Action and Agent Nouns in French and Polysemy

Abstract

In French, three main classes of deverbal nouns can be distinguished: action (or process) nouns, external argument nouns (generally called agent nouns) and internal argument nouns. Zwanenburg (1993) shows that the semantic structure of each of these three groups of deverbal nouns can be described in terms of argument structure, which is based on conceptual structure (Williams 1981). According to Di Sciullo and Williams (1987: 32–45), derived words tend to display function composition, which means that the arguments of the affixal head and those of the non-head base together compose the argument structure of the derived word. Action nouns are assumed to have an external argument position R, which is their reference. They have furthermore inherited all the arguments of the verbal base:

(1) l’accusation d’un innocent par Ie procureur

‘the accusation of an innocent person by the prosecutor’

External argument (or agent). nouns are characterized by the identification of the argument position Rwith the external argument position of the verbal base (Sproat 1985: 170–1).