A Lexical-Semantic Investigation

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Abstract
This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result
nominalisations and is aimed at showing and explaining why only certain
classes of base verbs yield the relevant semantic ambiguity in their derived
nominals, while other classes only give unambiguous event nominals. In
particular, the focus of the investigation is on the lexical semantic
characterisation of the base verbs and, more specifically, on the identification of
those structural and conceptual semantic properties that are indispensable for
yielding a result nominal. We accordingly propose a verbal taxonomy crucially
based on the ontological concept of 'result', and formally represent the
nominalisation process by means of the theoretical apparatus proposed by
Lieber (2004). Specifically, we contend that the morpho-syntactic and semantic
properties of result nominals can be derived through an accurate lexical
decomposition of the base verbs and of the suffixes, and by implementing the
co-indexation mechanism that drives the nominalisation process.