Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Predicting the Semantics of English Nominalizations: A Frame-Based Analysis of -ment Suffixation

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Semantics of Complex Words

Part of the book series: Studies in Morphology ((SUMO,volume 3))

Abstract

It has long been known that derivational affixes can be highly polysemous, exhibiting a range of different, often related, meanings. To account for this problem, it is commonly assumed that polysemy arises through the interaction of affix semantics with the meaning of the base (e.g. Plag I, The polysemy of -ize derivatives: the role of semantics in word formation. In: Booij G, van Marle J (eds) Yearbook of morphology 1997. Foris, Dordrecht, pp 219–242, 1998). This paper investigates the relationship between input semantics and output readings using the English nominal suffix -ment as a test case. From a sample of deverbal neologisms dating from the past 100 years, we investigate the largest semantic subclass of base verbs in the data set, i.e. psych verbs (Levin B, English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993). The analysis employs common semantic categories such as event, state, result and stimulus and formalizes the results with the help of frames (Barsalou LW, Cognitive psychology: an overview for cognitive sciences. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1992a; Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. In: Lehrer A, Kittay EF (eds) Frames, fields and contrasts. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 21–74, 1992b; Löbner S, Understanding semantics, 2nd edn. Arnold, London, 2013). It is shown that -ment almost exclusively attaches to verbs from two clearly defined sub-classes of psych verbs, i.e. amuse verbs and marvel verbs. Within these sub-classes, -ment derivatives can be merely transpositional in meaning (denoting events or states, depending on the kind of base verb), or the suffix can induce a metonymic shift to the participants stimulus and result state, but not to experiencer. In the light of the frame analysis it becomes clear that, if the base verb denotes a complex psych causation event, shifts to the two sub-events are also possible, which calls into question the traditional concept of transposition. Our findings support an approach in which the semantics of a derivational process is conceptualized as its potential to induce particular metonymic shifts in the semantic representation of its bases.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    All attestations are referenced in the following way: Corpus, genre (if available), year of attestation (if available). In COCA, the following genres are distinguished: spoken (SPOK), fiction (FIC), academic (ACAD), magazine (MAG) and news (NEWS). For GloWbE, WebCorp and Google, the following additional categories are relevant: Online articles and blog posts (BLOG), comments and Facebook posts (COMM).

  2. 2.

    Accessible at http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/projects/verbnet/downloads.html

  3. 3.

    While traditionally (see Saeed 2009, 154; Taylor 2002), experiencers are [+animate] per definition, in VerbNet there are classes which allow for experiencers to be either [+animate] or [+organization].

  4. 4.

    In languages that are morphologically richer than English, this subdivision is often based on case, see e.g. Klein and Kutscher (2005) for German, and Varchetta (2010) for Italian.

  5. 5.

    That muse over does possess an action reading can be tested with Aktionsart tests, for instance, its use in an imperative construction (“Muse over this!”).

  6. 6.

    http://neurofoolishmusings.blogspot.de/

  7. 7.

    It will have to be determined in further research whether all action nouns based on psych verbs behave like this.

  8. 8.

    In fact, both in English and in any language the authors can think of, these cannot be marked morphologically. In English, the initial state can be expressed in the semantics of a lexeme (e.g. deactivate) or clarified by context (“The clown managed to amuse the scared children”).

References

  • Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Functional structure in nominals: Nominalization and ergativity, Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today, vol. 42. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baayen, R. Harald. 1993. On frequency, transparency, and productivity. In Yearbook of morphology 1992, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 181–208. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Baayen, R. Harald. 2009. Corpus linguistics in morphology: Morphological productivity. In Corpus linguistics, ed. Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö, 900–919. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baayen, R. Harald, and Antoinette Renouf. 1996. Chronicling the times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72(1): 69–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bach, Emmon. 1986. The algebra of events. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 5–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Mark. 2003. Lexical categories: Verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Barque, Lucie, Antonio Fábregas, and Rafael Marín. 2011. On the (un)countability of stative deverbal nouns. Chronos X. 18.04.-20.04.2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1992a. Cognitive psychology: An overview for cognitive sciences. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1992b. Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. In Frames, fields and contrasts, ed. Adrienne Lehrer and Eva Feder Kittay, 21–74. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bauer, Laurie. 2001. Morphological productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag. 2013. Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beard, Robert. 1995. Lexeme-morpheme base morphology: A general theory of inflection and word formation. Albany: State University of New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brandtner, Regine. 2011. Deverbal nominals in context: Meaning variation and copredication. Stuttgart: Universitätsbibliothek der Universität Stuttgart dissertation. http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2011/6359.

