouns inherit the lexical aspect of their base (Fábregas et al. 2011), will be tested through the analysis of neologisms taken from the database. It will be shown that the APH does not hold for French deverbal nouns, and that lexical aspect can be modified in the nominalization process. Some suffix preferences with respect to aspectual shifts will also be highlighted.

References

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