Event related nominalizations

Overview & Synopsis

The literature on nominalizations often distinguishes classes of derived (deverbal) nominals with an event related interpretation, commonly analyzed as inherited from the semantics of the underlying verbal/aspectual structure. However, the classes of nouns that have been called 'eventive' exhibit sometimes contrastive properties. Dealing here with three such classes of derived nominals, i.e., Complex Event nominals (CENs), Simple Event nominals (SENs) and 'eventive' -er nominals, we propose a system that distinguishes between a 'strong' grammatical event and a 'weak' semantic event to account for the properties of event inheriting nominals. We further account for well-known differences between these classes of nominals using semantic type distinctions, and pave the way to an integrated compositional analysis of deverbal nominals.