  • Bresnan, Joan. 1982. The mental representation of grammatical relations, MIT press series on cognitive theory and mental representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Readings in English transformational grammar, Roderick Jacobs, and Peter Rosenbaum, 184–221. Waltham: Blaisdell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

  • Davies, Mark. 2013. Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/.

  • Diemer, Stefan. 2011. Corpus linguistics with Google? In Proceedings of ISLE 2 Boston 2008

    Google Scholar 

  • Ehrich, Veronika, and Irene Rapp. 2000. Sortale Bedeutung und Argumentstruktur: ung-Nominalisierungen im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 19(2): 245–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Filip, Hana. 1999. Aspect, eventuality types, and nominal reference. New York: Garland Pub.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geuder, Wilhelm. 2000. Oriented adverbs: Issues in the lexical semantics of event adverbs. Tübingen: Universität Tübingen dissertation.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grimshaw, Jane Barbara. 1990. Argument structure, Linguistic inquiry monographs, vol. 18. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Härtl, Holden. 2001. Mapping conceptual onto grammatical structures: The case of psych verbs. In Structural aspects of semantically complex verbs, ed. N. Dehé and A. Wanner. Frankfurt/New York: Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heyvaert, Liesbet. 2003. A cognitive-functional approach to nominalization in english, Cognitive linguistics research, vol. 26. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hundt, Marianne, Nadja Nesselhauf, and Carolin Biewer, eds. 2006. Corpus linguistics and the web, Language and computers – Studies in practical linguistics, vol. 59. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, Ray. 1983. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, Ray. 1991. Parts and boundaries. Cognition 41(1–3): 9–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kallmeyer, Laura, and Rainer Osswald. 2013. Syntax-driven semantic frame composition in lexicalized tree adjoining grammars. Journal of Language Modelling 1(2): 267–330.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kipper, Karin, Anna Korhonen, Neville Ryant, and Martha Palmer. 2008. A large-scale classification of English verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1): 21–40. doi:10.2307/41217861.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klein, Katarina, and Silvia Kutscher. 2005. Lexical economy and case selection of psych-verbs in German. Ms.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lees, Robert B. 1963. The grammar of English nominalizations. Bloomington: Indiana University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lieber, Rochelle. 1998. The suffix -ize in English: Implications for morphology. In Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, ed. S. G. Lapointe, D. K. Brentari, and P. M. Farrell, 12–34. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lieber, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and lexical semantics, Cambridge studies in linguistics, vol. 104. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lieber, Rochelle. 2014. The semantics of transposition. Paper presented at the “Semantics of Derivational Morphology” workshop, June 30–01 July, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lieber, Rochelle, and Harald Baayen. 1999. Nominalizations in a calculus of lexical semantic representations. In Yearbook of morphology 1998, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 175–198. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lindsay, Mark, and Mark Aronoff. 2013. Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In Morphology in Toulouse, ed. Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jesse Tseng. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.

    Google Scholar 

  • Löbner, Sebastian. 1985. Definites. Journal of Semantics 4(4): 279–326.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Löbner, Sebastian. 2013. Understanding semantics, 2nd ed. London: Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types of present-day English word-formation. Munich: Beck.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martsa, Sándor. 2013. Conversion in English: A cognitive semantic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melloni, Chiara. 2011. Event and result nominals: A morpho-semantic approach. Bern/New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • OED. 2013. The Oxford English dictionary online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/.

