Rafael Marín

The role of aktionsart in deverbal nouns: State nominalizations across languages

Most of the literature devoted to the study of deverbal nominalizations concentrates on the complex event reading (e.g. La concentracion de particulas tiene lugar a temperatura ambiente ‘The concentration of particles takes place at room temperature’) and the object reading (e.g. El paciente tenia concentraciones de calcio en el hombro ‘The patient had calcium concentrations in the shoulder’), while nominalizations denoting states (e.g. La concentracion de Sherlock Holmes duro cinco horas ‘Sherlock Holmes’ concentration lasted five hours) have remained, in general, understudied. In this paper we present their empirical properties and argue that, despite the empirical differences, state nominalizations and event nominalizations can receive a unified account. We show that in Spanish, Catalan, French, English and German the question of whether a deverbal nominalization denotes a state or an event, or is ambiguous between both readings depends on independent properties of the verbal base, allowing us to propose a unified account of both classes of nominalizations: the productive nominalizers in these languages can only denote the aspectual notions contained in the bases Aktionsart. We further argue that other languages, like Slovenian, have productive nominalizers that can operate over the external aspect of the predicate; in these cases, the nominalization can denote aspectual notions not contained in the bases Aktionsart.

Origins and development of adjectival passives in Spanish: a corpus study

To date, it has generally been assumed that most contemporary uses of Spanishestar ‘be.loc’ arose some time after the use of ser ‘be’, and that the former eventuallytook over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of diachronic changein estar claim that the usage of this verb became generalized as a result of somereanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over the resultstate and locative uses of ser. In this paper we wish to go one step further andinvestigate the questions of how adjectival passive estar + participle emerged inSpanish and how it extended its usage at the expense of ser based on an empiricalanalysis of data coming from a large corpus of Spanish texts from the 12th tothe 20th century. We propose that the first and most frequent usesof estar determined the way the participial construction emerged and furtherextended itself, gradually usurping uses of ser, and that the language changemechanism which drove this development was analogy. More specifically, weargue that this development was driven by the analogical relations establishedbetween participles appearing with this verb and locative prepositional phrases.

VERBOS Y NOMBRES PSICOLÓGICOS: JUNTOS Y REVUELTOS

En este articulo ofrecemos un estudio sobre las propiedades semanticas y –en menor medida, morfologicas– de los predicados psicologicos. Ponemos especial enfasis en las propiedades que parecen afectar de forma similar a verbos ( odiar, preocupar(se) ) y a nombres psicologicos ( odio, preocupacion ). Por lo que respecta a los verbos, en la linea sugerida por Fabregas y Marin (2012), demostramos que todos ellos, tanto los de experimentante sujeto ( odiar ) como los de experimentante objeto ( preocupar(se) ) denotan estados, si bien los primeros denotan estados individual-level (IL), mientras que los segundos describen estados stage-level (SL). Por lo que respecta a los nombres, de acuerdo con Sanroman (2012), comprobamos que tambien responden a esta division entre nombres psicologicos de estado IL ( odio ) y de estado SL ( preocupacion ). Los verbos de apoyo que acompanan a unos nombres y a otros constituyen uno de los indicios mas claros de tal distincion: el significado basico de los verbos de apoyo de nombres IL ( guardar, tener ) es el de posesion; los verbos de apoyo de nombres SL ( pasar, salir ) expresan, en cambio, desplazamiento. Esta distincion nos permite afinar mas el analisis de los verbos psicologicos: los de experimentante sujeto no han sufrido cambio alguno, mientras que los de experimentante objeto son fruto de un cambio de estado equiparable a un cambio de ubicacion, esto es, a un desplazamiento. El analisis que ofrecemos, basado en la causatividad, es aplicable tanto a verbos como a nombres: los predicados psicologicos que denotan estados SL contienen un operador causativo del que los predicados psicologicos que denotan estados IL carecen.

The NOMAGE project coding the semantic features of French nominalizations

From the work of (Lees, 1960), through (Chomsky, 1970) and (Grimshaw, 1990), to more recent studies, nominalizations have occupied a central place in grammatical analysis, with a focus on morphological and syntactic aspects. More recently, researchers have begun to address a specific issue often neglected before, i.e. the semantics of nominalizations, and its implications for Natural Language Processing applications such as electronic ontologies or Information Retrieval. We focus on precisely these issues in the research project NOMAGE (ANR-07-JCJC-0085-01), a young researchers project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The present submission outlines this ongoing semantic annotation project. Several previous works on the semantics of deverbal nouns (Haas & Huyghe, to appear), (Haas, Huyghe, & Marin, 2008) and (Huyghe & Marin, 2007), indicate that nominals inherit certain aspectual properties from their associated verbs. This is particularly clear when comparing telic verb (accomplishment and achievement) vs. atelic verb (state and activity) nominal derivations. For example, telic verb nominal derivations may appear in an N position such as in (1a) and (1b) while this position is not available to stative verb nominal derivations.