  • Osswald, Rainer. 2005. On result nominalization in German. In Proceedings of sub9, ed. Emar Maier, Corien Bary, and Janneke Huitink, 256–270. Nijmegen: Radboud University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osswald, Rainer, and Robert D. Van Valin. 2014. Framenet, frame structure, and the syntax-semantics interface. In Frames and concept types, ed. Thomas Gamerschlag, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald, and Wiebke Petersen. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Panther, Klaus-Uwe, and Linda L. Thornburg. 2002. The roles of metaphor and metonymy in English -er nominals. In Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast, ed. René von Dirven and Ralf Pörings, 279–322. Berlin/New Jersey: De Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Petersen, Wiebke. 2007. Representation of concepts as frames. In The Baltic international yearbook of cognition, logic and communication, vol. 2, ed. Jurgis Skilters, 151–170. Kansas: New Prairie Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plag, Ingo. 1998. The polysemy of -ize derivatives: The role of semantics in word formation. In Yearbook of morphology 1997, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 219–242. Dordrecht: Foris.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological productivity: structural constraints in English derivation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Pollard, Carl, and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. English nominal gerund phrases as noun phrases with verb-phrase heads. Linguistics 29(5): 763–799.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Radden, Günter, and Zoltán Kövecses. 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In Metonymy in language and thought. Human cognitive processing, vol. 4, ed. Klaus-Uwe Panther and Günter Radden, 17–60. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rainer, Franz, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Francesco Gardani, and Hans Christian Luschützky. 2014. Morphology and meaning: An overview. In Morphology and meaning, vol. v. 327, 3–48. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Renouf, Antoinette, Andrew Kehoe, and Jayeeta Banerjee. 2006. Webcorp: an integrated system for web text search. In: Corpus linguistics and the web, Language and computers, vol. 59, ed. Marianne Hundt, Nadja Nesselhauf, and Carolin Biewer, 47–67. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roßdeutscher, Antje. 2010. German -ung-nominalization. An explanation of formation and interpretation. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 17: 101–132.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roßdeutscher, Antje, and Hans Kamp. 2010. Syntactic and semantic constraints in the formation and interpretation of ung-nouns. In The semantics of nominalizations across languages and frameworks, Interface explorations, vol. 22, ed. Monika Rathert and Artemis Alexiadou, 169–214. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Roy, Isabelle, and Elena Soare. 2012. Event-related Nominalizations. 2012. Ms. < hal-00723654v1 > . https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/723654/filename/Nom_event_.pdf

  • Saeed, John I. 2009. Semantics, Introducing linguistics, vol. 2, 3rd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2011. English morphology and word-formation: Second revised and translated edition. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schulzek, Daniel. 2014. A frame approach to metonymical processes in some common types of German word formation. In Frames and concept types, ed. Thomas Gamerschlag, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald, and Wiebke Petersen, 221–242. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Sil, Avirup, Fei Huang, and Alexander Yates. 2010. Extracting action and event semantics from web text. In Proceedings of the AAAI 2010 fall symposium on commonsense knowledge, Arlington, 108–113.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spencer, Andrew. 2010. Lexical relatedness: A paradigm-based model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, John R. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trips, Carola. 2009. Lexical semantics and diachronic morphology: The development of -hood, -dom and -ship in the history of English. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Uth, Melanie. 2011. Französische Ereignisnominalisierungen: Abstrakte Bedeutung und regelhafte Wortbildung, Linguistische Arbeiten, vol. 540. Berlin: De Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Varchetta, Nicola. 2010. Psych-verbs: A locative derivation. In University of Venice working papers, vol. 20, ed. Laure Brugè, 113–155.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yoon, James Hye Suk. 1996. Nominal gerund phrases in English as phrasal zero derivations. Linguistics 34: 329–356.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank two reviewers and the editor for useful comments on an earlier version. Special thanks go to Shelly Lieber for many inspirational (and fun) exchanges (on matters morphological and beyond). We gratefully acknowledge funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 991 The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science) for the first author.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Language and Linguistics, Institute of English and American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany

    Lea Kawaletz & Ingo Plag

Authors
  1. Lea Kawaletz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ingo Plag
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lea Kawaletz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Laurie Bauer

  2. Department of British and American Studies, P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia

    Lívia Körtvélyessy

  3. Department of British and American Studies, P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia

    Pavol Štekauer

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Kawaletz, L., Plag, I. (2015). Predicting the Semantics of English Nominalizations: A Frame-Based Analysis of -ment Suffixation. In: Bauer, L., Körtvélyessy, L., Štekauer, P. (eds) Semantics of Complex Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14102-2_14

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation